The Haydn Piano Trio in C major is one of three dedicated to Therese Jansen, wife of his engraver Bartolozzi, and an apparently virtuosic former private student of Clementi. In the days before sustaining a public reputation, and before women were allowed to appear on stage, her musicianship and virtuosity inspired compositions from many composers. The trios of this set date from the time of Haydn’s years in England (1791-95) following Mozart’s death. We may recall that the latter two of three piano quartets commissioned from Mozart were cancelled by the publisher after the first quartet was delivered because the piano writing was deemed too virtuosic for home use in 1786 Vienna. In writing his second piano quartet for different publisher Mozart proved undeterred by the perceived local standard. For Haydn, the encounter with private greatness and public admiration beyond his national boundaries and expectations led to the creation of many of his greatest works including a few more sonatas for Jansen. This trio ends with one of Haydn’s greatest displays of humor, both in catchy tune and off beat accent.

Serenade for String Trio by Dohnányi has the distinction of being one of the most performed works for that combination after those of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Like the divertimenti and serenades of Mozart and Beethoven, it breaks the four-movement classical mold, employing instead five movements, the outer two using music for a march just like Beethoven’s Serenade in D major for String Trio. Where divertimenti and serenades of the past were often heard as background music intended to stimulate conversation, the Dohnányi was clearly written to be a show-stopper for three virtuosos who could not be denied. It is also the work of one who was to become an émigré from Hungary to Florida to teach at Florida State University following the war. Dohnányi is revered among musicians for his public stand against Nazi persecution of the Jews. His work is thereby the first of those by émigré composers we will be hearing this season as the focus of our Winter Festival.

Ernest Bloch’s Two Pieces for String Quartet were dedicated to the famed Griller String Quartet, with whom William Primrose recorded all the Mozart Viola Quintets as second violist. Since Bloch had already written two major string quartets and was soon after to write a third, it is possible these pieces were intended as encores adding spice and drive to their programs of classics, and as introductions to his longer quartets for presenters considering re-engagements.

As a young violin student growing up in the South Bronx in the 1950’s my first encounter with chamber music was seeing and hearing a telecast of the Schumann Piano Quintet played by the Budapest String Quartet with a pianist I cannot now recall. (It could have been Rudolf Serkin!) The most lasting visual image was of chiseled face of Boris Kroyt, the violist, turned outward over his viola toward the audience. The most lasting musical image was of the depth of feeling contained in the slow movement.

Four images of the Budapest String Quartet performing in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress. The lower left photo shows the image of Boris Kroyt similar to the 1950’s telecast mentioned above.

After many years of studying, performing, teaching and hearing the piece, I’m not surprised how popular it remains with audiences. It is still regarded as the first work successfully combining piano and string quartet by a major composer. It also marks the collapse of the social divide between the private and public concerts that was to allow chamber music be heard beyond the inner circle of performers and friends by a wider audience.

Schumann’s ideal for how to write chamber music was summed up in a review where he wrote: “no instrument dominates, and each has something to say.” However, he was to recognize in works by Mozart and Mendelssohn the need to strike a new balance between musical substance and virtuosic display; between the needs of adept amateurs playing at home and recitalists such as his wife, Clara and Felix Mendelssohn; and between orchestral textures with unison doublings and independence of parts in response to the growing demand for public performances in larger spaces. These factors helped make this quintet the perfect crossover.

This is the piece that made chamber music popular!

Enjoy!!

On Youtube you may find many different interpretations of the Lied, and here are two: First by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Gerald Moore:

And a more recent live recording by tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Juilius Drake:

You may find the original poem and English translation on the Lied and Art Song Texts website here.

Enjoy!

It is Mahler’s early Piano Quartet, featured in BCMS’s March 28 concert at Sanders Theatre.

Further reading: a post by Richard Brody on The New Yorker blog.

Classical era fugues

Differences in approach

Piano four hands arrangements

Great Fugue example

Piano four hands arrangements

Duo partners

Before 1717 all of Bach’s compositions involving the “flute” were actually composed for the recorder. It was only after he moved from Weimar to Cöthen that Bach began writing specifically for the transverse flute, or traverso. The very first piece he composed for the new-fangled traverso was the Partita.

The Partita presents a quandary to the flutist. In the first movement, the Allemande, Bach writes continuous sixteenth notes, as if writing for a string instrument. He provides no dynamic indications, no phrasing indications, no ornamentation, no editing, – just sixteenth notes and bar lines. Two hundred eighty eight sixteenth notes pass before the first pause for breath is provided.  How can we possibly perform the thing?

We must find enough freedom in our phrasing to allow time for breath. As in speech, phrases may be long or short, urgent or leisurely; some passages have a headlong trajectory, some tread water. As we play, we listen for the architecture and logic of Bach’s notes; having been chosen by him, there is genius in their arrangement. Phrases, sequences, and cadences become apparent, and in the welter of notes we seek places where we can catch breath with the least disruption to the music’s progress.

The three remaining movements of the Partita present no such quandaries. But the fact that Bach never again wrote a Partita for solo flute – let alone an Allemande – suggests that he realized that, in performance, it presents a real challenge.

Fenwick Smith

A little background here — what we are playing is a transcription  by the violinist, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, who made his version in memory of Glenn Gould (whose early and late recordings of the piece began and sealed his fame). So it’s a string trio which refers to a piano version of a piece for harpsichord. Layers within layers.

For us the question that comes up is how to balance our relationships with each of these ancestors. Bach made different versions of many of his own works so that, for example, there’s a fine concerto that one can listen to in his versions for either violin or harpsichord and be convinced that each is the original. There’s a level of imagination at work which goes beyond merely transcribing the notes from one instrument to the other — each version is fully idiomatic for the instrument. This was also Sitkovetsky’s  task, and it’s a mark of his success that his trio version has had a distinguished life of performance and recording since it was published in 1985, just after Gould’s early death.

So, underlying our discussions are the questions of how much to think about Sitkovetsky thinking about Gould. For some music lovers Gould’s two versions are like two books of a bible — the older, more bombastic and self-consciously idiosyncratic Gould seeming to chastise and correct his more naive younger self. In choosing particular string textures, is Sitkovetsky hearing the choices Gould made on the piano, and should we be taking Gould’s often extreme tempi into account when we choose our own?

Over the weeks it has become clear that our (perhaps unspoken) instinct is to find our way directly back to Bach’s own text, using Sitkovetsky’s very skillful transcription less as an interpretation and more as our vehicle, making our own decisions about articulations (mostly this means when to put in and take out slurs) based on our knowledge of the original harpsichord writing and our judgment about how best to realize it on string instruments. And if we see some subtle rewriting which we think sounds more elegant and more faithful we feel free to do so.

Lucy, Natasha and I have enjoyed playing string trios several times since Natasha and I moved to Boston in 2005, so we began the Bach with a sense of familiarity with each other as a trio. And yet, and this is from my viola perspective, it was immediately clear to me that it felt different from other string trios. What strikes me is that the viola part is only sometimes a viola part — it’s not conceived, like most viola parts, to provide a different, perhaps warmer contralto voice than the violin. Instead, it very often has to be heard as an equal and very similar voice to the violin as the two instruments go through Bach’s sequence of canons at every interval. So I find myself playing many passages on my top string in much higher positions than Lucy needs to be for the same notes. And so my challenge is to try to resemble the sound of a violinist easily running around in first and third positions on the E string, while I’m playing in 5th and higher positions on my larger instrument — are you feeling sorry for me? I was at first (feeling sorry for myself). For a few days I tried a fine 5-string viola and there was no doubt that the higher passages fell much more easily into the hand. But the instrument I borrowed hadn’t been conceived for classical use, and I missed the depth and body of my own instrument in the lower passages. And it was surprisingly confusing having to think about where my D string was. So I returned happily to my own viola and I’ve enjoyed getting a little fitter as I train in the higher altitudes.

One more note about our process — since so many of the variations are strict canons between the top two voices above wonderful running cello parts, Lucy and I have found a technique to make sure we are playing the voices as similarly as possible. We simply get Natasha to stop what she’s doing and listen to the two of us playing our parts simultaneously instead of at the interval of imitation Bach has written. This enables us to compare bowings, phrase shapes and articulations instantly, with Natasha’s ears guiding us from the middle. Since Bach goes through all the intervals of canon possible, this leads to some weird sounds as we play, seriously and musically, whole beautiful variations in parallel major seconds or 7ths. We can only hope nobody is eavesdropping on our rehearsals!

Roger Tapping