As regular readers of this blog will know, my other hobby besides chamber music is playing board games. And regular readers of this blog will not be at all surprised to learn that I track the games I play, using the wonderful BoardGameGeek website. Top of the list is almost always "Unpublished Prototype", since I have friends who are game designers, and I go to board game conventions where games that are under development get tested. But until now, I've never done the analogous activity in chamber music, to help a composer see how her piece works in real life. I rectified that omission Tuesday evening.
The composer was Pamela Marshall, a friend of a friend of mine, and I got in at the last minute on the first reading of her string quintet "Natural Harmony". The viola part was already taken, so I played second violin. The quintet was for standard string quartet with the addition of a double bass: a very nice combination that unfortunately is under utilized (I can only think of the Dvorak quintet for the same group of players off hand).
I liked "Natural Harmony" pretty well on first hearing, and it definitely grew on me with each subsequent play. I find that's generally true for music written since World War II; each composer has her own language, and it takes a while to figure out the logic of that language, and how everything fits together. That's why I find concerts of new music somewhat frustrating; you get to hear a piece once, and then probably never again.
I don't have a quick enough ear to say that I have any understanding of Marshall's harmonic language. Her rhythmic language is interesting, both in how two parts, playing a temporary duet, will be strikingly rhythmically independent, and in the kinds of rhythms the individual parts contain. It's funny how often you hear dotted-eighth followed by sixteenth in classical and romantic music, and how rarely sixteenth followed by dotted-eighth!
I really enjoyed the experience of being in the first group to bring a piece to life, and I particularly enjoyed talking with Pamela: we bonded over our common experience with Sibelius music layout software. And in discussing page turns, the bane of the existence of anyone who tries to do music layout. If architects cover their mistakes with ivy, and cooks cover their mistakes with sauces, music layout people cover their mistakes with V.S. :-)
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Two long pieces: Beethoven Op. 131, Schubert Cello Quintet
Last week, I had two evening sessions of chamber music. Tuesday evening was the Beethoven late C-sharp minor string quartet, Op. 131, and Thursday evening, the Schubert Cello Quintet in C major, D. 956. Before I write about the pieces and my experience with them, a brief digression about one of the difficulties of being an amateur chamber musician.
The problem is trying to find a suitable time to play music when you have a day job. I know this isn't the most sensitive thing in the world to complain about, when there are so many people who don't have jobs who need them. But still, I find it difficult to play music on a work night. We usually start at 7:30pm, and particularly if we're playing a long piece, like the two from this past week, we don't stop playing until past 9:30pm. And then there's the tradition of a snack and conversation afterwards, which is such a part of the whole experience that I hesitate to give it up. And then there's potentially driving home, if I'm not hosting, and then I'm so "up" from the experience that I find it difficult to get to sleep. And when you're my age, going to bed past midnight and getting up at 6am doesn't make for a wonderful work day.
So that's one of the reasons I've been trying to do more playing on weekends. I think that generally works better for me, but it does limit both the amount of time you have to play, and the people you can play with. Still, until I either retire or cut back my work hours, I think that will have to be the best solution. I am eager to hear any suggestions my readers can give me!
On to the pieces. The Beethoven Op. 131 quartet: an amazing piece, and one I don't really feel qualified to say much about. But since when has that stopped me? :-) It is fiendishly difficult, in so many ways, constant tempo changes, for one, but I'll just concentrate on one aspect, the key. C-sharp minor is a very difficult key for string instruments, particularly the viola and cello, since they lose the use of three of their four open strings. For me, that pushes me either to first position with an extended fourth finger to reach G-sharp on the C string and D-sharp on the G string, or half position. Half position is the only way to play a C-harp on the C string, and in a piece in C-sharp minor, you play a C-sharp a lot. And half position makes my brain hurt. :-)
(I am unable to find a good link describing half position. Although I think I would like to read this book, even though I'm somewhat outside the demographic for it. :-)
I wrote above that I lost three of my four open strings playing in C-sharp minor, but that's not strictly true. In the harmonic and melodic versions of the minor scale, you borrow the leading tone from the parallel major. In this case, you replace a B-natural with a B-sharp. And, since B-sharp is enharmonic to C-natural, in effect, for this piece, we replace the C string of the cello and viola with a B-sharp string. :-) And, seriously, by the end of the piece, I was really thinking of that thick piece of silver wound around sheep gut, at the left side of my fingerboard, as my B-sharp string. Listen to the beginning of this performance of the last movement (the actual last movement starts 17 seconds in). The end of the first phrase has the quartet in octaves on B-sharp, and you can hear the open strings of the viola and cello ring!
Because of the pull of this leading tone, it always struck me that C-sharp minor (or major), or, equivalently, D-flat minor (or major) are excellent keys for a string quartet. Too bad they're so difficult to play, and so seldom used. The second Dohnanyi quartet is in D-flat major; I hope to play that someday!
On to Thursday: a bittersweet occasion, the last session with a violinist I've been playing with a lot in the past year, but who's got a great job in another state and so is moving away. She'd asked specifically for the Schubert Cello Quintet, her favorite piece. There had been lots of obstacles in the way of getting this played, but things finally came together, and it was a marvelous evening.
I had been worried about what to play with the Schubert: there aren't that many cello quintets. Brahms wrote one, but destroyed it when he converted the music to his piano quintet. There are lots by Boccherini and Onslow, and ones by Cherubini and Glazunov. I had gotten the parts to the Borodin Cello Quintet on a mistaken recommendation from the second cellist (he was thinking of the famous Borodin Second String Quartet). But in the end, the question of what to play in the same evening with the Schubert Cello Quintet is: nothing. The piece is so long, and so beautiful, that one neither has time nor inclination to play anything else!
I really don't have that much to say about such a famous piece. Well, okay, I have two things to say. First, as I've mentioned before on this blog, one of the things that I find both fun and amusing about playing quartets are the times when the cello goes up high with a melody, I as the violist am always to be found, growling out the bass on my C-string. So, I think to myself, with two cellos in the room, that won't happen, right? Think again! Listen to the beautiful duet between the two cellos that forms the first statement of the second theme in the first movement of the Schubert, and, if you can tear your ears away from the melody, see if you can pick out the pizzicato bass line from the poor, lone viola. (You can catch it at 1:50 here).
The other thing I finally got while rehearsing for this reading was the very end of the last movement. As so often happens with Schubert, he oscillates between major and minor, but the last three notes of the piece are all five players: C, D-flat grace note, C. D-flat isn't in either C major or C minor, and I've never understood what it's doing there. But in my practice, I noticed that the slow movement starts in E major, moves to F minor for the middle section (a semitone higher), and then back to E major for the recap (with a tiny move back towards F minor again just before the end). And the Scherzo is in C major, while its trio is in D-flat major (again, up a semitone and back). So in a sense, the last three notes of the piece are echoing the entire second and third movements, a kind of Schenkerian analysis in miniature! I don't know how much sense that actually makes, but it's enough to make me completely happy with the ending.
A very successful sendoff for my violinist friend, someone I met "cold-calling" from the ACMP list. So let that be a lesson to all of you: blow the dust off your instrument, join the ACMP, and invite people from the list to play music with you! Don't be afraid! Not everyone will be compatible, but some will be, and then you can have a great deal of fun!
The problem is trying to find a suitable time to play music when you have a day job. I know this isn't the most sensitive thing in the world to complain about, when there are so many people who don't have jobs who need them. But still, I find it difficult to play music on a work night. We usually start at 7:30pm, and particularly if we're playing a long piece, like the two from this past week, we don't stop playing until past 9:30pm. And then there's the tradition of a snack and conversation afterwards, which is such a part of the whole experience that I hesitate to give it up. And then there's potentially driving home, if I'm not hosting, and then I'm so "up" from the experience that I find it difficult to get to sleep. And when you're my age, going to bed past midnight and getting up at 6am doesn't make for a wonderful work day.
So that's one of the reasons I've been trying to do more playing on weekends. I think that generally works better for me, but it does limit both the amount of time you have to play, and the people you can play with. Still, until I either retire or cut back my work hours, I think that will have to be the best solution. I am eager to hear any suggestions my readers can give me!
On to the pieces. The Beethoven Op. 131 quartet: an amazing piece, and one I don't really feel qualified to say much about. But since when has that stopped me? :-) It is fiendishly difficult, in so many ways, constant tempo changes, for one, but I'll just concentrate on one aspect, the key. C-sharp minor is a very difficult key for string instruments, particularly the viola and cello, since they lose the use of three of their four open strings. For me, that pushes me either to first position with an extended fourth finger to reach G-sharp on the C string and D-sharp on the G string, or half position. Half position is the only way to play a C-harp on the C string, and in a piece in C-sharp minor, you play a C-sharp a lot. And half position makes my brain hurt. :-)
(I am unable to find a good link describing half position. Although I think I would like to read this book, even though I'm somewhat outside the demographic for it. :-)
I wrote above that I lost three of my four open strings playing in C-sharp minor, but that's not strictly true. In the harmonic and melodic versions of the minor scale, you borrow the leading tone from the parallel major. In this case, you replace a B-natural with a B-sharp. And, since B-sharp is enharmonic to C-natural, in effect, for this piece, we replace the C string of the cello and viola with a B-sharp string. :-) And, seriously, by the end of the piece, I was really thinking of that thick piece of silver wound around sheep gut, at the left side of my fingerboard, as my B-sharp string. Listen to the beginning of this performance of the last movement (the actual last movement starts 17 seconds in). The end of the first phrase has the quartet in octaves on B-sharp, and you can hear the open strings of the viola and cello ring!
Because of the pull of this leading tone, it always struck me that C-sharp minor (or major), or, equivalently, D-flat minor (or major) are excellent keys for a string quartet. Too bad they're so difficult to play, and so seldom used. The second Dohnanyi quartet is in D-flat major; I hope to play that someday!
On to Thursday: a bittersweet occasion, the last session with a violinist I've been playing with a lot in the past year, but who's got a great job in another state and so is moving away. She'd asked specifically for the Schubert Cello Quintet, her favorite piece. There had been lots of obstacles in the way of getting this played, but things finally came together, and it was a marvelous evening.
I had been worried about what to play with the Schubert: there aren't that many cello quintets. Brahms wrote one, but destroyed it when he converted the music to his piano quintet. There are lots by Boccherini and Onslow, and ones by Cherubini and Glazunov. I had gotten the parts to the Borodin Cello Quintet on a mistaken recommendation from the second cellist (he was thinking of the famous Borodin Second String Quartet). But in the end, the question of what to play in the same evening with the Schubert Cello Quintet is: nothing. The piece is so long, and so beautiful, that one neither has time nor inclination to play anything else!
I really don't have that much to say about such a famous piece. Well, okay, I have two things to say. First, as I've mentioned before on this blog, one of the things that I find both fun and amusing about playing quartets are the times when the cello goes up high with a melody, I as the violist am always to be found, growling out the bass on my C-string. So, I think to myself, with two cellos in the room, that won't happen, right? Think again! Listen to the beautiful duet between the two cellos that forms the first statement of the second theme in the first movement of the Schubert, and, if you can tear your ears away from the melody, see if you can pick out the pizzicato bass line from the poor, lone viola. (You can catch it at 1:50 here).
The other thing I finally got while rehearsing for this reading was the very end of the last movement. As so often happens with Schubert, he oscillates between major and minor, but the last three notes of the piece are all five players: C, D-flat grace note, C. D-flat isn't in either C major or C minor, and I've never understood what it's doing there. But in my practice, I noticed that the slow movement starts in E major, moves to F minor for the middle section (a semitone higher), and then back to E major for the recap (with a tiny move back towards F minor again just before the end). And the Scherzo is in C major, while its trio is in D-flat major (again, up a semitone and back). So in a sense, the last three notes of the piece are echoing the entire second and third movements, a kind of Schenkerian analysis in miniature! I don't know how much sense that actually makes, but it's enough to make me completely happy with the ending.
A very successful sendoff for my violinist friend, someone I met "cold-calling" from the ACMP list. So let that be a lesson to all of you: blow the dust off your instrument, join the ACMP, and invite people from the list to play music with you! Don't be afraid! Not everyone will be compatible, but some will be, and then you can have a great deal of fun!
Monday, July 9, 2012
Eighty-eight years apart: Mozart, Brahms, Riley
Sometimes you have a session of chamber music for which the blog post practically writes itself. That's what happened on Sunday. Purely by chance, I played three pieces spaced almost exactly 88 years apart from each other, and nearly played a fourth with a similar spacing. A wonderful trip through music history!
Now that I've finished the Haydn Project, I'm looking for other pieces to play that I haven't played before. Sometimes I think I should have been a bird-watcher or stamp-collector, rather than a chamber musician, since I'm so focused on checking things off my list. :-) Mozart is an obvious choice, but I've played the ten "famous" quartets, and the thirteen I haven't played he wrote in utero and so people tend not to be too psyched to play them. But we found an alternative this morning: the Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546, written in 1788. This is not strictly a string quartet, but it is in the second volume of the Peters Edition of the Mozart quartets, and I hadn't played it before, so I readily agreed.
I have to say, though, that I wasn't very happy with the fugue the first time we played through it. In part that was because one of the players got lost in the middle, which can be suboptimal for counterpoint. :-) But mainly, I think, because, at least as reproduced in the Peters Edition, Mozart marks a dynamic marking of forte at the beginning, and never changes it. Dynamics have always been embarrassingly low down on my list of things to think about in playing and listening to music, but that's starting to change, particularly as I work on the Beethoven Op. 59 No. 3 quartet; dynamics are so central to Beethoven's music. Anyway, the second time we attempted the fugue, we put in our own group dynamics, by bringing out themes and listening to each other, and it was much more satisfying.
Next, we played the Brahms B-flat major string quartet, Op. 67, written in 1875 and first performed in 1876 (so 88 years or so after the Mozart). I think this is one of my absolute favorite string quartets, for so many reasons. Not only is the third movement practically a viola concerto, and the beginning of the fourth movement almost the same, there's just so much more of interest going on. It feels as if it's quite harmonically adventurous, although my theory chops aren't good enough to be sure (although the last movement has, in the viola part, not only B natural and B flat, but B sharp and B double flat; that must count for something). It's certainly rhythmically adventurous, with the usual Brahms nothing-on-the-downbeat and three-against-two, with addition of lots of three-against-four, and even some 5/4 measures (something which I think is very unusual in Brahms). And it's formally very interesting, with the last movement, a theme and variations, bringing in both the first and second themes of the first movement (who knew those were lurking in there?) Add in a gorgeous slow movement, and you have an absolute masterpiece. I don' t know what Brahms was thinking when he called it a "useless trifle", but I think Brahms often said things about his music that were obviously untrue.
We had an extra violinist showing up in time for a short piece (and the lunch following) which provided a quandary: what to play? The problem with violinists (well, one of the problems with violinists :-) is that while one is good, and two are wonderful, three are a complete disaster. IMSLP gave me almost nothing for the combination of three violins, one viola, and one cello: amazingly, no one has arranged any of the famous viola quintets for that combination. I thought we were going to have to fall back on the Pachelbel Canon, with me improvising a viola part from the continuo part. That would have fit the instrumentation (and the accidental theme, nearly, since it's from 1694), but a chance remark reminded me that I had another piece that would work for this combination.
That piece was Terry Riley's In C, written and first performed in 1964 (and so eighty-eight years after the Brahms quartet!). This is a famous piece of modern classical music (there was even a Radiolab podcast about it). In C was one of the first pieces of minimalist music, and also one of the early examples of aleatoric (i.e. chance) music. The score consists of 53 phrases of varying lengths: the instructions are that each musician plays each phrase in order as many times as he or she feel like. The directions say that the group can be aided by someone playing continuous eighth-note Cs; I took on that job. We didn't do a great job: I'd forgotten to print out the instructions, and we didn't try to stay within a few phrases of each other, as Riley directs. But it was great fun, and people were eager to try it again. I'm hatching a plot to get together a large group of strings to play In C on or near the 50th anniversary of its first performance, which will be on November 4, 2014. But hopefully I'll get to play it again before then!
Now that I've finished the Haydn Project, I'm looking for other pieces to play that I haven't played before. Sometimes I think I should have been a bird-watcher or stamp-collector, rather than a chamber musician, since I'm so focused on checking things off my list. :-) Mozart is an obvious choice, but I've played the ten "famous" quartets, and the thirteen I haven't played he wrote in utero and so people tend not to be too psyched to play them. But we found an alternative this morning: the Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546, written in 1788. This is not strictly a string quartet, but it is in the second volume of the Peters Edition of the Mozart quartets, and I hadn't played it before, so I readily agreed.
I have to say, though, that I wasn't very happy with the fugue the first time we played through it. In part that was because one of the players got lost in the middle, which can be suboptimal for counterpoint. :-) But mainly, I think, because, at least as reproduced in the Peters Edition, Mozart marks a dynamic marking of forte at the beginning, and never changes it. Dynamics have always been embarrassingly low down on my list of things to think about in playing and listening to music, but that's starting to change, particularly as I work on the Beethoven Op. 59 No. 3 quartet; dynamics are so central to Beethoven's music. Anyway, the second time we attempted the fugue, we put in our own group dynamics, by bringing out themes and listening to each other, and it was much more satisfying.
Next, we played the Brahms B-flat major string quartet, Op. 67, written in 1875 and first performed in 1876 (so 88 years or so after the Mozart). I think this is one of my absolute favorite string quartets, for so many reasons. Not only is the third movement practically a viola concerto, and the beginning of the fourth movement almost the same, there's just so much more of interest going on. It feels as if it's quite harmonically adventurous, although my theory chops aren't good enough to be sure (although the last movement has, in the viola part, not only B natural and B flat, but B sharp and B double flat; that must count for something). It's certainly rhythmically adventurous, with the usual Brahms nothing-on-the-downbeat and three-against-two, with addition of lots of three-against-four, and even some 5/4 measures (something which I think is very unusual in Brahms). And it's formally very interesting, with the last movement, a theme and variations, bringing in both the first and second themes of the first movement (who knew those were lurking in there?) Add in a gorgeous slow movement, and you have an absolute masterpiece. I don' t know what Brahms was thinking when he called it a "useless trifle", but I think Brahms often said things about his music that were obviously untrue.
We had an extra violinist showing up in time for a short piece (and the lunch following) which provided a quandary: what to play? The problem with violinists (well, one of the problems with violinists :-) is that while one is good, and two are wonderful, three are a complete disaster. IMSLP gave me almost nothing for the combination of three violins, one viola, and one cello: amazingly, no one has arranged any of the famous viola quintets for that combination. I thought we were going to have to fall back on the Pachelbel Canon, with me improvising a viola part from the continuo part. That would have fit the instrumentation (and the accidental theme, nearly, since it's from 1694), but a chance remark reminded me that I had another piece that would work for this combination.
That piece was Terry Riley's In C, written and first performed in 1964 (and so eighty-eight years after the Brahms quartet!). This is a famous piece of modern classical music (there was even a Radiolab podcast about it). In C was one of the first pieces of minimalist music, and also one of the early examples of aleatoric (i.e. chance) music. The score consists of 53 phrases of varying lengths: the instructions are that each musician plays each phrase in order as many times as he or she feel like. The directions say that the group can be aided by someone playing continuous eighth-note Cs; I took on that job. We didn't do a great job: I'd forgotten to print out the instructions, and we didn't try to stay within a few phrases of each other, as Riley directs. But it was great fun, and people were eager to try it again. I'm hatching a plot to get together a large group of strings to play In C on or near the 50th anniversary of its first performance, which will be on November 4, 2014. But hopefully I'll get to play it again before then!
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Haydn, unfinished quartet in D minor, Op. 103
Last night, I read through the last of Haydn's string quartets, the unfinished Op. 103. Originally, Haydn had been commissioned to write a set of six quartets for Count Lobkowicz, but he completed only two, in G major and F major, and the middle two movements of a quartet in D minor, before becoming too old and ill to be physically able to continue composing. The two complete quartets were published as Op. 77; the incomplete one later as Op. 103.
This was the last quartet in another way: with this reading, I have completed my goal of playing all 68 of Haydn's quartets, a goal I set for myself early in 2011, when I'd played only a couple of them. This has been an incredible musical journey. I can't express how much I've learned, and how much greater an appreciation I now have for Haydn as a composer.
I think the most impressive thing about Haydn is, that as long as he lived, and as much music as he wrote, he never "phoned it in": he was always exploring new ideas, new ways of writing music. His productive life spans most of the classical period, and in some ways it seems to me that it was Haydn's spirit that was pushing forward to Romanticism.
To take just one example of Haydn's development over his career: one of the ways people suggest for telling the music of Haydn from that of Mozart is chromaticism; Mozart's music tends to be more chromatic than that of Haydn. And that's true for most of Haydn's life, but by the end, he incorporates more and more of the spirit of Mozart in this way. Listen to the minuet of Op. 103: it practically slithers!
Another amazing thing about Haydn is just how varied his music is, and in how many ways he was ahead of his contemporaries. Four-bar and eight-bar phrases are pretty standard in Western music, but Haydn's phrase-lengths are much more variable. I doubt you could dance to any of the minuets in his string quartets! And we all learn about sonata form in school: first theme, second theme, exposition, development, recapitulation. And that holds well from Mozart to Mahler. But so many of the Haydn movements that are supposed to be in sonata form don't hold up to this model; there's no second theme, or the themes are scrambled in the recap. Haydn makes it all work; maybe it's just his genius that later composers found unable to imitate, sticking to a closer adherence to the model.
In any case, I recommend the Haydn project to any string quartet player (although you could start with Opus 9 and get most of the enjoyment out of the process that I did, without annoying your cellists :-) And I'd like to thank all the players who helped me achieve this goal!
This was the last quartet in another way: with this reading, I have completed my goal of playing all 68 of Haydn's quartets, a goal I set for myself early in 2011, when I'd played only a couple of them. This has been an incredible musical journey. I can't express how much I've learned, and how much greater an appreciation I now have for Haydn as a composer.
I think the most impressive thing about Haydn is, that as long as he lived, and as much music as he wrote, he never "phoned it in": he was always exploring new ideas, new ways of writing music. His productive life spans most of the classical period, and in some ways it seems to me that it was Haydn's spirit that was pushing forward to Romanticism.
To take just one example of Haydn's development over his career: one of the ways people suggest for telling the music of Haydn from that of Mozart is chromaticism; Mozart's music tends to be more chromatic than that of Haydn. And that's true for most of Haydn's life, but by the end, he incorporates more and more of the spirit of Mozart in this way. Listen to the minuet of Op. 103: it practically slithers!
Another amazing thing about Haydn is just how varied his music is, and in how many ways he was ahead of his contemporaries. Four-bar and eight-bar phrases are pretty standard in Western music, but Haydn's phrase-lengths are much more variable. I doubt you could dance to any of the minuets in his string quartets! And we all learn about sonata form in school: first theme, second theme, exposition, development, recapitulation. And that holds well from Mozart to Mahler. But so many of the Haydn movements that are supposed to be in sonata form don't hold up to this model; there's no second theme, or the themes are scrambled in the recap. Haydn makes it all work; maybe it's just his genius that later composers found unable to imitate, sticking to a closer adherence to the model.
In any case, I recommend the Haydn project to any string quartet player (although you could start with Opus 9 and get most of the enjoyment out of the process that I did, without annoying your cellists :-) And I'd like to thank all the players who helped me achieve this goal!
Quartets: Schubert G major, Mendelssohn unpublished, Mozart "Hoffmeister"
Last Sunday I continued the experiment of having morning chamber music, and I have to say, I do like the experience of playing the viola while awake. :-)
Since it was morning, I suggested we start with the Schubert G major string quartet, D. 887. This is Schubert's last string quartet, and I think an absolutely beautiful work (I know, I say that way too often, but still!) It feels to me that it doesn't get played that often, and I think there's an obvious reason for that: it's a perfect example of what Schumann called "himmlische Länge" (heavenly length). This is one long string quartet, and tiring: it's filled with tremolos which can take significant energy to play. I had thought this might be the longest string quartet ever written, but apparently it doesn't crack the top five.
In this quartet, you get lots of what you'd expect from Schubert: abundant modulation, and flipping back and forth between major and minor modes. And gorgeous melodies! But I think my favorite moments are in the second movement, where the first violin and viola share a two-note interpolation that remains fixed as the entire quartet modulates further and further away. One example is around 2:20 in the YouTube clip: see if you can hear what I'm talking about. It always sends shivers down my spine!
Next, I got another piece crossed off my life-list, the Mendelssohn String Quartet in E-flat major, written in 1823, when Mendelssohn was about 14 years old, but not published until well after his death. Even though it's on both the recordings I have of the complete Mendelssohn string quartets (Melos and Pacifica), it's not included in the standard Peters Edition parts, and was therefore difficult to find. I finally had to order it from Ourtext in the UK (a wonderful place if you're looking for obscure chamber music, by the way: very cheap, even with international shipping)
And I think it was worth getting and playing. It's uneven; the final movement is a fugue, which, while it has its moments, feels very much like a student exercise. But the other three movements are fine, particularly the slow movement, about which the first violinist remarked, "he already had that lyrical thing down, didn't he?" And through the miracle that is the rampant copyright violation on Youtube, you can listen to the entire quartet yourself. :-)
We probably should have stopped at that point, but no one said "no", and everyone was playing so well that I was reluctant to move on to lunch. We finished with the Mozart "Hoffmeister" Quartet in D major, K.499. This was definitely "a quartet too far", though: we were dragging by the end. But Mozart is always a delight to play. But, as sometimes happens, I wanted to ask Mozart, who often played viola in quartets, what fingering he could possibly recommend for certain passages. Either Mozart had very large hands, or a very small viola. :-)
Since it was morning, I suggested we start with the Schubert G major string quartet, D. 887. This is Schubert's last string quartet, and I think an absolutely beautiful work (I know, I say that way too often, but still!) It feels to me that it doesn't get played that often, and I think there's an obvious reason for that: it's a perfect example of what Schumann called "himmlische Länge" (heavenly length). This is one long string quartet, and tiring: it's filled with tremolos which can take significant energy to play. I had thought this might be the longest string quartet ever written, but apparently it doesn't crack the top five.
In this quartet, you get lots of what you'd expect from Schubert: abundant modulation, and flipping back and forth between major and minor modes. And gorgeous melodies! But I think my favorite moments are in the second movement, where the first violin and viola share a two-note interpolation that remains fixed as the entire quartet modulates further and further away. One example is around 2:20 in the YouTube clip: see if you can hear what I'm talking about. It always sends shivers down my spine!
Next, I got another piece crossed off my life-list, the Mendelssohn String Quartet in E-flat major, written in 1823, when Mendelssohn was about 14 years old, but not published until well after his death. Even though it's on both the recordings I have of the complete Mendelssohn string quartets (Melos and Pacifica), it's not included in the standard Peters Edition parts, and was therefore difficult to find. I finally had to order it from Ourtext in the UK (a wonderful place if you're looking for obscure chamber music, by the way: very cheap, even with international shipping)
And I think it was worth getting and playing. It's uneven; the final movement is a fugue, which, while it has its moments, feels very much like a student exercise. But the other three movements are fine, particularly the slow movement, about which the first violinist remarked, "he already had that lyrical thing down, didn't he?" And through the miracle that is the rampant copyright violation on Youtube, you can listen to the entire quartet yourself. :-)
We probably should have stopped at that point, but no one said "no", and everyone was playing so well that I was reluctant to move on to lunch. We finished with the Mozart "Hoffmeister" Quartet in D major, K.499. This was definitely "a quartet too far", though: we were dragging by the end. But Mozart is always a delight to play. But, as sometimes happens, I wanted to ask Mozart, who often played viola in quartets, what fingering he could possibly recommend for certain passages. Either Mozart had very large hands, or a very small viola. :-)
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Haydn, Op. 1, No. 6
I got to play the last of the complete string quartets in my project to do all of those Haydn composed. This was the C major, Op. 1, No. 6. It was a special occasion, because I got to welcome a new volunteer to the Haydn Project, the 10-year-old son of my Sunday evening sonata partner. He's the young violinist with whom I played the Schubert string trio earlier this year, and I have to say, he keeps getting better. Technically he was fine, but I was particularly impressed with his musicality. He got lost a few times, but always managed to figure out how to get back. And that's a trick that I have to admit sometimes eludes me in Haydn!
The Haydn Op. 1 and Op. 2 quartets are somewhat odd. They're really not fully developed string quartets: the viola and particularly the cello parts aren't very interesting, and in general, they often fall back to the melody-and-accompaniment pattern. The slow movement of 1/6, for example, is beautiful, but it's entirely a first violin solo with pizzicato accompaniment from the other three strings. And these quartets have a symmetrical structure with two minuets. My joke is that Haydn figured he wouldn't be able to write a thousand minuets in his life if he didn't try to cram some extras into his early quartets. (Has anyone added up how many minuets Haydn wrote? It's got to be at least 200!)
Oh, I almost forgot: I said "last of the complete string quartets" because the only one I have remaining is the unfinished Op. 103, and I'm hoping to play that later this month. This has been an absolutely incredible musical journey, and I recommend it to all amateur string quartet players. Although if you're a cellist, I might suggest, as Haydn himself apparently recommended, that you start with Opus 9. :-)
The Haydn Op. 1 and Op. 2 quartets are somewhat odd. They're really not fully developed string quartets: the viola and particularly the cello parts aren't very interesting, and in general, they often fall back to the melody-and-accompaniment pattern. The slow movement of 1/6, for example, is beautiful, but it's entirely a first violin solo with pizzicato accompaniment from the other three strings. And these quartets have a symmetrical structure with two minuets. My joke is that Haydn figured he wouldn't be able to write a thousand minuets in his life if he didn't try to cram some extras into his early quartets. (Has anyone added up how many minuets Haydn wrote? It's got to be at least 200!)
Oh, I almost forgot: I said "last of the complete string quartets" because the only one I have remaining is the unfinished Op. 103, and I'm hoping to play that later this month. This has been an absolutely incredible musical journey, and I recommend it to all amateur string quartet players. Although if you're a cellist, I might suggest, as Haydn himself apparently recommended, that you start with Opus 9. :-)
Monday, June 18, 2012
Beethoven, String Quartet Op. 59, No. 3, "Razumovsky #3"
I've signed up for another chamber music workshop; this time, the Wellesley Composer's Conference. I'll be attending the second half of the second week, August 2nd through 4th. For the afternoon sessions, I've been assigned to play viola in the Schumann Piano Quintet. For the morning sessions, though, a cellist friend of mine put together a string quartet to play the Beethoven String Quartet in C major, Op. 59, No. 3, the third of the set dedicated to Count Razumovsky. (As an aside, I wonder how many of these late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century noblemen suspected that their lasting claim to fame would be as the dedicatee of some piece of music by a famous composer?)
We've had a couple of read-throughs of the quartet, but this week was our first attempt at taking it apart and working on small sections. We worked mostly on the first movement, and while there were a couple of spots in the main section that needed work (there's one bar with syncopated sixteenth notes for the violins that's a real bear!) we spend most of that time on the introduction.
This introduction is Beethoven at his most audacious and amazing. It's clearly modeled on the opening of the Mozart Dissonance Quartet that I played and blogged about a couple of weeks ago. But Beethoven takes Mozart one further. While the Mozart introduction ventures into far distant keys, it at least starts with repeated Cs in the cello to establish the tonic. Beethoven starts this quartet with a diminished seventh chord, perhaps one of the most dissonant, and certainly the most ambiguous, chords in Western music. Its ambiguity comes from the fact that it's completely symmetric, being made up of three minor thirds and an augmented second, which is enharmonically the same as a minor third. You literally have no idea where it's going, and Beethoven doesn't do anything to clear up the confusion. There are lots of diminished seventh chords in this short introduction, and lots of unusual resolutions, until you finally have the viola drop down from Ab to G, to clue you in that you're actually in C major, the bar before the introduction ends.
By the way, does anyone know of a harmonic analysis of this introduction? Internet research hasn't turned one up, and it would be incredibly helpful for me to figure out my way through this forest of bizarre chords.
As you might expect, this creates a big challenge in interpretation. The introduction needs to be simultaneously mysterious and secure, a difficult pairing to pull off! Plus, there's the problem of intonation. How do you tune an isolated diminished seventh chord? I'm thinking I need to write up a little introduction to the introduction, to establish the key and prepare that initial surprise.
At the end of the evening we read through the last movement, but that, amazingly, seems to be in pretty good shape. Well, we're taking it at a half-note equals 100 (100 beats per minute), which is significantly under the tempo of the recordings (including the one I've linked to). But we can play it at that tempo, and I think it sounds good: you can hear all the motives from the fugue theme that opens the movement, and how Beethoven plays with all of them as the movement progresses. The only trick is that it's all up to me. The movement starts with a viola solo, and if I start too fast, we're in for a train wreck. :-)
We've had a couple of read-throughs of the quartet, but this week was our first attempt at taking it apart and working on small sections. We worked mostly on the first movement, and while there were a couple of spots in the main section that needed work (there's one bar with syncopated sixteenth notes for the violins that's a real bear!) we spend most of that time on the introduction.
This introduction is Beethoven at his most audacious and amazing. It's clearly modeled on the opening of the Mozart Dissonance Quartet that I played and blogged about a couple of weeks ago. But Beethoven takes Mozart one further. While the Mozart introduction ventures into far distant keys, it at least starts with repeated Cs in the cello to establish the tonic. Beethoven starts this quartet with a diminished seventh chord, perhaps one of the most dissonant, and certainly the most ambiguous, chords in Western music. Its ambiguity comes from the fact that it's completely symmetric, being made up of three minor thirds and an augmented second, which is enharmonically the same as a minor third. You literally have no idea where it's going, and Beethoven doesn't do anything to clear up the confusion. There are lots of diminished seventh chords in this short introduction, and lots of unusual resolutions, until you finally have the viola drop down from Ab to G, to clue you in that you're actually in C major, the bar before the introduction ends.
By the way, does anyone know of a harmonic analysis of this introduction? Internet research hasn't turned one up, and it would be incredibly helpful for me to figure out my way through this forest of bizarre chords.
As you might expect, this creates a big challenge in interpretation. The introduction needs to be simultaneously mysterious and secure, a difficult pairing to pull off! Plus, there's the problem of intonation. How do you tune an isolated diminished seventh chord? I'm thinking I need to write up a little introduction to the introduction, to establish the key and prepare that initial surprise.
At the end of the evening we read through the last movement, but that, amazingly, seems to be in pretty good shape. Well, we're taking it at a half-note equals 100 (100 beats per minute), which is significantly under the tempo of the recordings (including the one I've linked to). But we can play it at that tempo, and I think it sounds good: you can hear all the motives from the fugue theme that opens the movement, and how Beethoven plays with all of them as the movement progresses. The only trick is that it's all up to me. The movement starts with a viola solo, and if I start too fast, we're in for a train wreck. :-)
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Beethoven "Eyeglasses" Duo, WoO 32, and Kalliwoda, Six Nocturnes, Op. 186
My Sunday evening sonata partner plays the cello as well as the piano (and about a dozen instruments besides, but that's another story!) and so last week I got him to get his cello out of the basement to join me in one of my favorite pieces, the Beethoven Duo for Viola and Cello, called the "Eyeglasses" because of the note on the manuscript, "mit zwei
obligaten Augengläsern". It was never published in Beethoven's lifetime, and has the bizarre-looking catalog number "WoO 32", where "WoO" stands for "Werke ohne Opus", work without opus number. Apparently, the first movement wasn't published until 1912, after it was discovered in one Beethoven's notebooks; the second movement was found in the same notebook in the 1940s. I'm just happy it survived: it's just a fun, fun piece. And it's the first piece I played when I started playing the viola again back in 2009 (with this same cellist, as it happens!)
As readers of this blog will remember, I'm on a real Kalliwoda kick, and my sonata partner was very indulgent, and read through with me his Six Nocturnes for Viola and Piano, Op. 186. I think these are wonderful pieces: very "violistic", if I can coin that phrase. My partner said that they were very sight-readable, because Kalliwoda never does anything in the least unexpected. :-( Still, I think all violists ought to give these a try. I may like the first one the best; listen and see if you don't think it's very pretty. My sonata partner likened some of these pieces to melodies by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and to me, that's high praise (I used to be a huge Gilbert and Sullivan fan!)
I realized that there's a link here: both of these pieces are what I call "fun", and that's a thread that can be hard to find in chamber music, particularly in the romantic era. Haydn certainly had fun, and created fun experiences for his players, as did Beethoven early in his career. But somehow, music, particularly chamber music, took a very serious turn early in the nineteenth century, leaving "fun" to composers like Strauss, Offenbach, and Sullivan. I mean, I just adore Brahms, but no one would ever consider calling his chamber music "fun"!
As readers of this blog will remember, I'm on a real Kalliwoda kick, and my sonata partner was very indulgent, and read through with me his Six Nocturnes for Viola and Piano, Op. 186. I think these are wonderful pieces: very "violistic", if I can coin that phrase. My partner said that they were very sight-readable, because Kalliwoda never does anything in the least unexpected. :-( Still, I think all violists ought to give these a try. I may like the first one the best; listen and see if you don't think it's very pretty. My sonata partner likened some of these pieces to melodies by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and to me, that's high praise (I used to be a huge Gilbert and Sullivan fan!)
I realized that there's a link here: both of these pieces are what I call "fun", and that's a thread that can be hard to find in chamber music, particularly in the romantic era. Haydn certainly had fun, and created fun experiences for his players, as did Beethoven early in his career. But somehow, music, particularly chamber music, took a very serious turn early in the nineteenth century, leaving "fun" to composers like Strauss, Offenbach, and Sullivan. I mean, I just adore Brahms, but no one would ever consider calling his chamber music "fun"!
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Haydn, Op. 33, No. 4, and Brahms, Op. 51, No. 1
Friday evening was one of the rare quartet sessions that I didn't set up myself. My schedule finally allowed me to accept an invitation to play at the violist's house where I played the Mozart Clarinet Quintet back in January. Unfortunately, he's basically no longer playing: he's 93 years old, and age is catching up with him at last. But he and his wife are still hosting string quartets every other Friday night.
We started with the next quartet in the house Haydn cycle, the B-flat major, Opus 33, No. 4. Since I only have one and a half quartets left to finish my project to play all of the Haydn quartets, you won't be surprised to hear that this was one I'd played before, but it was over a year ago, so it still sounded fresh to me. At least I still chuckled out loud at the false recap, and the very deceptive true recap, in the first movement. Here's a recording: listen to the beginning, and then the section from three minutes in to about three minutes thirty seconds, and see if you can spot the fake recap and the true one. I think it's really hard!
One of the violinists suggested the Brahms C minor quartet, and we all agreed. I would have preferred to play that piece some other time than the middle of the night (the tradition at this house is to gather around 8:30 and have some tea and chocolate first, which means we didn't start playing until 9pm!) but I will seldom pass up an opportunity to play Brahms, particularly with such an excellent group of musicians!
This is a piece with which I have a long history. According to my records, I've played it, or movements of it, six times since starting to play the viola again in 2009, and I have at least one distinct memory of slogging through it before the large gap in my chamber music. And each time, it gets better, which is gratifying. I still got lost a couple of times, once causing a breakdown. I can't rely on my sense of rhythm in Brahms; I really have to count! One of the listening guests was reading the score, and said later: "you know, there's a section in the third movement where no one has anything on the downbeat for bars and bars: I had to close the score, it was making me dizzy". I said, "that's Brahms. That's what he does". So I'm going to continue to play this piece until I get it right. :-)
It's funny: the other composer with whom I need to count more than I do is Haydn. People think Haydn is an easy composer to play, but between his constant jokes and traps, and his love of irregular phrase lengths, I find I have to count like a maniac to avoid mistakes.
Since I'm on a music theory kick, I should mention that that it seems to me that the two quartets in Brahms' Opus 51 are both focused on a different interval. In this quartet, it's the diminished seventh (very clearly outlined in the first few bars of both the first and last movements.); in the second, the A minor, it's the tritone. Unfortunately, neither is a particularly graceful interval to play on a stringed instrument (particularly the tritone), but the music is so good I forgive Brahms his less-than-perfect string writing. :-)
We started with the next quartet in the house Haydn cycle, the B-flat major, Opus 33, No. 4. Since I only have one and a half quartets left to finish my project to play all of the Haydn quartets, you won't be surprised to hear that this was one I'd played before, but it was over a year ago, so it still sounded fresh to me. At least I still chuckled out loud at the false recap, and the very deceptive true recap, in the first movement. Here's a recording: listen to the beginning, and then the section from three minutes in to about three minutes thirty seconds, and see if you can spot the fake recap and the true one. I think it's really hard!
One of the violinists suggested the Brahms C minor quartet, and we all agreed. I would have preferred to play that piece some other time than the middle of the night (the tradition at this house is to gather around 8:30 and have some tea and chocolate first, which means we didn't start playing until 9pm!) but I will seldom pass up an opportunity to play Brahms, particularly with such an excellent group of musicians!
This is a piece with which I have a long history. According to my records, I've played it, or movements of it, six times since starting to play the viola again in 2009, and I have at least one distinct memory of slogging through it before the large gap in my chamber music. And each time, it gets better, which is gratifying. I still got lost a couple of times, once causing a breakdown. I can't rely on my sense of rhythm in Brahms; I really have to count! One of the listening guests was reading the score, and said later: "you know, there's a section in the third movement where no one has anything on the downbeat for bars and bars: I had to close the score, it was making me dizzy". I said, "that's Brahms. That's what he does". So I'm going to continue to play this piece until I get it right. :-)
It's funny: the other composer with whom I need to count more than I do is Haydn. People think Haydn is an easy composer to play, but between his constant jokes and traps, and his love of irregular phrase lengths, I find I have to count like a maniac to avoid mistakes.
Since I'm on a music theory kick, I should mention that that it seems to me that the two quartets in Brahms' Opus 51 are both focused on a different interval. In this quartet, it's the diminished seventh (very clearly outlined in the first few bars of both the first and last movements.); in the second, the A minor, it's the tritone. Unfortunately, neither is a particularly graceful interval to play on a stringed instrument (particularly the tritone), but the music is so good I forgive Brahms his less-than-perfect string writing. :-)
Mozart "Dissonance" Quartet, K465, and Mendelssohn Op. 44 No. 1
After a relatively quiet time (there was some music, but no time to blog about it) I've had an intense schedule of four sessions on four successive nights! I think that was a bit much, even for me. :-)
Wednesday I had the pleasure of meeting a new cellist. As a violist, I feel I can never have too many cellists in my circle of acquaintance: the music you can play without a cellist is quite limited. This cellist was a good player, a nice person, and, as a bonus, lives in my town. A real find!
We started off with the Mozart "Dissonance" Quartet, K465, the last of the six quartets dedicated to Haydn. The dedication is rather touching, I think: it seems to show a side of Mozart that we don't often think of:
Wednesday I had the pleasure of meeting a new cellist. As a violist, I feel I can never have too many cellists in my circle of acquaintance: the music you can play without a cellist is quite limited. This cellist was a good player, a nice person, and, as a bonus, lives in my town. A real find!
We started off with the Mozart "Dissonance" Quartet, K465, the last of the six quartets dedicated to Haydn. The dedication is rather touching, I think: it seems to show a side of Mozart that we don't often think of:
- To my dear friend Haydn,
- A father who had resolved to send his children out into the great world took it to be his duty to confide them to the protection and guidance of a very celebrated Man, especially when the latter by good fortune was at the same time his best Friend. Here they are then, O great Man and dearest Friend, these six children of mine. They are, it is true, the fruit of a long and laborious endeavor, yet the hope inspired in me by several Friends that it may be at least partly compensated encourages me, and I flatter myself that this offspring will serve to afford me solace one day. You, yourself, dearest friend, told me of your satisfaction with them during your last Visit to this Capital. It is this indulgence above all which urges me to commend them to you and encourages me to hope that they will not seem to you altogether unworthy of your favour. May it therefore please you to receive them kindly and to be their Father, Guide and Friend! From this moment I resign to you all my rights in them, begging you however to look indulgently upon the defects which the partiality of a Father’s eye may have concealed from me, and in spite of them to continue in your generous Friendship for him who so greatly values it, in expectation of which I am, with all of my Heart, my dearest Friend, your most Sincere Friend,
- W.A. Mozart
The quartet gets its name from the slow introduction to the first movement, with its harmonies so strange for the time that some of the early editions tried to "correct" them. Haydn said, “If Mozart wrote it so he must have had a good reason for it.”
This reading went very well, I thought, even though the first violinist had practiced the wrong piece. She did so well that I think I'm going to keep telling her the wrong pieces to practice. :-)
The other quartet we played that evening is the Mendelssohn Op. 44 No. 1 in D major. Readers of the blog will know that I particularly enjoy Mendelssohn. I have an idea for a project (now that the Haydn quartet project is nearly over) to play all of the Mendelssohn string quartets in one day. There are eight of them, plus twelve short fugues he wrote as a child: I think it's doable. With lots of breaks. And perhaps lots of coffee. :-)
The Mendelssohn D major quartet was great fun. On top of just being beautiful music, I got to play a bunch of open B sharps, something which always tickles me.
The new cellist remarked that the chord three from the end in the first movement was strange: she played a G sharp, which is not in the key of D major. I've included an excerpt from the score (please forgive my inexpert cut-and-paste job).
Internet research reminded me that this is called a "secondary dominant", in this case V7/V. Looking for explanations of this led me to discover a wonderful set of YouTube videos by David Newman, who teaches voice and ear training at James Madison University. I can't decide which is my favorite: they're all absolutely amazing. If you have any interest in music theory at all, you have to listen to them!
This reading went very well, I thought, even though the first violinist had practiced the wrong piece. She did so well that I think I'm going to keep telling her the wrong pieces to practice. :-)
The other quartet we played that evening is the Mendelssohn Op. 44 No. 1 in D major. Readers of the blog will know that I particularly enjoy Mendelssohn. I have an idea for a project (now that the Haydn quartet project is nearly over) to play all of the Mendelssohn string quartets in one day. There are eight of them, plus twelve short fugues he wrote as a child: I think it's doable. With lots of breaks. And perhaps lots of coffee. :-)
The Mendelssohn D major quartet was great fun. On top of just being beautiful music, I got to play a bunch of open B sharps, something which always tickles me.
The new cellist remarked that the chord three from the end in the first movement was strange: she played a G sharp, which is not in the key of D major. I've included an excerpt from the score (please forgive my inexpert cut-and-paste job).
Internet research reminded me that this is called a "secondary dominant", in this case V7/V. Looking for explanations of this led me to discover a wonderful set of YouTube videos by David Newman, who teaches voice and ear training at James Madison University. I can't decide which is my favorite: they're all absolutely amazing. If you have any interest in music theory at all, you have to listen to them!
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Duets and Trio, Kalliwoda, Bach/David, Beethoven
Following along on the theme of catching up on my blog, I'm going to combine parts of two different sessions, so that I can talk about a couple of themes: smaller groups, and arrangements.
First, continuing my obsession with Kalliwoda, I got to play the first of his two violin-viola duets, the Op. 208, No. 1 in C major. There's a blog post about these two duets here, and I have to say, I agree: wonderful pieces. Kalliwoda has a gift for melody, I think, and his writing is technically gratifying for both instruments. Maybe he does love double-stops a bit too much, but he writes them so cleverly that I forgive him. And he does manage to get a full, rich sound out of only two instruments!
In that same session, we played about half of the Ferdinand David transcription for violin and viola of the Bach Two-Part Inventions. You can hear three of them here. I think they work remarkably well, particularly the famous F major No. 8. I'm eager to play more of David's transcriptions. And maybe even add his string quartet to my list of quartets by obscure composers to play (not that that list needs more entries!)
I suppose this is a good place to discuss my feelings about arrangements and transcriptions. I'm in favor of them, as long as they're done with a real understanding of the instruments being transcribed for. I don't like, for example, to play a string quartet with a flute taking over the first violin part. But something like the Bach transcriptions by David, an expert violinist (he premiered the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto) can work really well.
On a separate occasion, waiting for a tardy cellist for a session of string quartets, I got to play another transcription, this time the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 87 Trio for Two Oboes and English Horn, in the Henle edition for two violins and viola, prepared by Egon Voss. It's unclear whether the string version is Beethoven's or not, but he at least approved it. And it's delightful: notwithstanding the high opus number, this is a very early work, and I have a particular fondness for Beethoven's earliest music. Another example of a transcription working very well! You can listen to the original version here, and the transcription here, and form your own opinion.
First, continuing my obsession with Kalliwoda, I got to play the first of his two violin-viola duets, the Op. 208, No. 1 in C major. There's a blog post about these two duets here, and I have to say, I agree: wonderful pieces. Kalliwoda has a gift for melody, I think, and his writing is technically gratifying for both instruments. Maybe he does love double-stops a bit too much, but he writes them so cleverly that I forgive him. And he does manage to get a full, rich sound out of only two instruments!
In that same session, we played about half of the Ferdinand David transcription for violin and viola of the Bach Two-Part Inventions. You can hear three of them here. I think they work remarkably well, particularly the famous F major No. 8. I'm eager to play more of David's transcriptions. And maybe even add his string quartet to my list of quartets by obscure composers to play (not that that list needs more entries!)
I suppose this is a good place to discuss my feelings about arrangements and transcriptions. I'm in favor of them, as long as they're done with a real understanding of the instruments being transcribed for. I don't like, for example, to play a string quartet with a flute taking over the first violin part. But something like the Bach transcriptions by David, an expert violinist (he premiered the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto) can work really well.
On a separate occasion, waiting for a tardy cellist for a session of string quartets, I got to play another transcription, this time the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 87 Trio for Two Oboes and English Horn, in the Henle edition for two violins and viola, prepared by Egon Voss. It's unclear whether the string version is Beethoven's or not, but he at least approved it. And it's delightful: notwithstanding the high opus number, this is a very early work, and I have a particular fondness for Beethoven's earliest music. Another example of a transcription working very well! You can listen to the original version here, and the transcription here, and form your own opinion.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Viola quintets: Mendelssohn Op. 18 and Mozart K515
Last night was another session of viola quintets at my house. I know I've been playing a lot of viola quintets, but if I want to play with violists without switching to violin myself, that's pretty much what I have to do. :-) It's unfortunate that there are many fewer quintets than quartets, since some of the great quartet composers didn't write quintets (Haydn, Bartok, Shostakovich), and some of the quintets of great composers are unaccountably neglected (I can't imagine why people don't play Beethoven's Op. 29!) But there are enough wonderful works to keep me occupied for quite a while.
We started with a seldom-played work, the first Mendelssohn quintet, the Op. 18 in A major. I don't really understand why this piece is neglected, but then, one of my gifts (?) as a chamber musician is that I like practically everything. Perhaps this pieces is a little heavily weighted towards the first violin, but our wonderful first violinist had worked up the part so that it was a pleasure to hear. Actually, it was a great group, top to bottom!
We then did three movements of the Mozart K515 Quintet in C major, before running out of energy. K515 is definitely an example of Mozart not being in a hurry! The first movement is very long; you feel like you've been playing forever when you reach the exposition repeat, and realize you're not even half done. The minuet and trio is rather sedate, and the slow movement is also lengthy: it needs to be, to fit in all the thirty-second notes in the beautiful duet between the first violin and first viola. I'd chosen to play second viola on this pieces, and I was happy to have done so: the other violist played so beautifully that it was a pleasure to let her be in the driver's seat.
I had a special reason for wanting to play this work: it was the birthday of one of the violinists, and I had done a setting of Happy Birthday in the style of Mozart, modeled after the opening bars of the first movement of this quintet. That went over well, but perhaps the birthday cake was appreciated even more. :-)
We started with a seldom-played work, the first Mendelssohn quintet, the Op. 18 in A major. I don't really understand why this piece is neglected, but then, one of my gifts (?) as a chamber musician is that I like practically everything. Perhaps this pieces is a little heavily weighted towards the first violin, but our wonderful first violinist had worked up the part so that it was a pleasure to hear. Actually, it was a great group, top to bottom!
We then did three movements of the Mozart K515 Quintet in C major, before running out of energy. K515 is definitely an example of Mozart not being in a hurry! The first movement is very long; you feel like you've been playing forever when you reach the exposition repeat, and realize you're not even half done. The minuet and trio is rather sedate, and the slow movement is also lengthy: it needs to be, to fit in all the thirty-second notes in the beautiful duet between the first violin and first viola. I'd chosen to play second viola on this pieces, and I was happy to have done so: the other violist played so beautifully that it was a pleasure to let her be in the driver's seat.
I had a special reason for wanting to play this work: it was the birthday of one of the violinists, and I had done a setting of Happy Birthday in the style of Mozart, modeled after the opening bars of the first movement of this quintet. That went over well, but perhaps the birthday cake was appreciated even more. :-)
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Haydn Op. 51: "The Seven Last Words of Christ"
I'm sorry about the long delay between blog posts. As I wrote last time, I was on vacation. And then I got sick. And then work heated up. I did manage to play chamber music in the intervening time, so I have some catching up to do. So bear with me. :-)
As you know, I've been working on a project to play all of the Haydn string quartets. One of the questions I had in this project was, "what to do about The Seven Last Words?" The string quartet version isn't considered as part of the canonical 68 string quartets Haydn wrote, but still, I had an interest in playing it.
Then I learned that this year the company I work for was going to give us two new holidays, one of which was euphemistically called "Spring Holiday", the algorithm for which was "the Friday before Easter". I'm not religious, but I figured that Good Friday would be the perfect day to play the Seven Last Words.
Then I got email from Musical Deliveries, a volunteer organization in the Boston area who helps connect chamber groups with nursing homes to perform in. This was the final piece in the puzzle: I got together a willing string quartet, and we played at a local Catholic-run nursing home on the afternoon of Good Friday.
It was my first chamber music performance since I started playing again, and it wasn't as scary as I had thought it would be. It was interesting to see just what happened in performance that never happened in rehearsal. And I think by and large the audience was appreciative, although the piece is rather long (nearly an hour!)
And the Seven Last Words is very different from Haydn's other string quartets. Formally, of course: eight slow movements in a row! But also because there's no attempt at equality of parts: it's really a solo for the first violin with string trio accompaniment. But we had a wonderful first violinist, so that all worked out.
Here are the program notes I wrote for our performance. Not my best writing, but it gives the basic outline of the story.
As you know, I've been working on a project to play all of the Haydn string quartets. One of the questions I had in this project was, "what to do about The Seven Last Words?" The string quartet version isn't considered as part of the canonical 68 string quartets Haydn wrote, but still, I had an interest in playing it.
Then I learned that this year the company I work for was going to give us two new holidays, one of which was euphemistically called "Spring Holiday", the algorithm for which was "the Friday before Easter". I'm not religious, but I figured that Good Friday would be the perfect day to play the Seven Last Words.
Then I got email from Musical Deliveries, a volunteer organization in the Boston area who helps connect chamber groups with nursing homes to perform in. This was the final piece in the puzzle: I got together a willing string quartet, and we played at a local Catholic-run nursing home on the afternoon of Good Friday.
It was my first chamber music performance since I started playing again, and it wasn't as scary as I had thought it would be. It was interesting to see just what happened in performance that never happened in rehearsal. And I think by and large the audience was appreciative, although the piece is rather long (nearly an hour!)
And the Seven Last Words is very different from Haydn's other string quartets. Formally, of course: eight slow movements in a row! But also because there's no attempt at equality of parts: it's really a solo for the first violin with string trio accompaniment. But we had a wonderful first violinist, so that all worked out.
Here are the program notes I wrote for our performance. Not my best writing, but it gives the basic outline of the story.
The Seven Last Words of Christ was originally an orchestral work by Joseph Haydn, commissioned in 1785 or 1786 for the Good Friday service at Cádiz Cathedral in Spain. The composer adapted it in 1787 for string quartet, and it is that version that is most often heard today.This was a positive experience, overall. I know I'm not a performer by nature, but I shouldn't avoid performing at all costs. And at least I can say that I've played Haydn's Seven Last Words!
Haydn, a devout Catholic, created a particularly beautiful work, capturing the different haloes of meaning around the seven utterances, and weaving a story told entirely in music. The texture tends to be simple, usually a first violin melody with the other three instruments accompanying, and Haydn is able to show his gift for melody. Interestingly, even though the piece was conceived without voices, the first violin line of each of the seven sonatas follows the rhythm of the “word” in question: this is indicated in the score and in the first violin part.
One example of Haydn’s compositional care evident in the Seven Last Words: at the nadir of the piece, Sonata IV (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?), Haydn chooses the key of F minor, described in a text from the period as expressing “deep depression, funereal lament, groans of misery and longing for the grave.”
Haydn himself wrote about the origin of this work:
Some fifteen years ago I was requested by a canon of Cádiz to compose instrumental music on the Seven Last Words of Our Savior On the Cross. It was customary at the Cathedral of Cádiz to produce an oratorio every year during Lent, the effect of the performance being not a little enhanced by the following circumstances. The walls, windows, and pillars of the church were hung with black cloth, and only one large lamp hanging from the center of the roof broke the solemn darkness. At midday, the doors were closed and the ceremony began. After a short service the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced the first of the seven words (or sentences) and delivered a discourse thereon. This ended, he left the pulpit and fell to his knees before the altar. The interval was filled by music. The bishop then in like manner pronounced the second word, then the third, and so on, the orchestra following on the conclusion of each discourse. My composition was subject to these conditions, and it was no easy task to compose seven adagios lasting ten minutes each, and to succeed one another without fatiguing the listeners; indeed, I found it quite impossible to confine myself to the appointed limits.Haydn wrote with his usual modesty here; his only failure to “confine [himself] to the appointed limits” is in adding the final movement, a Presto representing the earthquake that opened Christ’s tomb. If this movement doesn’t quite fit with the mood of the rest of the piece, perhaps Haydn can be forgiven.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Mendelssohn, Op. 80, and Haydn, Op. 17 No. 1
I'm sorry I've been remiss on updating my blog; I've been playing quite a bit of music over the past few weeks, but I've been otherwise too busy to write about it. I'm on vacation this week, away from my instruments, so I'm hoping to catch up.
Friday, March 30, I had another wonderful session of string quartets. Our first violinist had requested Mendelssohn, so I chose the Opus 80 quartet, the only complete, published one of his quartets that I hadn't yet played since taking up the viola again. I love Mendelssohn; his music is beautiful, and also, as a string player, it lies under the hand better than almost any other composer. But the Opus 80 is a challenging work.
Felix Mendelssohn had an older sister, Fanny, who was also a composer, and the two were very close. In February of 1847, at the age of 41, Fanny died suddenly of a stroke, the same malady that had felled both their parents and their famous grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn. Felix took his sister's death badly, and eventually decided to write a string quartet as part of the process of working through his grief. This quartet, later published as Opus 80, he finished in September of that year, and started work on another quartet, completing two movements before he himself died of a stroke in November, at the age of 38.
I think the best term to describe the Opus 80 string quartet is "raw". Except for the respite of the slow movement, it has almost none of the melodic touches Mendelssohn is famous for. Even the choice of key is telling: F minor, which in the period was associated with "Deep depression, funereal lament, groans of misery and longing for the grave." The first movement is rhythmically and harmonically driving, and the scherzo that follows is even more so: there is no trace of the kind of "fairyland" lightness with which Mendelssohn so often imbued his scherzi. I have to admit, I was nearly in tears playing this movement (which isn't good for one's accuracy!)
I had thought to go for a complete change of pace (and also to balance out four flats with four sharps)
with one of the few remaining Haydns in my project, the E major, Op. 17, No. 1. I don't know, though: maybe it was playing this after the Mendelssohn, but even with the bright key, this seemed to be quite melancholy, for Haydn. Even though it has one of Haydn's jokes in the first movement, a perfect false recap.
We finished the evening reading one of the movements from Mendelssohn's unfinished quartet, the Theme and Variations published as Op. 81, No. 1. It feels that Mendelssohn has progressed on the path of recovery from grief. It's not hard to believe that he would have completed a set of three quartets, as he did for Op. 44, and together they would have been an amazing journey. Mendelssohn's early death was of course a tragedy, but leaving this musical journey incomplete is to me the most tragic aspect.
Friday, March 30, I had another wonderful session of string quartets. Our first violinist had requested Mendelssohn, so I chose the Opus 80 quartet, the only complete, published one of his quartets that I hadn't yet played since taking up the viola again. I love Mendelssohn; his music is beautiful, and also, as a string player, it lies under the hand better than almost any other composer. But the Opus 80 is a challenging work.
Felix Mendelssohn had an older sister, Fanny, who was also a composer, and the two were very close. In February of 1847, at the age of 41, Fanny died suddenly of a stroke, the same malady that had felled both their parents and their famous grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn. Felix took his sister's death badly, and eventually decided to write a string quartet as part of the process of working through his grief. This quartet, later published as Opus 80, he finished in September of that year, and started work on another quartet, completing two movements before he himself died of a stroke in November, at the age of 38.
I think the best term to describe the Opus 80 string quartet is "raw". Except for the respite of the slow movement, it has almost none of the melodic touches Mendelssohn is famous for. Even the choice of key is telling: F minor, which in the period was associated with "Deep depression, funereal lament, groans of misery and longing for the grave." The first movement is rhythmically and harmonically driving, and the scherzo that follows is even more so: there is no trace of the kind of "fairyland" lightness with which Mendelssohn so often imbued his scherzi. I have to admit, I was nearly in tears playing this movement (which isn't good for one's accuracy!)
I had thought to go for a complete change of pace (and also to balance out four flats with four sharps)
with one of the few remaining Haydns in my project, the E major, Op. 17, No. 1. I don't know, though: maybe it was playing this after the Mendelssohn, but even with the bright key, this seemed to be quite melancholy, for Haydn. Even though it has one of Haydn's jokes in the first movement, a perfect false recap.
We finished the evening reading one of the movements from Mendelssohn's unfinished quartet, the Theme and Variations published as Op. 81, No. 1. It feels that Mendelssohn has progressed on the path of recovery from grief. It's not hard to believe that he would have completed a set of three quartets, as he did for Op. 44, and together they would have been an amazing journey. Mendelssohn's early death was of course a tragedy, but leaving this musical journey incomplete is to me the most tragic aspect.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Schubert Arpeggione Sonata, D821
Last Saturday I got a chance to play the Schubert "Arpeggione" Sonata for the first time. One of the interesting things about having been a violinist who didn't really pick up the viola until after the end of my formal training is that I missed out on a lot of the standard viola literature, and the Arpeggione Sonata is one of those pieces.
It's really funny how the Arpeggione Sonata is one of the staples of the viola literature, since it wasn't even written for the viola. Schubert composed the piece for a new instrument, the arpeggione, which went in and out of fashion so fast that this sonata is pretty much the only piece for it. The arpeggione is tuned like a guitar, with six strings and frets, but is bowed like a cello.
It's fascinating how carefully Schubert considered the strengths and weaknesses of the arpeggione in writing this piece. The keys of the movements (A minor, E major, A major) work very well for the strings of the instrument. The biggest drawback of the arpeggione is that, with six strings, the bridge has to be quite flat, and so it's very difficult to play loudly without hitting more than one string. Schubert avoids this problem by having almost the whole piece marked "piano" or "pianissimo", except when there are double stops, or when the notes are to be played on the highest string (therefore making it easier to avoid hitting another string by mistake).
All this, of course, is lost when you play the piece on the viola. Those keys aren't particularly good for the viola, and there's no need to play quietly all the time! Not to mention that the viola can't actually play as low as the arpeggione, so some passages have to be taken up an octave.
Still, it's a beautiful piece, filled with those amazing Schubert melodies. But I want to talk about the beginning of the second movement, the first four notes of the viola in particular.
When I was a kid, I had the companion book to Leonard Bernstein's television broadcasts about music. I didn't see any of the shows at the time; this was back when you had to watch what they were showing on television (how barbaric that seems now). But the book was fascinating, and I remember one lecture in particular, The Infinite Variety of Music. This discussed how much composers can get out of four notes: sol-do-re-mi, in that order, or, as Bernstein puts it, "How Dry I Am". It's a wonderful exploration: well worth watching. And here, in the slow movement of the Arpeggione Sonata, the same four notes! Maybe Schubert wasn't as original as we suppose. :-)
It's really funny how the Arpeggione Sonata is one of the staples of the viola literature, since it wasn't even written for the viola. Schubert composed the piece for a new instrument, the arpeggione, which went in and out of fashion so fast that this sonata is pretty much the only piece for it. The arpeggione is tuned like a guitar, with six strings and frets, but is bowed like a cello.
It's fascinating how carefully Schubert considered the strengths and weaknesses of the arpeggione in writing this piece. The keys of the movements (A minor, E major, A major) work very well for the strings of the instrument. The biggest drawback of the arpeggione is that, with six strings, the bridge has to be quite flat, and so it's very difficult to play loudly without hitting more than one string. Schubert avoids this problem by having almost the whole piece marked "piano" or "pianissimo", except when there are double stops, or when the notes are to be played on the highest string (therefore making it easier to avoid hitting another string by mistake).
All this, of course, is lost when you play the piece on the viola. Those keys aren't particularly good for the viola, and there's no need to play quietly all the time! Not to mention that the viola can't actually play as low as the arpeggione, so some passages have to be taken up an octave.
Still, it's a beautiful piece, filled with those amazing Schubert melodies. But I want to talk about the beginning of the second movement, the first four notes of the viola in particular.
When I was a kid, I had the companion book to Leonard Bernstein's television broadcasts about music. I didn't see any of the shows at the time; this was back when you had to watch what they were showing on television (how barbaric that seems now). But the book was fascinating, and I remember one lecture in particular, The Infinite Variety of Music. This discussed how much composers can get out of four notes: sol-do-re-mi, in that order, or, as Bernstein puts it, "How Dry I Am". It's a wonderful exploration: well worth watching. And here, in the slow movement of the Arpeggione Sonata, the same four notes! Maybe Schubert wasn't as original as we suppose. :-)
Sunday, March 25, 2012
String Quartets: Ravel Quartet in F; Schubert "Death and the Maiden"
Friday evening I had string quartets at my house. One of the violinists had requested the Ravel quartet; the other Death and the Maiden. That made for a challenging and long evening, even though we started at 7pm rather than my more usual 7:30pm start time, and even though I didn't try to sneak in one of the few remaining quartets in my Haydn Project. :-) But a very satisfying evening of music!
One of the side effects of playing lots of chamber music for strings is that, if you're not careful, you can easily end up living on a diet of German music, leavened only by music strongly influenced by the German style, like Dvorak. Don't get me wrong: I love German composers. But every now and then, it's great to hear something completely different, and Ravel is a perfect example of that.
The Ravel Quartet in F is, in form, completely in the standard string quartet mode: sonata form first movement, scherzo second movement, slow third movement, fast, driving finale. But from a purely aural point of view, it sounds absolutely nothing like a Haydn quartet. It's filled with impressionistic effects: tremolos, fast arpeggios, shimmering, unstable harmonies, extremes of register, complex, shifting rhythms; in short, every color you could imagine from the string quartet palette. Just listen and you can't help but notice the departure from the German model. Of course, all those effects make it very difficult to play. I can't say we played it well, but it was, shall we say, recognizable. And fun!
One comment here: we played from the International Edition, and it was just horrible. As far as I can tell, just a reprint of the original French edition, with misprints galore. For example, two eighth notes just missing from the viola part, third movement four measures before the end. (Checking with the score, an A before the B-flat quarter note, and an A-flat after). And some of those complex, shifting rhythms could be much more clearly notated. Can anyone recommend a better edition of this quartet? Or I'll have to do one myself in my copious free time. :-)
After the Ravel, Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet. Oh, what an amazing piece! I don't know what I can say about it that hasn't already been said. Just go listen to it. (And thanks again to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for their amazing collection of free chamber music recordings from their concerts!)
Well, maybe I can say two things. First, I can only echo Schumann's remark about another piece fo Schubert's music : "himmlische Länge" (heavenly length). But after 9pm on a Friday after a long work week, perhaps more accent on the "Länge" than the "himmlische". :-)
Second, I just learned from reading the Wikipedia article about this piece that it's very likely that Schubert himself played the viola part at the premiere. Yet another reason why violas are the center of the universe. :-)
One of the side effects of playing lots of chamber music for strings is that, if you're not careful, you can easily end up living on a diet of German music, leavened only by music strongly influenced by the German style, like Dvorak. Don't get me wrong: I love German composers. But every now and then, it's great to hear something completely different, and Ravel is a perfect example of that.
The Ravel Quartet in F is, in form, completely in the standard string quartet mode: sonata form first movement, scherzo second movement, slow third movement, fast, driving finale. But from a purely aural point of view, it sounds absolutely nothing like a Haydn quartet. It's filled with impressionistic effects: tremolos, fast arpeggios, shimmering, unstable harmonies, extremes of register, complex, shifting rhythms; in short, every color you could imagine from the string quartet palette. Just listen and you can't help but notice the departure from the German model. Of course, all those effects make it very difficult to play. I can't say we played it well, but it was, shall we say, recognizable. And fun!
One comment here: we played from the International Edition, and it was just horrible. As far as I can tell, just a reprint of the original French edition, with misprints galore. For example, two eighth notes just missing from the viola part, third movement four measures before the end. (Checking with the score, an A before the B-flat quarter note, and an A-flat after). And some of those complex, shifting rhythms could be much more clearly notated. Can anyone recommend a better edition of this quartet? Or I'll have to do one myself in my copious free time. :-)
After the Ravel, Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet. Oh, what an amazing piece! I don't know what I can say about it that hasn't already been said. Just go listen to it. (And thanks again to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for their amazing collection of free chamber music recordings from their concerts!)
Well, maybe I can say two things. First, I can only echo Schumann's remark about another piece fo Schubert's music : "himmlische Länge" (heavenly length). But after 9pm on a Friday after a long work week, perhaps more accent on the "Länge" than the "himmlische". :-)
Second, I just learned from reading the Wikipedia article about this piece that it's very likely that Schubert himself played the viola part at the premiere. Yet another reason why violas are the center of the universe. :-)
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Chiara String Quartet Workshop: Dvorak Op. 51, and Herzogenberg Op. 27 No. 2
Yesterday I attended a string quartet workshop given by the Chiara String Quartet at the Northampton Community Music Center. This was the first time I'd ever been to such a thing, and the first time I'd had any coaching since graduate school. And I have to say, I had a marvelous time!
The format was as follows: we had coaching from one member of the string quartet for 45 minutes, then 45 minutes to rehearse what we'd learned. Then a 15 minute break, and then the same pattern. Lunch, and the afternoon followed the morning pattern. It felt to be the right amount of coaching and playing for a day, although 45 minutes seemed an awfully short period of time when a coach is saying all sorts of fascinating things.
I had been nervous that my playing wouldn't be good enough, and I'd get some harsh criticism, but all four coaches were very nice, and had nothing negative to say. I suppose that's not surprising, since if we didn't enjoy ourselves, we wouldn't come back. :-)
Our second violinist is very experienced at being coached, and her suggestion that we just work on one movement, the first of the Dvorak Op. 51 string quartet in E-flat major, was really good: it was just the right amount of music for the day's coaching.
The amount and variety of ideas that the coaches (and my fellow players!) planted in my head almost made my brain explode. From the very technical: how if you're playing in E-flat major, the E-flat should be sharper than equal tempered to make a just major third with the open G string (I could write a whole blog post on tuning, temperament, the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, and the string quartet, but that will have to be another time); how to unify the sound the lower strings need to play with their bows closer to the bridge, which excites more of the higher harmonics in the sound, both clarifying the pitch and making it easier for the violins to blend in. But there was also a lot of metaphor in a lot of adjectives: hot, cool, open, closed, glassy, pressured, pompous, songlike, dancelike. As I said, enough to make my brain explode!
I wish my engineering education had had more of this kind of thing. Maybe engineering isn't really suited to coaching, but certainly the creative spirit, so important in engineering as it is music, isn't fostered by the kind of classroom, test and fact focused teaching I had back in the 1980s. I'm not being entirely fair: I'm in touch with one of the professors at my alma mater who's been involved in revamping the curriculum, and they've moved it significantly in this direction.
I'm eager to have more coaching. I'm already signed up for some in early August; maybe I will have other opportunities sooner.
We had a break at the end of the day, and one of our violinists needed to leave early. Fortunately, I'd brought a collection of trios, and convinced the other two to try the Herzogenberg String Trio Op. 27 No. 2. As is usually the case, I enjoyed the experience of playing music by an obscure composer more than my partners, but they were very nice about it. Herzogenberg is often called a Brahms imitator, but I think he has some significant differences from Brahms that show up in his trios. First, Brahms is incapable of writing a thin texture, but Herzogenberg manages it quite well: the opening phrase of this trio is for cello alone, pizzicato. And Herzogeberg's string writing is much friendlier than Brahms, particularly his viola parts, which are fun and rewarding to play. Listen for yourself, and let me know if you don't think this is lovely music!
At the end of the day, we we treated to a concert by the Chiara Quartet: the Brahms Op. 67 quartet, which they're preparing for an upcoming recording. I love this quartet, both because of the compositional intricacies, but also because the whole third movement and the first quarter of the last movement are practically a viola concerto. (I'd love to work on this piece with a quartet, but I think I'd need to build up a lot of viola points before I could convince people to do it with me. :-)
The Chiara Quartet gave an absolutely thrilling performance. I was particularly struck with the completely convincing flexibility of tempo they employed (something else they'd talked to us about during the day). Fortunately, their recording of this quartet (and the other two, and the G major quintet) has gotten enough Kickstarter funding that it will definitely be coming out. I'm really looking forward to it!
The format was as follows: we had coaching from one member of the string quartet for 45 minutes, then 45 minutes to rehearse what we'd learned. Then a 15 minute break, and then the same pattern. Lunch, and the afternoon followed the morning pattern. It felt to be the right amount of coaching and playing for a day, although 45 minutes seemed an awfully short period of time when a coach is saying all sorts of fascinating things.
I had been nervous that my playing wouldn't be good enough, and I'd get some harsh criticism, but all four coaches were very nice, and had nothing negative to say. I suppose that's not surprising, since if we didn't enjoy ourselves, we wouldn't come back. :-)
Our second violinist is very experienced at being coached, and her suggestion that we just work on one movement, the first of the Dvorak Op. 51 string quartet in E-flat major, was really good: it was just the right amount of music for the day's coaching.
The amount and variety of ideas that the coaches (and my fellow players!) planted in my head almost made my brain explode. From the very technical: how if you're playing in E-flat major, the E-flat should be sharper than equal tempered to make a just major third with the open G string (I could write a whole blog post on tuning, temperament, the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, and the string quartet, but that will have to be another time); how to unify the sound the lower strings need to play with their bows closer to the bridge, which excites more of the higher harmonics in the sound, both clarifying the pitch and making it easier for the violins to blend in. But there was also a lot of metaphor in a lot of adjectives: hot, cool, open, closed, glassy, pressured, pompous, songlike, dancelike. As I said, enough to make my brain explode!
I wish my engineering education had had more of this kind of thing. Maybe engineering isn't really suited to coaching, but certainly the creative spirit, so important in engineering as it is music, isn't fostered by the kind of classroom, test and fact focused teaching I had back in the 1980s. I'm not being entirely fair: I'm in touch with one of the professors at my alma mater who's been involved in revamping the curriculum, and they've moved it significantly in this direction.
I'm eager to have more coaching. I'm already signed up for some in early August; maybe I will have other opportunities sooner.
We had a break at the end of the day, and one of our violinists needed to leave early. Fortunately, I'd brought a collection of trios, and convinced the other two to try the Herzogenberg String Trio Op. 27 No. 2. As is usually the case, I enjoyed the experience of playing music by an obscure composer more than my partners, but they were very nice about it. Herzogenberg is often called a Brahms imitator, but I think he has some significant differences from Brahms that show up in his trios. First, Brahms is incapable of writing a thin texture, but Herzogenberg manages it quite well: the opening phrase of this trio is for cello alone, pizzicato. And Herzogeberg's string writing is much friendlier than Brahms, particularly his viola parts, which are fun and rewarding to play. Listen for yourself, and let me know if you don't think this is lovely music!
At the end of the day, we we treated to a concert by the Chiara Quartet: the Brahms Op. 67 quartet, which they're preparing for an upcoming recording. I love this quartet, both because of the compositional intricacies, but also because the whole third movement and the first quarter of the last movement are practically a viola concerto. (I'd love to work on this piece with a quartet, but I think I'd need to build up a lot of viola points before I could convince people to do it with me. :-)
The Chiara Quartet gave an absolutely thrilling performance. I was particularly struck with the completely convincing flexibility of tempo they employed (something else they'd talked to us about during the day). Fortunately, their recording of this quartet (and the other two, and the G major quintet) has gotten enough Kickstarter funding that it will definitely be coming out. I'm really looking forward to it!
Sunday, March 11, 2012
More Viola Quintets: Mozart K515, Brahms Op. 88, Dvorak Op. 97
Viola quintets for the second evening in a row, and again, for the reason that I was crashing a string quartet party. Everyone in this quartet was very nice, particularly the host violist, who let me play all the fun parts (at least, that's how it seems to me). Violinists are used to doing "the dance" of deciding who will play first and who will play second, but violists don't get as much practice at it, so we tend not to do it very well. :-)
I suggested the first piece, the Mozart C major quintet, K515, because I'd just heard it on the Gardner Museum podcast. What an amazing piece. Particularly in the first movement, Mozart is writing on a scale he seldom reaches. My Grumiaux recording clocks in at just under 15 minutes for the movement, which is way longer than any of the other Mozart quintet first movements. I joke that it's a great example of Mozart not being in a hurry. :-) It's not surprising that Schubert, a composer famous for not being in a hurry, used this quintet as a model for his cello quintet.
[ A confession to make: one of my background projects is writing variations on Happy Birthday in the style of various chamber music composers. This first movement is the one I based my "Mozart" variation on: you can pretty much keep everything except exchange the first violin Mozart melody with the much less interesting one from the Hill sisters. :-) ]
This beautiful Mozart melody has a turn in it. Can I mention how much I dislike the notation for a turn? When you're sight reading, you have to make quick decisions about what position to be in, and you make those decisions based on the notes you see. But a turn implies that you're going to have to quickly play a note below the one notated on the page, and you can easily have chosen a bad position for that. Grumble. Music notation is fascinating, particularly because of all the features that weren't designed, but just evolved.
I got to play first viola in the slow movement, which is a duet between the first violin and first viola, with the other three instruments accompanying. I felt the first violinist and I had a good rapport, and I hope that will continue as we play together more. She did a particularly good job in the last movement, playing the silly Mozart theme in an appropriately silly way. :-)
Next up was the Brahms Op. 88 quintet, which (you'll remember if you're paying attention) was the second time I'd played it in as many days. I stuck withe the second viola part, and I definitely played better this time: it's almost as if practice does something. :-) It points out to me that maybe I'm being a little too focused on my "life lists", trying to play so many different pieces of music, rather than focusing on fewer and getting them in better shape. I guess the only way to reconcile these conflicting desires is to play a lot more. :-)
We had time for only the first two movements of the Dvorak "American" quintet. This was a piece I'd played three times before, which may be a record for me. All those times were on second viola, but this time I got to play first viola, and was surprised how different the experience was. I didn't do a fantastic job in the beautiful solo in the middle of the scherzo: my upper position sight reading on the viola leaves something to be desired. But I think everyone had fun!
I suggested the first piece, the Mozart C major quintet, K515, because I'd just heard it on the Gardner Museum podcast. What an amazing piece. Particularly in the first movement, Mozart is writing on a scale he seldom reaches. My Grumiaux recording clocks in at just under 15 minutes for the movement, which is way longer than any of the other Mozart quintet first movements. I joke that it's a great example of Mozart not being in a hurry. :-) It's not surprising that Schubert, a composer famous for not being in a hurry, used this quintet as a model for his cello quintet.
[ A confession to make: one of my background projects is writing variations on Happy Birthday in the style of various chamber music composers. This first movement is the one I based my "Mozart" variation on: you can pretty much keep everything except exchange the first violin Mozart melody with the much less interesting one from the Hill sisters. :-) ]
This beautiful Mozart melody has a turn in it. Can I mention how much I dislike the notation for a turn? When you're sight reading, you have to make quick decisions about what position to be in, and you make those decisions based on the notes you see. But a turn implies that you're going to have to quickly play a note below the one notated on the page, and you can easily have chosen a bad position for that. Grumble. Music notation is fascinating, particularly because of all the features that weren't designed, but just evolved.
I got to play first viola in the slow movement, which is a duet between the first violin and first viola, with the other three instruments accompanying. I felt the first violinist and I had a good rapport, and I hope that will continue as we play together more. She did a particularly good job in the last movement, playing the silly Mozart theme in an appropriately silly way. :-)
Next up was the Brahms Op. 88 quintet, which (you'll remember if you're paying attention) was the second time I'd played it in as many days. I stuck withe the second viola part, and I definitely played better this time: it's almost as if practice does something. :-) It points out to me that maybe I'm being a little too focused on my "life lists", trying to play so many different pieces of music, rather than focusing on fewer and getting them in better shape. I guess the only way to reconcile these conflicting desires is to play a lot more. :-)
We had time for only the first two movements of the Dvorak "American" quintet. This was a piece I'd played three times before, which may be a record for me. All those times were on second viola, but this time I got to play first viola, and was surprised how different the experience was. I didn't do a fantastic job in the beautiful solo in the middle of the scherzo: my upper position sight reading on the viola leaves something to be desired. But I think everyone had fun!
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Brahms Viola Quintets, Op. 88 in F major and Op. 111 in G major
I've been playing a lot of quintets recently, rather than quartets (and I'll be playing more this evening). In the case of this evening, there were two reasons: I wanted to get a chance to play with a violist who had been recommended to me without having to give up my C string, and one of the violinists I play with regularly is moving away this summer, and she particularly likes Brahms; we're trying to fill her up before she departs. It was a wonderful evening of music, although in retrospect, programming both Brahms quintets was a bit of a stretch, and perhaps too much of a good thing.
There are seven pieces of chamber music for strings alone that Brahms published, and they fall neatly into three groups: the two early sextets, Op. 18 and 36; the three string quartets, Op. 51/1, 51/2, and Op 67; and these two late viola quintets, Op. 88 and Op. 111. I find it hard to feel them as late works: while they have their moments of pathos, in places they're some of the happiest, sunniest music Brahms wrote.
These are typical Brahms pieces in many ways: lots of three-against-two, lots of nobody-on-the-downbeat, lots of metrical displacement (something that feels like a downbeat, but isn't). Added to that some difficult meters (there's room for a lot of eighth notes in 3/2, and even more sixteenth notes in 9/8!) and you get what makes Brahms so difficult to play (and we haven't even gotten to his occasionally awkward string writing). My late wife Roberta Lukes used to quip that playing Brahms was easy: all you had to do was get the notes in the right places and the music played itself. :-) If only that weren't so challenging to do!
I guess the feature that makes these feel late is that they're harmonically adventurous, even for Brahms. The slow movement of the F major quintet is in the distant key of C-sharp minor (and goes even father afield: you know you're in trouble when you get, not only B sharps and F double sharps, but C double sharps!). The last movement of Op. 111 can't decide whether it's in B minor or G major, and near the end, the whole group an F-sharp major scale, leading to an F-sharp major seventh chord. That resolves to a G major chord for the last rollicking section of the movement: a perfectly natural kind of deceptive cadence, but to me, it feels like Brahms is saying, "Oh, %^$#, I'm way too far from the home key. Well, maybe I'll just pretend that this modulation works, and no one will notice". (The section I'm talking about starts at about 3:45 on this YouTube video.)
I have grumbled before that Brahms is incapable of writing a thin texture, but, boy, are his thick textures wonderful! There's nothing quite like the feeling of being in my living room, bathed in an ocean of absolutely gorgeous sound! Just listen to these pieces, and you'll get an idea what I'm talking about. If you only have time to listen to a little, the opening of Op. 111 is just incredible, and one of the pieces that gives me such cello envy. I even transposed the opening solo up an octave so that I could attempt it on the viola. Technically, it works, but it just sounds all wrong. Both the violin and cello have wonderful sounds in the upper register: let's just say that the upper register of the viola is an acquired taste. :-)
I got to play second viola all evening, which worked out well: firstly, because it's the closest I'm actually going to get to being a cellist, and secondly, because out guest violist was an absolutely wonderful player, with amazing tone on the big viola solos.
One note about editions: we played both quintets from new Peters editions, but they leave a lot to be desired. Some misprints (a missing eighth rest in the second viola part of Op.. 111: page 15, fourth line, last measure), some bad page turns (but who knows if there could be better ones) and some editorial choices that enraged one of our violinists. The opening of Op. 88 is marked "IV" for the first violin, specifying that the entire passage should be played high on the G string. But Op. 88 is one of the few Brahms works for which we have the manuscript, and as you can see, Brahms indicates nothing of the kind. This kind of thing is enough to make me want to do my own edition of the Brahms quintets. In my copious free time. :-)
A last off topic note; I've written before about my new white LED downlights. I was practicing earlier this week, and looked at my C string while tuning it. I saw a bizarre strobe effect, as if the string were just wobbling back and forth. I figured out what was causing it: the LEDs must be getting AC current, and in each downlight, half the LEDs are turning on each half cycle of 60Hz. So the fixtures as a whole are flashing at 120Hz: too fast to be noticeable as a flicker to the unaided eye, but enough to make the 130Hz viola C string look like something you'd see at the Boston Museum of Science. :-)
There are seven pieces of chamber music for strings alone that Brahms published, and they fall neatly into three groups: the two early sextets, Op. 18 and 36; the three string quartets, Op. 51/1, 51/2, and Op 67; and these two late viola quintets, Op. 88 and Op. 111. I find it hard to feel them as late works: while they have their moments of pathos, in places they're some of the happiest, sunniest music Brahms wrote.
These are typical Brahms pieces in many ways: lots of three-against-two, lots of nobody-on-the-downbeat, lots of metrical displacement (something that feels like a downbeat, but isn't). Added to that some difficult meters (there's room for a lot of eighth notes in 3/2, and even more sixteenth notes in 9/8!) and you get what makes Brahms so difficult to play (and we haven't even gotten to his occasionally awkward string writing). My late wife Roberta Lukes used to quip that playing Brahms was easy: all you had to do was get the notes in the right places and the music played itself. :-) If only that weren't so challenging to do!
I guess the feature that makes these feel late is that they're harmonically adventurous, even for Brahms. The slow movement of the F major quintet is in the distant key of C-sharp minor (and goes even father afield: you know you're in trouble when you get, not only B sharps and F double sharps, but C double sharps!). The last movement of Op. 111 can't decide whether it's in B minor or G major, and near the end, the whole group an F-sharp major scale, leading to an F-sharp major seventh chord. That resolves to a G major chord for the last rollicking section of the movement: a perfectly natural kind of deceptive cadence, but to me, it feels like Brahms is saying, "Oh, %^$#, I'm way too far from the home key. Well, maybe I'll just pretend that this modulation works, and no one will notice". (The section I'm talking about starts at about 3:45 on this YouTube video.)
I have grumbled before that Brahms is incapable of writing a thin texture, but, boy, are his thick textures wonderful! There's nothing quite like the feeling of being in my living room, bathed in an ocean of absolutely gorgeous sound! Just listen to these pieces, and you'll get an idea what I'm talking about. If you only have time to listen to a little, the opening of Op. 111 is just incredible, and one of the pieces that gives me such cello envy. I even transposed the opening solo up an octave so that I could attempt it on the viola. Technically, it works, but it just sounds all wrong. Both the violin and cello have wonderful sounds in the upper register: let's just say that the upper register of the viola is an acquired taste. :-)
I got to play second viola all evening, which worked out well: firstly, because it's the closest I'm actually going to get to being a cellist, and secondly, because out guest violist was an absolutely wonderful player, with amazing tone on the big viola solos.
One note about editions: we played both quintets from new Peters editions, but they leave a lot to be desired. Some misprints (a missing eighth rest in the second viola part of Op.. 111: page 15, fourth line, last measure), some bad page turns (but who knows if there could be better ones) and some editorial choices that enraged one of our violinists. The opening of Op. 88 is marked "IV" for the first violin, specifying that the entire passage should be played high on the G string. But Op. 88 is one of the few Brahms works for which we have the manuscript, and as you can see, Brahms indicates nothing of the kind. This kind of thing is enough to make me want to do my own edition of the Brahms quintets. In my copious free time. :-)
A last off topic note; I've written before about my new white LED downlights. I was practicing earlier this week, and looked at my C string while tuning it. I saw a bizarre strobe effect, as if the string were just wobbling back and forth. I figured out what was causing it: the LEDs must be getting AC current, and in each downlight, half the LEDs are turning on each half cycle of 60Hz. So the fixtures as a whole are flashing at 120Hz: too fast to be noticeable as a flicker to the unaided eye, but enough to make the 130Hz viola C string look like something you'd see at the Boston Museum of Science. :-)
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Haydn, Op. 17, No. 2, and Beethoven, Op. 135
Finally getting back to chamber music after what feels like a long break (I was on vacation in California and didn't bring any instrument with me). And, of course, starting back up with Haydn. I took advantage of a quartet with an excellent violinist and an obliging cellist to cross off another of the Opus 17 quartets, No. 2 in F major. Haydn wrote these quartets for the virtuoso violinist at Eszterhazy, Luigi Tomasini, so the first violin parts are filled with double stops and intricate passage work. And these were written before Opus 20, when Haydn realized that the violist and cellist might want to have interesting things to play, too. :-)
But even so, this is a beautiful quartet. I find the closing theme of the first movement enchanting: there's just something about the harmony that moves me, even though the passage is just a few measures long. (Our second violinist claims it was her B natural, and I have no reason to doubt her). And as much as I enjoy the more equal distribution of interest in the later Haydn quartets, there's something wonderful about the pure first-violin arias that you often get in the slow movements of the early works, and this is a fine example. And in the last movement, Haydn shows himself, as always, inventive in his sonata forms, turning a simple bass line, shared by the cello and viola in the exposition, into a much more involved example of counterpoint in the recapitulation.
Staying in F major, we moved to Beethoven's last string quartet, the Opus 135. Oh, I wish I had had more time to practice this: I really shouldn't have scheduled late Beethoven only a few days after I'd returned from vacation. But it was okay, and we had fun.
It's hard to describe how bizarre and outlandish the late Beethoven string quartets are. It feels as if they were written a century before their time. Certainly Beethoven's contemporaries could make nothing of them: I've previously quoted Louis Spohr's remark that they were "an indecipherable, uncorrected horror". And while Mendelssohn modeled his Op. 13 after them, he only used the least unconventional ideas. I think it's fair to say that the rest of the nineteenth century ignored these quartets: it isn't until Bartok that you feel a continuation of the compositional ideas of the late Beethoven quartets.
Just one example of one of the oddities in Opus 135: in the trio of the scherzo, the second violin, viola, and cello play, in octaves, the same measure over forty times in succession, while the first violin plays a kind of melody above. (The passage is just after the two minute mark here). It's bad enough for the poor second and viola, but because the cello is a larger instrument, one can't easily play the passage in one position. You can see on the video how the left hand of the cellist is frantically moving up and down, while the two inner strings can keep theirs still. Last night, our cellist tried thumb position, not usually used for notes so low on the instrument. It seemed to work, although she said that it would be very difficult to get to thumb position there reliably and quickly.
The slow movement is in the wonderful key of D-flat major, with five flats. The middle section goes from major to minor, but Beethoven chooses the enharmonic key of C-sharp minor, which has four sharps. Confusing: a bit like crossing the International Date Line (or a branch cut for you math geeks out there). Beethoven has to do this because D-flat minor doesn't exist as a key, because it would have eight flats and you can only have seven in the key signature. Although I think it would be really cool to have a B-double-flat in a key signature. And, yes, I know that I have a very strange sense of what would be really cool. :-)
I have to admit, I don't get the last movement at all. It's subtitled "Der schwer gefaßte Entschluß" ("The Difficult Decision"). The slow introduction is marked "Muss es sein? (Must it be?)" and the succeeding Allegro "Es muss sein! (It must be!)" I've always heard this explained that Beethoven, months away from death, is wrestling with the eternal question. And the introduction is as anguished as anything he wrote. But the Allegro! I could have understood a feeling of resignation, of acceptance, of maybe even joy. But what you get is something happy, maybe even mischievous. And the pizzicato ending is downright silly. If anyone can help me come up with a way of understanding this, I'd appreciate it!
But even so, this is a beautiful quartet. I find the closing theme of the first movement enchanting: there's just something about the harmony that moves me, even though the passage is just a few measures long. (Our second violinist claims it was her B natural, and I have no reason to doubt her). And as much as I enjoy the more equal distribution of interest in the later Haydn quartets, there's something wonderful about the pure first-violin arias that you often get in the slow movements of the early works, and this is a fine example. And in the last movement, Haydn shows himself, as always, inventive in his sonata forms, turning a simple bass line, shared by the cello and viola in the exposition, into a much more involved example of counterpoint in the recapitulation.
Staying in F major, we moved to Beethoven's last string quartet, the Opus 135. Oh, I wish I had had more time to practice this: I really shouldn't have scheduled late Beethoven only a few days after I'd returned from vacation. But it was okay, and we had fun.
It's hard to describe how bizarre and outlandish the late Beethoven string quartets are. It feels as if they were written a century before their time. Certainly Beethoven's contemporaries could make nothing of them: I've previously quoted Louis Spohr's remark that they were "an indecipherable, uncorrected horror". And while Mendelssohn modeled his Op. 13 after them, he only used the least unconventional ideas. I think it's fair to say that the rest of the nineteenth century ignored these quartets: it isn't until Bartok that you feel a continuation of the compositional ideas of the late Beethoven quartets.
Just one example of one of the oddities in Opus 135: in the trio of the scherzo, the second violin, viola, and cello play, in octaves, the same measure over forty times in succession, while the first violin plays a kind of melody above. (The passage is just after the two minute mark here). It's bad enough for the poor second and viola, but because the cello is a larger instrument, one can't easily play the passage in one position. You can see on the video how the left hand of the cellist is frantically moving up and down, while the two inner strings can keep theirs still. Last night, our cellist tried thumb position, not usually used for notes so low on the instrument. It seemed to work, although she said that it would be very difficult to get to thumb position there reliably and quickly.
The slow movement is in the wonderful key of D-flat major, with five flats. The middle section goes from major to minor, but Beethoven chooses the enharmonic key of C-sharp minor, which has four sharps. Confusing: a bit like crossing the International Date Line (or a branch cut for you math geeks out there). Beethoven has to do this because D-flat minor doesn't exist as a key, because it would have eight flats and you can only have seven in the key signature. Although I think it would be really cool to have a B-double-flat in a key signature. And, yes, I know that I have a very strange sense of what would be really cool. :-)
I have to admit, I don't get the last movement at all. It's subtitled "Der schwer gefaßte Entschluß" ("The Difficult Decision"). The slow introduction is marked "Muss es sein? (Must it be?)" and the succeeding Allegro "Es muss sein! (It must be!)" I've always heard this explained that Beethoven, months away from death, is wrestling with the eternal question. And the introduction is as anguished as anything he wrote. But the Allegro! I could have understood a feeling of resignation, of acceptance, of maybe even joy. But what you get is something happy, maybe even mischievous. And the pizzicato ending is downright silly. If anyone can help me come up with a way of understanding this, I'd appreciate it!
Sunday, February 19, 2012
van Bree, String Quartet No. 1 in a minor, String Quartet No. 2 in E-flat major
Way back in the depths of time (that is, when I was in graduate school), I heard a very interesting piece on the radio. (It’s funny how clear some memories are: I remember exactly where I was at the time, standing at the bus stop near my apartment). The piece was the Allegro for Four String Quartets by the Dutch romantic violinist and composer, Johannes Bernardus van Bree (1801-1857). A nice sonata-form movement, with a catchy tune as the second theme, and I thought it would be great fun to play it someday. But getting fifteen other willing participants, and a large enough location, seemed daunting.
I was at a chamber music weekend last spring, and finally got a chance to play the van Bree. It was a lot of fun, and went over reasonably well: people remarked that it was much more like a piece of chamber music than the Brandenburgs that are often played in such situations. People asked me about the composer, and I had to admit I knew very little about him.
Research after I got home showed that van Bree published three string quartets, and that the third was available from Edition Silvertrust. I ordered it, both out of curiosity and as a present for one of the violinists I played quartets with, a visiting scientist from the Netherlands. The third string quartet by van Bree showed both the positive and negative qualities I’d perceived in the Allegro for Four String Quartets: a real gift for melody, but a lack of imagination in form: everything was extremely regular and rather predictable. Still, a fun piece to play.
van Bree’s second string quartet was only available as a scan of the original edition on IMSLP, and, as I’ve remarked before, music printed before the second half of the nineteenth century can be pretty hard to read. I’d been playing around with Sibelius music layout software, and decided that it would be a fun project to make my own edition of this piece. And it was fun, working without a score, putting in the parts one at a time, seeing how they overlapped and interacted, and hearing the work come to life through my speakers. (Sibelius version 7 has impressively good playback capabilities, although with some annoying bugs: staccato notes in the strings are significantly louder than legato).
But, overall, my impression of van Bree’s second string quartet is that it’s even more mediocre than his third. I wrote a blog post about it, The Value of Mediocrity. But hidden in the formal dullness (really, do you *always* have to have entries in the order cello-viola-second violin-first violin?) are again some truly charming melodies.
I continued this project one step further. The only place I was able to track down a copy of the van Bree first string quartet was the Nederlands Muziek Instituut (the Dutch National Music Library), which very kindly sent me a photocopy of the parts. And I started the process of making my own edition.
The van Bree third string quartet has been recorded, although the recording is out of print. The second, as far as I can tell, has had only one recent live performance by the Gaudeamus Quartet, which I discovered on the website of a Dutch radio station. But I’m convinced that the first quartet hasn’t been played this century, or maybe even in the last. You’d pretty much have to do what I did, make your own edition, because as published, the parts are filled with errors. Not just inconsistencies of dynamics and bowing, but just plain wrong notes: for example, there’s an entire passage in the first violin part that seems to be off by a half step.
After all that work, my conclusion is that the first quartet is weaker than the second. It has the disadvantage, for me, of being in the “quatuor brillant” style, which is basically a concerto for the first violin with the other three instruments accompanying. And it’s again formally very dull. But the jaunty tune that starts the last movement has become a real favorite of mine. I’m probably the only person in the world who goes around singing a theme from van Bree’s first string quartet!
Wednesday evening I finally got a chance to play these two quartets from my own edition, taking advantage of my Dutch violinist friend’s return, and two other willing participants. It was fun, although I’m sure I enjoyed it more than the others did.
I don’t know what it is, but I like playing music by obscure composers. Part of it is that I love playing pieces I’ve never played before, and particularly, pieces I’ve never heard before. But also, as I wrote in The Value of Mediocrity, I think it’s good to play mediocre music from time to time, so that one can appreciate great music all the more. And even in mediocre music there are moments of brilliance, moments that make you happy to have experienced them.
But for some reason, it's really hard to find amateur chamber musicians who are willing to try pieces by obscure composers. So if you're reading this because a Google search for van Bree (or Kalliwoda, or Herzogenberg, or Dohnanyi, or Arriaga, or Richter, or Hoffstetter, etc.) has sent you here, and you want to try playing some of these pieces, send me email, and we'll see what we can arrange!
I’m not sure what to do next with the van Bree string quartets. I’m planning on cleaning up my editions and uploading them to IMSLP. But after all this work, I’d really like to have a recording of these quartets, and as I’ve said, none are available. I am tempted to commission a professional or semi-pro string quartet to make a recording for me, but I don’t know how to proceed with that. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Schubert, String Trio No. 1 in B flat, D471
Sunday evening I had a very special chamber music treat. I've mentioned on this blog that I go most Sunday nights to my friend's house for dinner with him and his family, board games with his kids, and then violin sonatas (we're working our way through the Mozart sonatas for a second time). But my friend is also a cellist, and his nearly ten-year-old son is a rapidly advancing violinist (almost done with Book Four of Suzuki, if I recall correctly). A couple of months ago, his parents thought to give him a gift of a chamber music session with me and his father, and asked me to pick the piece. I chose Schubert's single movement String Trio No. 1 in B flat, D471. I'd heard it at a Chameleon Arts Ensemble concert a few months previously, and thought that it was the right length and character for this purpose.
Sunday evening we had our first run through of the piece, and it was a wonderful musical experience. My young friend has all the makings of an excellent musician (I'd expect nothing less, knowing his father!) Confident, attentive, musical, a joy to play with! I hope to do so again often in the months and years ahead.
And I think the piece I chose was just right. It was a bit of a stretch for my young friend, both technically (going up to fifth position in one place), but also musically. The Suzuki books concentrate almost exclusively on folk songs and Baroque music, so Schubert's early Romantic harmonic vocabulary initially confused him greatly, particularly in the development section. But he practiced the piece a lot, and surmounted the technical difficulties, as well as implanting Schubert earworms into his entire family. (I have a friend who says the only way to get a Schubert melody out of your head is with another Schubert melody!)
Sunday evening we had our first run through of the piece, and it was a wonderful musical experience. My young friend has all the makings of an excellent musician (I'd expect nothing less, knowing his father!) Confident, attentive, musical, a joy to play with! I hope to do so again often in the months and years ahead.
And I think the piece I chose was just right. It was a bit of a stretch for my young friend, both technically (going up to fifth position in one place), but also musically. The Suzuki books concentrate almost exclusively on folk songs and Baroque music, so Schubert's early Romantic harmonic vocabulary initially confused him greatly, particularly in the development section. But he practiced the piece a lot, and surmounted the technical difficulties, as well as implanting Schubert earworms into his entire family. (I have a friend who says the only way to get a Schubert melody out of your head is with another Schubert melody!)
Dvorak, Quartet in E flat, Op. 51
On Sunday afternoon, we had the first meeting of a string quartet that we've put together to attend the Chiara Quartet's workshop on March 17th. We played through portions of a large number of quartets (Schubert "Death and the Maiden", Brahms 51/2, Shostakovich 2 and 3, and Bartok 1) before settling on the piece we tried out first, the Dvorak String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 51. I say this way too often, but this is an absolutely beautiful work. We ended up playing through the entire quartet, but we're going to concentrate on the first movement for the workshop.
I have to admit, I'm really nervous about the workshop. I haven't had any coaching since I started playing the viola again two and a half years ago, and I hadn't had any before then since I was an undergraduate. I'm not quite sure what to expect, and I'm worried that I won't be able to modify my playing in the direction the coaches suggest. And while the Dvorak isn't as technically challenging for the viola as the other pieces we tried Sunday, the first measure gives me a puzzle that I'm not sure I have a good solution for.
Here's the measure:
(For those of you unfamiliar with it, that symbol on the far left is the alto (or viola) clef. Middle line is middle C: what could be more logical? I happen to think it's a very pretty clef. But I digress. :-)
One of the big decisions one has to make as a string player is which finger of the left hand to use to play each note (and also, which string to use). These usually come down to choosing a "position" for the left hand, which are numbered from first (hand farthest away from the body) on up, although within a position, you also have some flexibility as to the choice of finger. String players number their fingers from 1 (index) to 4 (little).
There are several factors that come into choice of position. You want to avoid changing positions too frequently; you want to avoid having to cross strings unnecessarily (although sometimes that's a special effect a composer is looking for). You might want to deemphasize the weaker fourth finger (trills with the fourth finger, for example, are difficult). And the tone colors of the strings are quite different: for example, playing in the higher positions on the C string on the viola creates, to my mind, not a particularly pleasant sound (although Mahler specifically calls for it in his Sixth Symphony).
All that said, there are basically two choices for this first measure of the Dvorak quartet. The obvious one is second position, so you start with the first finger on the C string for the low E flat, going to the fourth finger on the G string for the high E flat. No change of position, only one string crossing.
The problem with this solution is the final chord. Playing two notes at once is called a "double stop", and some double stops are easier than others. Hardest are fifths: since the viola is tuned in fifths, you need to use the same finger to stop both strings. In effect, this means that not only the position of the finger has to be exactly right, but its angle does, as well. Compounding this problem is the fact that fifths, being perfect intervals, are more sensitive to pitch errors than other intervals. All this means that I have trouble getting fifths consistently in tune, and being out of tune on the first measure of a piece doesn't start things off on the right foot. :-)
There's an alternate solution to the fingering problem: playing the passage in first position, ending with the fifth played on the "open strings" G and D (no fingers at all). There's one more string crossing, but that's not a huge issue here. Playing an open fifth can be a problem if the strings have gone out of tune, but at the beginning of a piece, just after tuning, that shouldn't be a concern.
The problem with this solution is that open strings have a very special sound, and one that tends not to be favored in modern string playing, particularly for soft, lyrical passages. I have gotten some sharp looks in the past from fellow players for using open strings where they really aren't appropriate.
So I can't make up my mind. I'll consult with the other members of our quartet, and with the coaches on March 17. Dvorak was a violist: I wish I could consult him.
And this matters a lot, because those final notes of that measure form one of the harmonic cornerstones for the entire quartet. Some chord progressions are more common than others, and the chord progression in this measure, from the tonic (I), E-flat major, to the mediant (iii), G minor, is very uncommon. (Probably because iii is a fence-straddling chord, sharing two notes with the tonic and two with the dominant). I haven't finished looking, but I think this progression ties the whole quartet together. I don't think it's a coincidence that the second movement is in G minor, and that the theme of the last movement starts in E-flat major but cadences in G minor.
And it's those two notes at the end of the first bar of the viola part that create the G minor chord (along with the B-flats in the second violin and cello). A huge responsibility!
Whew! I promise to avoid writing entire blog posts about single measures in the future. :-)
I have to admit, I'm really nervous about the workshop. I haven't had any coaching since I started playing the viola again two and a half years ago, and I hadn't had any before then since I was an undergraduate. I'm not quite sure what to expect, and I'm worried that I won't be able to modify my playing in the direction the coaches suggest. And while the Dvorak isn't as technically challenging for the viola as the other pieces we tried Sunday, the first measure gives me a puzzle that I'm not sure I have a good solution for.
Here's the measure:
One of the big decisions one has to make as a string player is which finger of the left hand to use to play each note (and also, which string to use). These usually come down to choosing a "position" for the left hand, which are numbered from first (hand farthest away from the body) on up, although within a position, you also have some flexibility as to the choice of finger. String players number their fingers from 1 (index) to 4 (little).
There are several factors that come into choice of position. You want to avoid changing positions too frequently; you want to avoid having to cross strings unnecessarily (although sometimes that's a special effect a composer is looking for). You might want to deemphasize the weaker fourth finger (trills with the fourth finger, for example, are difficult). And the tone colors of the strings are quite different: for example, playing in the higher positions on the C string on the viola creates, to my mind, not a particularly pleasant sound (although Mahler specifically calls for it in his Sixth Symphony).
All that said, there are basically two choices for this first measure of the Dvorak quartet. The obvious one is second position, so you start with the first finger on the C string for the low E flat, going to the fourth finger on the G string for the high E flat. No change of position, only one string crossing.
The problem with this solution is the final chord. Playing two notes at once is called a "double stop", and some double stops are easier than others. Hardest are fifths: since the viola is tuned in fifths, you need to use the same finger to stop both strings. In effect, this means that not only the position of the finger has to be exactly right, but its angle does, as well. Compounding this problem is the fact that fifths, being perfect intervals, are more sensitive to pitch errors than other intervals. All this means that I have trouble getting fifths consistently in tune, and being out of tune on the first measure of a piece doesn't start things off on the right foot. :-)
There's an alternate solution to the fingering problem: playing the passage in first position, ending with the fifth played on the "open strings" G and D (no fingers at all). There's one more string crossing, but that's not a huge issue here. Playing an open fifth can be a problem if the strings have gone out of tune, but at the beginning of a piece, just after tuning, that shouldn't be a concern.
The problem with this solution is that open strings have a very special sound, and one that tends not to be favored in modern string playing, particularly for soft, lyrical passages. I have gotten some sharp looks in the past from fellow players for using open strings where they really aren't appropriate.
So I can't make up my mind. I'll consult with the other members of our quartet, and with the coaches on March 17. Dvorak was a violist: I wish I could consult him.
And this matters a lot, because those final notes of that measure form one of the harmonic cornerstones for the entire quartet. Some chord progressions are more common than others, and the chord progression in this measure, from the tonic (I), E-flat major, to the mediant (iii), G minor, is very uncommon. (Probably because iii is a fence-straddling chord, sharing two notes with the tonic and two with the dominant). I haven't finished looking, but I think this progression ties the whole quartet together. I don't think it's a coincidence that the second movement is in G minor, and that the theme of the last movement starts in E-flat major but cadences in G minor.
And it's those two notes at the end of the first bar of the viola part that create the G minor chord (along with the B-flats in the second violin and cello). A huge responsibility!
Whew! I promise to avoid writing entire blog posts about single measures in the future. :-)
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Beethoven, Op. 18, No. 4, and Haydn, Op. 77, No. 2
I only played two quartets last night: we were all tired, and one of the violinists was on crutches, recovering from day surgery. But they were two wonderful quartets, and I think we sounded particularly good. Part of it was the skill of the players (helped out by the viola bow I'm trying out), but I think part of it is that my living room has really good acoustics for chamber music. We could really get a clarity of sound when needed!
In selecting the program for this evening, I had prepared a bit of a musicological term-paper topic. One of the violinists had expressed eagerness to play one of Beethoven's Opus 18 quartets (we played No. 4, in C minor), so I chose from among the few (!) remaining quartets in my Haydn project his last complete one, the Opus 77, No. 2, in F major. (I didn't realize, until I was preparing this blog post, that this quartet had the nickname "Wait Till The Clouds Roll By". I can find no explanation for this name: maybe one of you out there can help me?)
I don't know if this is true for everyone, but one tends to keep composers in memory in a kind of chronological order, like Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven. But that is an oversimplification, and the two pieces from tonight show why. Both were written in the period 1798-1800, while both composers were living in Vienna, and both were commissioned and dedicated to the same patron, Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz. So the term-paper topic is, "compare and contrast these two string quartets".
Both composers are at the top of their form, I think. Haydn could probably have gotten away with "phoning it in" to Lobkowicz, but there's no trace of that. He continues his lifelong exploration of the string quartet, particularly noticeable in the distant keys he reaches in the development section of the first movement, and the shift from F major to D-flat major between the minuet and trio. Beethoven seems to have delayed his attempt at string quartets, publishing a total of five string trios before the Op. 18, perhaps to make sure he was ready to tackle this already-venerated form. I think he was definitely ready. :-) This quartet is a thrill from beginning to end. It's particularly interesting that the traditional "slow" movement isn't slow at all, but a kind of mixture of sonata and scherzo.
In comparing these two works, you can't even fall back on the rule of thumb, "Haydn writes minuets, Beethoven writes scherzos". On the minuet-scherzo spectrum, the Beethoven 18/4 is definitely on the minuet side compared with the Haydn 77/2. ("Scherzo" means "joke" in Italian, and Haydn certainly plays a joke on the viola in this movement. I thought I'd have three chances to get my tricky rhythmic entrance correct, but as it turns out, I needed a fourth. :-)
I think the fundamental question is, can you tell the difference between a piece written by someone in his late sixties, as opposed to someone in his late twenties? There's something indescribable in the Haydn that makes it seem like "old music" to me, particularly the beautiful slow movement. And the Beethoven seems like "young music": in the last two movements he has the tempo increase near the end, which feels to me like a reflection of the impatience of youth. But I'm not sure if that's just not some sort of projection on my part. Listen to the pieces and let me know what you think!
P.S. For those of you keeping track at home, the Haydn Quartet Project stands at 59 played, only nine to go!
In selecting the program for this evening, I had prepared a bit of a musicological term-paper topic. One of the violinists had expressed eagerness to play one of Beethoven's Opus 18 quartets (we played No. 4, in C minor), so I chose from among the few (!) remaining quartets in my Haydn project his last complete one, the Opus 77, No. 2, in F major. (I didn't realize, until I was preparing this blog post, that this quartet had the nickname "Wait Till The Clouds Roll By". I can find no explanation for this name: maybe one of you out there can help me?)
I don't know if this is true for everyone, but one tends to keep composers in memory in a kind of chronological order, like Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven. But that is an oversimplification, and the two pieces from tonight show why. Both were written in the period 1798-1800, while both composers were living in Vienna, and both were commissioned and dedicated to the same patron, Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz. So the term-paper topic is, "compare and contrast these two string quartets".
Both composers are at the top of their form, I think. Haydn could probably have gotten away with "phoning it in" to Lobkowicz, but there's no trace of that. He continues his lifelong exploration of the string quartet, particularly noticeable in the distant keys he reaches in the development section of the first movement, and the shift from F major to D-flat major between the minuet and trio. Beethoven seems to have delayed his attempt at string quartets, publishing a total of five string trios before the Op. 18, perhaps to make sure he was ready to tackle this already-venerated form. I think he was definitely ready. :-) This quartet is a thrill from beginning to end. It's particularly interesting that the traditional "slow" movement isn't slow at all, but a kind of mixture of sonata and scherzo.
In comparing these two works, you can't even fall back on the rule of thumb, "Haydn writes minuets, Beethoven writes scherzos". On the minuet-scherzo spectrum, the Beethoven 18/4 is definitely on the minuet side compared with the Haydn 77/2. ("Scherzo" means "joke" in Italian, and Haydn certainly plays a joke on the viola in this movement. I thought I'd have three chances to get my tricky rhythmic entrance correct, but as it turns out, I needed a fourth. :-)
I think the fundamental question is, can you tell the difference between a piece written by someone in his late sixties, as opposed to someone in his late twenties? There's something indescribable in the Haydn that makes it seem like "old music" to me, particularly the beautiful slow movement. And the Beethoven seems like "young music": in the last two movements he has the tempo increase near the end, which feels to me like a reflection of the impatience of youth. But I'm not sure if that's just not some sort of projection on my part. Listen to the pieces and let me know what you think!
P.S. For those of you keeping track at home, the Haydn Quartet Project stands at 59 played, only nine to go!
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