by Bill Scanlan Murphy
HENRYK WIENIAWSKI (1835-1880)
VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 2 in D minor ,
I: Allegro Moderato
Composed: 1862
Premiered: St. Petersburg, Russia, 1862
A violin virtuoso who more or less played himself to death, dying of exhaustion in Moscow at the early age of 45, Wieniawski composed mainly for himself, though the very popular second Concerto is dedicated to another great nineteenth-century virtuoso, Pablo Sarasate. The passages of rapid staccato notes that are found throughout his works were specifically designed for his own, highly controversial rigid-arm bow grip, which made the music relatively easy for him, but cost him dearly in severe neuralgia in his last years. Nowadays, a different technique is recommended to students!
The first movement reverses the trend set by Mendelssohn: instead of bringing the soloist in within seconds of the downbeat, Wieniawski reverts (ironically in such a romantic work) to the Classical model, and gives the violin a longish buildup to a relatively restrained dramatic entry, playing its own, technically alarming version of the first subject that has just been outlined by the orchestra. From there, it’s sonata business as usual, with the lyrical second subject – indeed, much of the movement – showing Wieniawski’s particular fondness for the lower reaches of the violin’s range.
DANIEL BERNARD ROUMAIN (born 1971)
HARLEM ESSAY, for digital tape and orchestra
Composed: 1995-1997
Premiered: 1997, New York
Once described as “a combination of Mozart, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Prince,” Florida-born Haitian-American Daniel Bernard Roumain has taken musical fusion to hitherto unimaginable new realms with his “Dred Violin” works, which combine elements of jazz, hip-hop and Haitian folk music with still-recognizable classical elements to forge an entirely new, instantly recognizable and slightly hair-raising musical style—at least as recognizable as his own sometimes slightly terrifying “Dred” violin playing. It is also safe to say that very few other composers featured in this concert series have played guitar and sung lead vocals in a funk band, or worked with Prince and Count Basie before leaving high school.
In Harlem Essay, Roumain takes his discoveries from these very different musics into the world of orchestral music to offer a portrait of his adopted home of Harlem, where he first came to live as a graduate student in 1998 (he now teaches composition and theory at the Harlem School for the Arts). His new home made a deep impression on him. As he himself says:
“New York is stimulating, invigorating, inspiring. The themes of the people resonate loudly, boldly and with the pride of place and purpose. In Harlem I found more than the occasion for a new orchestral work. I found something beyond a home, my history, or my adopted heritage. I found my humanity.”
In the work, we encounter Harlem’s humanity face to face in the shape of the spoken words of its residents, played on tape as the orchestra adds Roumain’s musical comments in sounds drawn from sources at least as varied as these literal voices of the streets. The voices are part of the music itself, not a commentary on it. As Roumain explains:
“I knew [the work] had to contain an extra-musical statement. But I had no way of knowing, then, that it would end up a multitude of statements reaching far, far beyond my own personal one. Those statements come from the people of Harlem, and they are so much more than music.”
Eighty years ago, George Gershwin gave us his New York by bringing jazz and seriously “un-classical” music to the concert hall. Now, we have Daniel Bernard Roumain bringing similarly “alien” life to “classical” music. Not the same thing? The New York Times disagreed, giving the first performance of Harlem Essay one of its very rare uninhibited rave reviews, praising the work’s “sophistication, invention and wry wit.” In 1927, another work was described as “sophisticated, inventive and even droll” in the same august pages—the Rhapsody in Blue.
FELIX MENDELSSOHN-BARTHOLDY (1809-1847)
VIOLIN CONCERTO IN E MINOR, Op. 64,
III: Allegretto non troppo—Finale: Allegro molto vivace
Composed: 1844
Premiered: March 13, 1845 in Leipzig, Germany
Like Mozart’s, Felix Mendelssohn’s life was tragically short; he lived barely three years longer than Mozart, though he died in considerably more material comfort. Though written only three years before his death, the Violin Concerto has deep roots in his youth and is arguably his greatest work.
In 1825, the sixteen-year-old Mendelssohn met a fellow prodigy, the 15-year-old violinist Ferdinand David; the two became firm friends. When Mendelssohn was appointed conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1836, David was his obvious choice as concertmaster; Mendelssohn proposed celebrating their double appointment with a violin concerto. A letter from Mendelssohn to David in 1838 includes the soaring opening melody of the first movement (he said the melody “gave [him] no peace”), but various mishaps and commitments prevented the work being completed until 1844. David offered help and advice on the very difficult violin part throughout, and some passages are more David than Mendelssohn.
Throughout the work, the orchestration in particular is superbly designed to frame and showcase, rather than overwhelm, the soloist. For the finale, we might have expected a rondo, but in this work, arguably the first truly “Romantic” concerto, we find a concise but unusually-argued sonata form. “Unusually,” because the first subject does not really re-appear as we expect, because the second subject is constructed to include part of it. Before we have time to be outraged by this departure from the Beethoven model, both soloist and orchestra have disappeared in a cloud of Mendelssohn’s unique gossamer.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
SYMPHONY NO. 6, “Pastoral”
Composed: 1808
Premiered: Vienna, Austria, 1808
I:Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande (Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country)—Allegro ma non troppo
II: Szene am Bach (Scene by the brook): Andante molto
III: Lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute (Happy gathering of country folk): Allegro
IV:Gewitter. Sturm (Thunderstorm; Storm): Allegro
V: Hirtengesang. Frohe und dankbare Gefühle nach dem Sturm (Shepherd's song; cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm): Allegretto
First performed with no rehearsal well after midnight in a freezing hall in late December, it is perhaps no great surprise that this utter masterpiece, originally given under the title Recollections of Country Life, was (literally!) coldly received by its original audience. Barely an hour earlier, they had heard the first performance of the Fifth Symphony, so hypothermia may not have been the only kind of shock they experienced.
The Pastoral was actually composed simultaneously with the Fifth (it even overlaps with some of the composition of the Fourth), and, despite its pictorial pretensions (almost unique in Beethoven’s music, and perhaps inspired by Haydn’s experiments in pastoralism in
The Creation six years earlier), shares the Fifth’s obsession with closely-knit form. Like the Fifth, the Sixth has a scherzo linked to the finale by a minor-key linking passage, seamlessly welded at both ends; if Beethoven had given the title “Distant Storm” to the corresponding passage in the Fifth, nobody would have had difficulty believing him. Indeed, this is really the essence of Beethoven’s “Romanticism,” which is much misunderstood and wildly exaggerated: for Beethoven, Romanticism consisted simply of giving emotional or pictorial “names” to what he was doing anyway.
So, if we ignore the work’s program, what we find is a perfectly “normal,” if very large, Classical symphony. The first movement is a solid sonata structure, with the added interest of having its two themes treated as groups of small fragments after their first statement—the beginning of the road that led to Wagner’s leitmotive. The slow movement is, again, in a granitic Beethovenian sonata form; the famous appearance of the three birds (nightingale, quail and cuckoo, according to Beethoven, who seems not to have known that these three species never sing together) takes on an almost cartoon-like character in the context of such formal precision.
The scherzo repeats an experiment first tried in the entirely non-programmatic Hammerklavier sonata, dropping a bouncy 2/4 section between appearances of the scherzo and trio (and making exact deductions from the overall structure to make room for it). The “Storm” contains nothing unfamiliar to an audience acquainted with the scarier end of the Sturm und Drang school of composers of 1790s Vienna, while the Finale is cast in a sonata-rondo form that Mozart would have found entirely familiar.
Beethoven himself warned against taking the programmatic aspect of the Pastoral too seriously, saying that the symphony was “a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds.” It is also a matter of compositional solidity and technical virtuosity—and with those tools at his command, Beethoven can convince us of anything.
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