All posts by Douglas Meyer

Czech Suite, Op. 39 Antonín Dvořák

In 1874, Brahms reluctantly sat on the jury of the Austrian State Stipendium with the critic Eduard Hanslick and the Director of the Imperial Opera, Johann Herbeck. The jury was to award financial support to talented composers in need within the Habsburg Empire. Brahms encountered a massive submission from an obscure Czech composer: fifteen works including two symphonies, several overtures and a song cycle (Op. 7). Brahms was visibly overcome by the mastery and talent of this unknown individual. As a result of Brahms’s support, Antonin Dvorák received the stipend (and twice more in 1876 and 1877).

The Czech suite was written at the point in Antonín Dvořák’s career when his fame as a composer was burgeoning. The popularity of nationalist music was growing. Liszt had had great success with his set of Hungarian rhapsodies, composed from 1846 onwards, and Brahms had followed on with his famous set of 21 Hungarian dances.

Brahms’ music publisher, Fritz Simrock was looking for more music of this kind, and on the recommendation of Brahms approached Dvořák to commission a new work. The commission saw the publication of a set of 16 Slavonic dances which were originally written for piano duet. The work was a huge success. Simrock made a handsome profit and Dvořák received a pitifully small fee. At Simrock’s request Dvořák orchetrated the dances and they were published as his Opus 46. This time Dvořák insisted on and received a much higher fee. The Czech suite was written the following year.

The work is made up of five movements, three of which are traditional Czech dances, and two are descriptive of the Bohemian countryside which inspired much of Dvořák’s music.

The first movement is a pastorale in which the bucolic atmosphere is created by drone sounds accompanying a long lyrical melody and the sounds of bird-like songs.

The second movement is a Polka, the most celebrated of Bohemian dances. It is in a minor key and in duple time.

The third movement is a sousedská, a calm swaying dance in three quarter time. Some refer to the style as the grandparents’ dance.

The fourth movement is a romance that takes us back into the countryside. It is slower and gentler than the two preceding dances. The final movement is a furiant. This is a fast energetic dance that frequently shifts accents between duple and triple time. It provides a lively and exuberant conclusion to the work.

Overture to Abduction from the Seraglio, K. 384 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

It was an open secret in Mozart’s day that Wolfgang wished to free himself from service at the Salzburg court of the Archbishop Hieronymous von Colloredo. Mozart’s letters are full of colorful rants about the archbishop.

Colloredo became exceptionally annoyed with Mozart’s frequent absences. After a number of arguments, he ultimately dismissed him with the words, “Soll er doch gehen, ich brauche ihn nicht!” (“He should just go then; I don’t need him!”)

Mozart’s letters to his father recount his indignation at what he portrays as abusive and insulting behavior by the Archbishop. In his letter of June 13, 1781, Mozart recounts that the final indignity of his dismissal by Colloredo was a kick up the backside administered by the Archbishop’s steward, Count Arco.

Free at last Mozart left to pursue a career as a freelance performer and composer in Austria’s capital. In Vienna, Mozart met Constanze Weber (a cousin of the composer Carl Maria von Weber) and they were to be married on August 4, 1782. Mozart’s father, Leopold objected strongly to the wedding but in the end relented and gave his approval.

Just before the wedding, Wolfgang was involved in a rather large and influential project. A recent artistic trend in Vienna focused on the Ottoman Empire. Just a century before, Vienna has been attacked by the Turks, so it is somewhat unusual that music, art, clothing were so influenced by the Near East. Mozart’s contribution to this fad was his singspiel (an opera with spoken dialogue) The Abduction from the Seraglio.

In the singspiel, Mozart uses the “alla Turca style.” Inspired by the sounds of Turkish military bands, this style features strong downbeats and jangling grace notes that imitate the sounds of the Turkish Crescent, an instrument consisting of a long pole with an Islamic crescent adorned with small bells that jingled when the pole struck the floor in time with the music. The Overture to The Abduction from the Seraglio contains the perfect example of this style. The Abduction takes place in sixteenth-century Turkey and concerns the efforts of Belmonte to find his lover Konstanze who has been abducted by pirates and sold to a Turkish Pasha named Osmin. All ends well after Osmin takes pity on Belmonte and pardons both him and Konstanze (and their devoted servants) from further punishment for their attempts at escape. This story was a popular farce in Vienna in the eighteenth century and was familiar to audiences. The work was first performed on July 16, 1782, at the Burgtheater in Vienna.

The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires — Ástor Piazzolla (Desyatnikov)

It is rare indeed that a musical composition might highlight the differences between the North and South Hemispheres of Planet Earth. But today we’ll experience one.

It is true that January, the coldest month in Venice, has an average temperature of 3.5 °C (38 °F),and that of the warmest months, July and August) is of 23 °C (73 °F). It is also true that January is the hottest month in Buenos Aires with an average temperature of 25°C (77°F) and the coldest is June at 12°C (54°F). It would follow then that music written about the seasons in the Northern Hemisphere would have an atmosphere quite different from a similar work written in the Southern Hemisphere.

Ástor Piazzolla was born in Argentina, raised in New York and educated in Paris by the legendary composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. It seemed he was destined for a satisfactory but unremarkable career penning orchestral ditties with a South American accent. But one day Boulanger heard Piazzolla nonchalantly playing a Tango at her piano before a lesson. She urged her pupil to follow this direction with the proclamation that ‘here is the true Piazzolla.’ But she also insisted that he continue his rigorous study of Baroque and High Classical music.

When the young composer returned to Buenos Aires, he began to do for the Tango what Johann Strauss had for the waltz over a century before. He thrust classical complexities, harmonies and textures into the form, cultivating it and adapting it without compromising its raw ingredients.

Piazzolla’s most famous concert work is a monumental salute to Vivaldi entitled The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (‘Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas’). In a sense, it represents the apex of the Argentine’s ‘Tango Nuevo’ style, music that was born from the Tango but was designed to be listened to, rather than danced to.

This particular piece, though, was crafted carefully and slowly. The first season, Verano Porteño (Summer), arrived in 1965, scored for string quartet and designed to accompany a play by the composer’s colleague Rodriguez Munoz. In 1969 Piazzolla wrote Autumn for the same forces and in the following year, Spring and Winter.

The present version for solo violin and string orchestra postdates Piazzolla’s death by several years. The Russian violinist, Gidon Kremer wanted a piece to complement Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and commissioned composer Leonid Desyatnikov to make this arrangement, which was completed in 1998.

Desyatnikov did not confine himself to mere transcription. To a degree he recomposed the pieces to fit Kremer’s concept, adding quotations from the Vivaldi Seasons as well as cadenzas for the solo violinist and principal cellist. He did preserve certain special effects Piazzolla devised to compensate for the lack of percussion in his quintet—slapping the back of the bass and scrubbing behind the violin bridge to produce an imitation of the stick-scratched gourd called a guiro, as well as violin slides both slow and whipped. Buenos Aires is located about two-thirds down the East coast of South America on the Rio de la Plata; its climate is classified as subtropical. But a warning for the meteorologically unprepared: in recognition of the reversal of seasons south of the Equator, in Desyatnikov’s arrangement Vivaldi’s Winter is quoted in Piazzola’s Summer, and Vivaldi’s Summer in Piazzola’s Winter. Spring and Autumn references are similarly switched.

Haydn Oboe Concerto in C

The story behind the “Haydn Oboe Concerto in C” is interesting. It first came to light in 1926, when it was published by Breitkopf & Härtel. The edition was based on the only extant copy of a manuscript held in Zittau (Saxony), to which the word “Haydn” had been added by a different and later hand. In spite of continuing efforts, musicologists have yet to disprove this attribution.

It was not until the 1950’s that Anthony van Hoboken, a Dutch enthusiast, created the first complete catalog of Haydn’s works. In the interim, so many records have been lost or destroyed that scholars have often been left to guess at a particular work’s provenance, using clues such as musical style or thematic relationships to deduce whether it is authentic and who the true composer might have been.

The concerto isn’t found in either the Entwurf Katalog or Haydn Verzeichnis (both of which the composer prepared). The distinguished Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon states that the concerto “is certainly not by Haydn, but an attractive and bright work by a good minor master.” The Haynes Catalog of Oboe Music by Peter Wuttke attributes the composition to Ignaz Malzat (1757-1804).

In addition to the soloist, the score requires pairs of oboes, horns, trumpets, timpani and the usual strings. 

Mozart: Symphony No. 36 in C major, K. 425 “Linz”

On August 4, 1782 in Vienna, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart married Constanze Weber without the blessing of his father. Papa Leopold thought that the humble, uneducated girl was not worthy of his brilliantly talented son, and he made no secret of it. In an attempt to heal the family rift, the new Herr and Frau Mozart went to Salzburg the following summer for an extended stay. The visit changed little. Leopold spent the rest of his life telling his son what a poor choice of a wife he had made. Wolfgang tried to put a good face on the situation, but he was bitterly disappointed at the results of the Salzburg visit. He left the town of his birth on October 27, 1783, and never returned.

LINZ, AUSTRIA

The Mozarts returned to Vienna by way of Linz, where they found a warm welcome. “When we arrived at the gates of Linz,” Mozart reported to his father on October 31st, “a servant was waiting there to conduct us to the palace of old Count Thun where we are now staying. I can’t tell you how they overwhelm us with kindness in this house. On Thursday, November 4th, I am going to give a concert in the theater, and since I haven’t a single symphony with me, I am up to my ears writing a new one which must be finished by then.”

The piece was completed on time, in the astonishing space of just five days. Such speed characterized the creation of many of Mozart’s works, and is an important indication of his compositional process: formulating a work completely in his head before committing it to paper. The Symphony begins with an introduction in slow tempo with chromatic inflections before the tempo quickens for the arrival of the energetic main theme. In the Andante, Mozart supplied the necessary pathos to balance the exuberance of the surrounding movements. The third movement is a cheerful Minuet, whose trio is reminiscent of an Austrian Ländlerm and the finale is filled with dashing vitality and irresistible joy.

Bach: Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor BWV 10

An opportunity arose for Bach when in 1729 the Collegium Musicum of Leipzig found itself in need of a new director. This organization, which was one of the earliest ensembles to produce and perform public concerts in the modern sense, had been founded in 1701 by Bach’s friend (and godfather to his second son) Georg Philipp Telemann.

Led by Bach the Collegium Musicum performed a weekly two-hour concert at the largest and most prestigious coffee-house in Leipzig, owned and operated by Gottfried Zimmermann

Bach held the directorship of this Collegium through 1737, and again from 1739 through 1741.

For these concerts he had to compose or obtain, and rehearse and perform, a vast quantity of music. His 10-year tenure as director of the Collegium meant producing an estimated 500 concerts. A major orchestral genre of the time was the overture with appended suite of dances (Telemann is reckoned to have composed many hundreds). There are four which survive from Bach’s hand. Three of them, the one in C major, and both of those in D major, were probably composed in the 1710’s and revived for the Collegium concerts. The overture in B minor for flute and strings is more likely to have been composed anew for the Collegium and the only surviving parts date from the late 1730’s. As in other examples of this genre, the opening movement is the largest in scale, alternating between a slower section of majestic character and a quicker, fugal section. It is then followed by a series of dance-movements: a Gavotte (even though it is labeled “Rondeau”), a Sarabande, a pair of Bourrées, a Polonaise with a variation, and a Menuet. To round it off a movement that superficially resembles a fast Gavotte, but which Bach calls “Badinerie.”

Arvo Pärt: If Bach had been a beekeeper

Since 2011 Arvo Pärt has been among the most performed living composers in the world. Pärt possesses one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary classical music, the product of eclectic influences from the “official” Soviet aesthetic to Renaissance polyphony. Born near Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, Pärt began his formal musical education in 1954 at the Tallinn Music Secondary School entering the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957.

Immediately preceding World War II, Estonia was bloodlessly annexed by the Soviet Union, leaving the young Pärt with only limited access to the musical developments in the West. His early compositions, including his first two symphonies, employed serial techniques, but he soon tired of the rigid rules of twelve-tone composition. After studying French and Flemish choral music from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, Pärt began incorporating the style and spirit of early European polyphony into his own compositions, beginning in 1971with his Third Symphony.

If Bach had been a beekeeper, completed in 1976, is one of the works performed at a legendary concert by the early music ensemble Hortus Musicus on 27 October of the same year. This marked the beginning of Pärt’s new creative style. Intensive creative collaboration with the early music ensemble offered the composer an opportunity to use instruments played by the ensemble and experiment with their sounds.

The key to understanding the sound of this composition is provided by an ironic title Pärt initially gave it: Portrait of a Musicologist Against the Background of a Wasp Nest.

The basic form of the piece is Toccata (showpiece), Ricercare (fugal music) and Chorale (quote from Bach). In the Toccata Pärt embedded Bach’s name, (b–a–c–h: in German b=b flat and h=b natural) on several levels: melodic, sustained chords and tremolo. Then he surrounded Bach with string parts reminiscent of the buzzing of bees. The rhythmic pulse of the accompanying piano part consists of chords in B flat, A, C and B natural. The work resolves in a coda featuring music from Bach’s prelude in B minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1.The first half of Bach’s slowly paced prelude is played at half the speed, offering a relief from the previously tense music. Heavenly lightness begins to glow as the final chord is not played in the original minor, but in the bright major of the same tonality.

Bach: Concerto for Violin and Oboe BWV 1060R

It was during Johann Sebastian Bach’s six years as Court Kapellmeister in Köthen (1717–1723) that he produced a significant amount of secular music. Köthen’s Prince Leopold was a connoisseur of music and he asked for instrumental repertoire for solo performance as well as for his 13-member orchestra, and since he was a Calvinist, the Prince did not require very much music for church services.

It was during Johann Sebastian Bach’s six years as Court Kapellmeister in Köthen (1717–1723) that he produced a significant amount of secular music. Köthen’s Prince Leopold was a connoisseur of music and he asked for instrumental repertoire for solo performance as well as for his 13-member orchestra, and since he was a Calvinist, the Prince did not require very much music for church services.

The original score for the concerto BWV 1060 was lost after Bach’s death and the version we perform these days is a reconstruction from a transcription that Bach made for two harpsichords.

Differences between the extant harpsichord scores for this concerto indicate that the composer was writing for contrasting solo instruments. The solo parts strongly suggested his initial choice of violin and oboe.

BWV 1060 follows the standard Italian baroque concerto structure: three movements: fast-slow-fast. The first movement (Allegro) alternates between soloists (concertino) and orchestra (ripieno) clearly defining the separation of forces. Similar to Vivaldi’s concerto design, the second movement (Adagio) resembles an operatic aria and the flashy last movement pops up with a crisp main theme which will also reappear within the central and closing sections of the movement (a ritornello).

The original score for the concerto BWV 1060 was lost after Bach’s death and the version we perform these days is a reconstruction from a transcription that Bach made for two harpsichords.

Differences between the extant harpsichord scores for this concerto indicate that the composer was writing for contrasting solo instruments. The solo parts strongly suggested his initial choice of violin and oboe.

BWV 1060 follows the standard Italian baroque concerto structure: three movements: fast-slow-fast. The first movement (Allegro) alternates between soloists (concertino) and orchestra (ripieno) clearly defining the separation of forces. Similar to Vivaldi’s concerto design, the second movement (Adagio) resembles an operatic aria and the flashy last movement pops up with a crisp main theme which will also reappear within the central and closing sections of the movement (a ritornello).

Twas the Night Before Christmas – Singalong for Narrator and Orchestra

A orchestra piece with Narration of the famous “A Visit from St. Nicholas” interspersed with carols sung by the audience, including: The First Nowell, All Through the Night, Jingle Bells, Up on the Housetop, Toyland, Jolly Old St. Nicholas, and We Wish you and Merry Christmas. Full orchestra includes 2222/4231 strings, timpani, sleigh bells and orchestra bells. Timing is 12 min. (There is a listen tab after you click on SCORE or PARTS)

SCORE click here   PARTS click here