Monday, October 29, 2018

A Great Chord from Heitor Villa-Lobos

My newest listening challenge: to listen to the 17 string quartets by one of my favorite composers, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959). VL wrote his first string quartet in 1915, his last in 1957. The general consensus amongst music scholars appears to be they are groundbreaking works, though at times inconsistent or wandering. (I got this from Lionel Salter of Gramophone Magazine)  But they are always original and demonstrate a wide range of tones, melodies, textures and  musical ideas.
Here is a great chord that appears very early in his String Quartet no. 1.

The second measure is the chord. My friend and music theory expert, Dr. Reynold Simpson, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, says this of the chord:
"That's simply a G9 chord (the A in the second violin is a major 9th above the root in the cello.) The 9 is simply an extension of the stack of thirds that creates a 7 chord (1-3-5-7-9).
It may be simple, but it packs an emotional punch.

Take a listen The chord appears at the 1:07 mark.
 I will report back when I have made it though all 17 string quartets. 

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Monday, October 15, 2018

What do we want??? More Guitar Music-Segovia plays Kansas City in 1959. Alfredo Casella, and some Mahler trivia.


I'll start with my obsession for classical guitar music. OK...there you have it... I am obsessed. Not quite to the level of piano my enthusiasm, but oh so very close. I love the sound of classical guitars, and no one means more to this form of music than Andres Segovia. He almost single-handedly developed and championed music for this instrument in the twentieth century. An instrument that just about every composer had ignored or forsaken for much of history, Segovia mounted a campaign to prove that there was a market for this sound. He convinced composers to write new pieces that he toured the world performing. He legitimized the guitar as a solo instrument.
Andres Segovia performed in Kansas City, my birthplace, on February 10, 1959. I want to share the review of that performance from the Kansas City Times with you:

EXPLORE NEW PATHS IN FIELD OF MUSIC

Segovia plays his guitar to resounding Applause with the Philharmonic

THE ORCHESTRA SINGS OUT

Schubert and Tchaikovsky Pieces Are Enjoyed by Sellout Audience

By Clyde Neibarger
(The Star's Music Editor)

     Some effective crusading for musical causes was accomplished at the Philharmonic subscription concert at the Music Hall last night. Andres Segovia, master guitarist, gave a convincing demonstration of the guitar as a legitimate concert instrument. The sellout audience approved heartily.
     The orchestra, likewise in the role of demonstrator, helped Hans Schwieger, conductor, explore neglected paths in the literature, with a clean-cut performance of the little-heard Tchaikovsky Thrd Symphony, a worthy predecessor of the Russian composer's later and better known Fourth and Fifth and Sixth.
Soloist Steals Show

     Tossed in for good measure was a Franz Schubert gem, the convivial, song-like "Rosamunde" overture, which gave the orchestra opportunity to engross the listeners, from the very beginning of this eighth program in the subscription series. It was well paced, crisply articulated by the orchestra.
     The tall, courtly, balding, and gray Segovia definitely was a show stealer. A low bench, a chair, a footrest, and his prized Spanish guitar were his equipment.
     With a small orchestra of 34 as his capable collaborator, Segovia charmed and completely captivated his rapt listeners with his playing of the Guitar Concerto in D Major composed especially for him by the Italian, Mario Castelnuevo-Tedesco.

Orchestra Matches Mood

     For most in the audience, this was a unique experience. The concerto itself is a rather fragile, dainty work of art. Segovia played it that way. His interpretation was aristocratic. The tones were not big but they were beautiful, resonant, and carried far. Schwieger and the orchestra matched his moods marvelously
     The cadenza passages, all too brief, exploited the guitar's plaintive charm and the artist's magic in plucking six strings. 
     Big applause brought Segovia back for several acknowledgements before he graciously assented to what the audience wanted-more guitar music. So there were three encores for unaccompanied guitar. They were the familiar Gavotte by Bach, the Villa-Lobos "Study," and a Spanish folk song.

Opportunity for Strings

     There was a near ovation too, for Schwieger and the orchestra as a well-earned reward for for their performance of the 45 minute Symphony No. 3, the "Polish," by Tchaikovsky. It built up from an unassuming beginning to emotion packed episodes, in which the woodwinds shone and the strings finally had their chance to sing out. The music reflected a younger Tchaikovsky, though we has 35 when he wrote it, in 1875. True, his later symphonies overshadow it. Granted that, it is over-longish and occasionally tedious, it is a refreshing slant on the famed composer.

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Talk about a long concert.....when Mahler's Symphony No. 4 was given it's first performance in Amsterdam on October 23, 1904, it was played twice. Here is the explanation given by Alma Mahler;
"Mahler wrote me a detailed account. He had to go on to Amsterdam where he stayed with Mengelberg, and felt increasingly at home. He conducted the Second and the Fourth. It was the first performance of the fourth in Amsterdam and Mengelberg put it twice in the same program: Fourth Symphony. Intermission. Fourth Symphony. Mahler conducted for the first time, Mengelberg the second, with Mahler sitting comfortably in the stalls to hear his own work played to him. Mengelberg, he said when he came home, had grasped his meaning so perfectly that it was just as if he had been conducting himself."
 
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My friend Byl Strother suggested a new composer for me to explore...Alfredo Casella. First off...I have never actually met Byl. We are friends on Facebook through another cool dude named Patrick Neas, whom I have had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing for this online journal. Both men are classical music Ninjas. But I feel like I know Byl, and I welcome his thoughts about all kforms of music. Anyway, Byl shared recently that he likes the music of Alfredo Casella, an Italian composer with whom I was not familiar. So I instantly jumped into action and explored Casella's music. Wow. Amazing music. <y first dive was his Symphony No. 1. I heard Mahler, Strauss and Brahms...and maybe some Holst. Turns out that Casella was a contemporary of Mahler, and he championed Mahler's work in France where he lived and had studied with the likes of Maurice Ravel. He was also acquainted with Debussy and Stravinsky. I found a great article by David Gallagher that includes this great passage about Casella's connection to Gustav Mahler:

"The expense of performing Mahler’s huge work could only be covered by financial backing from two different musical societies; but they hated each other. It took Casella over a year to charm them into collaborating—and afterwards it was brickbats as usual: the concert’s main underwriter, the immensely rich president of the Société des Grandes Auditions Musicales, Countess Elisabeth Greffulhe (Marcel Proust’s model for his Duchesse de Guermantes), complained that the rival Société des Amis de la Musique had ‘behaved like crooks’. At the end of the symphony the Paris public cheered Mahler to the rafters; Debussy walked out halfway through. Mahler’s heart-on-sleeve musical aesthetic was anathema to many in the early twentieth-century Parisian musical establishment, who amused themselves by punning on the similarity of his surname to the French word for ‘misfortune’. As leader of the small group of diehards who championed Mahler’s music, Casella—tall, thin, long-nosed—was dubbed ‘l’oiseau de Malhe[u]r’, ‘the bird of ill-omen’.
Probably no composer ever affected Casella so profoundly as Mahler did for almost a decade at this time. ‘Discovering Mahler’s symphonies (‘the greatest work of musical genius since Wagner’s Parsifal’) was the crucial event of my artistic education,’ he said, recalling that ‘Mahler was sincerely moved when he discovered I knew them practically by heart’. Casella wrote a stream of enthusiastic articles, not least as the only French or Italian critic who travelled to Munich for the première, later in 1910, of Mahler’s Eighth (the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’)—the supreme triumph of Mahler’s life. His sudden death the following year was a professional as well as personal shock for Casella: Mahler was planning not only to conduct Casella’s rhapsody ItaliaOp. 11, and Suite in C majorOp. 13, but to engage the Italian as his assistant when he returned to the Vienna Opera. ‘I have a great liking for the young man,’ Mahler told another of his supporters in France, William Ritter, ‘and I have high hopes of him’. When French publishers rejected Italia and the Suite, Mahler convinced his own publisher Universal Edition to issue them, negotiating, Casella recalled, ‘a deal I could never have dreamed of’; he commissioned Casella to arrange his Seventh Symphony for piano duet; he presented ‘my great friend’, ‘pioneer’ Casella with signed scores and photographs. A giant photo of Mahler, ‘this man of extraordinary goodness, warmth and generosity, sincerity and altruism’, took pride of place on Casella’s wall for the rest of his life.
Casella’s own Symphony No. 2 in C minor is his most enduring—and deeply indebted—homage to Mahler. Though the Italian scholar Quirino Principe perhaps exaggerates in calling Casella’s first movement ‘almost pure Mahler’, its sources are palpable, above all a startlingly prominent direct quotation of a march theme from the finale of Mahler’s Second—here transposed and transformed into a lyrical melody. Casella revised this movement after the symphony’s première in 1910, but the manuscript of the first version is lost: was he making it more like Mahler or less? From the very opening notes, with their tolling bells, Casella’s symphony also saturates itself in the Mahlerian soundworld, its tensions between major and minor and its very timbres: Casella eulogised Mahler’s ‘miraculous ear, his incomparable gift for incessantly inventing new sonorities’, pinpointing instruments’ individual, contrasted qualities rather than blending them homogeneously. The slow third movement of Casella’s Second Symphony—the first part he completed (early in 1908)—is simply the central movement of his First Symphony, with a single bar added at its midpoint, and reorchestrated in a far more Mahler-like manner; it even keeps the original key of F sharp minor, a tritone away from the Second Symphony’s C. Curiously, the musical material sometimes seems ill at ease in its new clothes, the first version feeling a better fit—with the exception of the theme that Casella adopts to germinate the Second Symphony’s ‘Epilogue’. Casella’s finale, albeit less monumental than the epic apotheosis of Mahler’s Second, traces a similar trajectory from darkness to triumphant C major light, marching through frequent reminiscences of Mahler’s later symphonies, the ThirdSixth and Seventh.
Only in the second movement does Casella step out of Mahler’s ‘imperious shadow’—as he admitted—into those of Rimsky-Korsakov and Balakirev. Casella had met both composers on his first visit to Russia in 1907: Rimsky gave him valuable advice in orchestration, while Casella’s orchestral version of Balakirev’s virtuoso piano piece Islamey attracted the admiration of its composer—among others: ‘a blond young man wearing enormous glasses approached me,’ Casella recollected, ‘saying timidly that he would love to study the score’. It was Igor Stravinsky: a year older than Casella, but then still unknown. The second movement of Casella’s Second is prophetic too, its driving percussive rhythms sometimes pre-echoing later Russian composers like Mossolov (Iron Foundry), Prokofiev or Shostakovich (another composer who learnt much from Mahler, and who is often brought to mind by Casella’s penchant for the xylophone); or indeed later Casella, of the 1920s and 1930s.
Another Mahlerian concordance is that Casella apparently conceived his Second in dramatic terms, but was ambivalent about publicising the fact. Casella wrote at the top of his first movement manuscript ‘Prologue to a tragedy’, and later released the piece alone under that title, mirroring Mahler’s reworking of his tone poem Todtenfeier (‘Funeral Ceremony’) as the first movement of his own Second Symphony; at the end of the ‘Epilogue’ Casella scribbled ‘Finis Comoedia’. If this world is a comedy to those that think and a tragedy to those that feel, Casella and Mahler are poles apart: Casella’s music conveys an objective quality, as if observing the drama dispassionately from outside; Mahler’s is quintessentially self-confessional, a living experience of emotional extremes—like two other darkness-to-light symphonies with (in their case quiet) C major endings: Asrael, another C minor Second, in which Josef Suk (Bohemian-born, as was Mahler) confronts the devastating deaths of first his teacher Dvořák and then his wife, Dvořák’s daughter Otilie; and the Third Symphony of Arnold Bax (a British composer also greatly influenced by the Russians), a final laying-to-rest of his personal inner demons." 
It really is a small world. But we need to open our brains and hearts to explore it. So I've listened to all three of Casella's symphnies, some of his piano music and this...my favorite work so far...his Harp Sonata (1943).