Month: July 2024

Bartók’s Études, Op 18: Daring Technical Exercises for Solo Piano

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Béla Bartók’s three Études, Op 18 for solo piano are daring, both technically and musically. Composed in 1918, they were intended to push the limits as pedagogical studies. The influence of Chopin, Debussy (whose piano Études were written three years earlier), and Schoenberg is evident. The three brief Études follow the traditional fast-slow-fast format. The first unleashes an exhilarating, demonic motor, punctuated with the accents of Hungarian folk music and language. In …

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Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4: Fearful Symmetry

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The greatest music requires deep, active listening. You can’t just put it on in the background and allow it to waft over you as you go about other tasks. It demands undivided attention. Initially, it may seem wildly incomprehensible. Its meaningfulness may be revealed gradually over the course of repeated listenings. Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4, composed in Budapest during the summer of 1928, is one of those mysterious and monumental …

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“Dark Pastoral” for Cello and Orchestra: David Matthews’ Completion of a Vaughan Williams Fragment

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A four-minute fragment of music, sketched by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1942, is all that exists of a cello concerto the composer intended to write for Pablo Casals. In 2010, contemporary English composer David Matthews (b. 1943) developed the fragment, which would have become the concerto’s slow movement, into the elegiac Dark Pastoral for cello and orchestra. Vaughan Williams’ original two-stave short score set out the movement’s A section, with only a few instrumental …

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Vaughan Williams’ Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra: An Homage to Bach and the Country Fiddler

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In Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra (“Concerto Accademico”), vibrant neoclassical counterpoint meets the sunny strains of an English country fiddler. Completed in 1925, the Concerto was dedicated to the Hungarian violinist, Jelly d’Aranyi, who gave the premiere with Anthony Bernard and the London Chamber Orchestra on November 6, 1925. Initially, the work was called “Concerto Accademico,” but Vaughan Williams came to dislike the title and withdrew it prior …

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Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” Overture: A Wild and Exhilarating Ride

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Mozart’s 1786 comic opera in four acts, The Marriage of Figaro, K. 492, is filled with trickery, deception, overheard conversations, cunning disguises, and crazy schemes. Unfolding over the course of a single “day of madness,” it tells the story of two servants, Figaro and Susanna, who succeed in getting married despite the efforts of their lecherous employer, Count Almaviva. The play by Pierre Beaumarchais, on which the opera was based, faced censorship because …

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Bach’s Sinfonia from Cantata, BWV 21 (“Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis”): A Portrait of Greif

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J.S. Bach composed the Cantata, Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis, BWV 21 (“I had much grief”) in 1713 during his tenure as director of music at the court of Weimar. It was first performed a year later on the third Sunday after Trinity. Themes of suffering, grief, and mourning dominate the opening section of the Cantata, which, as conductor John Eliot Gardiner observes, is “set almost obsessively in C minor.” It is a …

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Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: Herbert Blomstedt and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

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Last Thursday, July 11, renowned Swedish conductor Herbert Blomstedt celebrated his 97th birthday. Sidelined by a serious fall in December of 2023, Blomstedt resumed his conducting schedule last April; and with numerous upcoming engagements, centered in Leipzig, Dresden, and Paris, he shows no signs of slowing down. This year, in celebration of Blomstedt’s birthday, the Bamberg Symphony played I denna ljuva sommartid, a Swedish summer psalm which holds significance for the conductor. …

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