GOOD (STRING) VIBRATIONS
Our final recorded concert of the 2020-2021 season transcends a year of challenges to arrive in artistic triumph. The Chamber Orchestra completes its tour of Mozart’s three “Salzburg Symphonies” and turns to the modern but soulful music of Goossens and Jacob. Piano sensation Zahari Metchkov, celebrated professor at Colorado State University-Pueblo, lends his unique depth and gravitas to Gordon Jacob’s rarely heard but always surprising Piano Concerto No. 1. And the real heroes of this season—the strings of the Chamber Orchestra—end the season in the pure joy of Suk’s Serenade for Strings. We cannot thank them enough for bringing our community together in the essential experience of great music.
Our final recorded concert of the 2020-2021 season transcends a year of challenges to arrive in artistic triumph. The Chamber Orchestra completes its tour of Mozart’s three “Salzburg Symphonies” and turns to the modern but soulful music of Goossens and Jacob. Piano sensation Zahari Metchkov, celebrated professor at Colorado State University-Pueblo, lends his unique depth and gravitas to Gordon Jacob’s rarely heard but always surprising Piano Concerto No. 1. And the real heroes of this season—the strings of the Chamber Orchestra—end the season in the pure joy of Suk’s Serenade for Strings. We cannot thank them enough for bringing our community together in the essential experience of great music.
Available digitally to subscribers and single ticket buyers May 2
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Divertimento in F Major, K. 138
Eugene Goossens Concertino, op. 47
Gordon Jacob Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Strings
Dr. Zahari Metchkov, piano
Josef Suk Serenade for Strings
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Divertimento in F Major, K. 138
Eugene Goossens Concertino, op. 47
Gordon Jacob Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Strings
Dr. Zahari Metchkov, piano
Josef Suk Serenade for Strings
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How will the video concerts work?
Our musicians will be recording on each originally-announced concert date in a private, physically-distanced session at First Christian Church. The final recording will include information about the repertoire, reflections on what it is like to perform in this time of Covid-19, and more! The concert videos will be made available to our subscribers via private link and you will be able to watch them at your convenience in the comfort of your own home. We hope you’ll sit and relax, grab something to eat and drink, and enjoy these performances, made just for you! In addition to the online video, each concert will be rebroadcast on KCME 88.7 FM. Tune in at 3 p.m. on the Sunday following each video release.
PROGRAM NOTES
by Mark Arnest
Overview: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria; died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1772
The 16-year-old Mozart composed three Divertimenti shortly after being appointed Konzertmeister to the Salzburg court. This early professional triumph gave him high hopes that would be thoroughly dashed by the time of his angry resignation nine years later. Like its companion pieces K. 136 – heard this season on Concert 4 – and 137, it is sometimes described as a quartet rather than as a divertimento.
Mozart’s music is so polished at such a young age that it’s difficult for us today to comprehend how rapidly musical style was then evolving. The prevailing style of Mozart’s youth was no longer Baroque and not yet the mature Classical style that Mozart and Josef Haydn perfected (and which Beethoven would extend and ultimately transcend). This Gallant style favored clarity and charm over either intellect or emotion, unfolding a profusion of short motifs over a strongly directional harmonic structure. In the 1770s, the divertimento would evolve into the string quartet, with its greater independence of the musical lines; but here, while the second violins get a great deal of attention, and even the violas get their moments in the sun, the cellos and basses mostly provide harmonic and rhythmic support.
The two-part theme – loud, then soft – with which the first movement begins would become a hallmark of the Classical style. It’s in sonata form, albeit an exceptionally compact one, with the exposition lasting about a minute and the development section about 30 seconds. Several hints of the minor mode don’t quite rise to the level of teenage angst, but do add a bit of welcome shade to the generally sunny mood.
The lovely second movement is memorable for its meltingly tender second theme, a beautiful phrase for a composer of any age. The tiny closing movement is a rondo, with a rollicking theme that recurs between several short episodes, including an especially delightful one in which the young Mozart shows off his knowledge of counterpoint.
Overview: Eugene Goossens
Born May 26, 1893, London, England; died June 13, 1962, Middlesex, England
Work Composed: 1928
The son of a musical family, Goossens began his career as a violinist, but switched to conducting in his 20s after successfully filling in for an ailing Thomas Beecham on short notice. In 1921 he formed his own orchestra for the purpose of performing modern music, and achieved a measure of fame for conducting the British concert premiere of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, a performance of which the composer said “his music had never sounded so well before.”
Goossens then spent nearly a quarter century in the United States, most of it as conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. During this period his career as a composer blossomed.
After the war Goossens settled in Australia as conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and director of the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music. He was a tireless orchestra builder and promoter, and the high state of concert music in Australia today owes much to Goossen’s efforts.
But Goossens’s Australian career ended in scandal in 1955 when, on returning to Australia from a trip to London, he was arrested for trying to bring in erotic photographs and other suspect materials. He was forced to resign his positions, and his international career was over. Visiting him a few years later, his former student, the conductor Richard Bonynge, described Goossens as “absolutely destroyed.”
Today Goossens’s music is rarely performed, and he’s best known not for his own compositions but for a piece that only exists through Goossens’s generosity. To raise the public morale during World War II, for the Cincinnati Orchestra’s 1942-43 season, Goossens commissioned nine fanfares by American composers. Eight are forgotten today, but the ninth was Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.
Befitting the work of a violinist who was also an experienced conductor, the Concertino is notable for the richness of its scoring. The work is in a large ternary form, with two fast sections flanking a dreamy slow section. The tone is conversational, and the angular opening theme, through either its rhythm or its melodic shape, gives rise to nearly all the piece’s thematic material. The final section combines and develops elements from the first two sections.
Overview: Josef Suk
Born January 4, 1874, Křečovice, Bohemia; died May 29, 1935, Benešov, Czechoslovakia
Work Composed: 1892
Josef Suk had an impeccable musical pedigree. His combination of talent plus the education he received from his father, a choir director, was sufficient to get him admitted to the Prague Conservatory at the age of 11, where he studied with the leading figures in Czech music. Although he had completed his studies by the age of 17, he stayed an extra year to study with Antonín Dvorák. He became Dvorák’s most illustrious student, and a few years later, married his daughter Otilie.
Suk’s early works – such as the Serenade for Strings, composed when he was only 18 – are very much in the style of his great father-in-law. Suk found his own voice only in the wake of tragedy: the deaths of Suk’s wife and of his father-in-law just 14 months apart in 1904 and 1905. This prompted a dramatic change in his style. His compositions became more chromatic and more introspective, with more complex harmonies. His later works – some of which are enormous – have an allegorical, and even philosophical, dimension. There are not a large number of works, however, partly because Suk was also a fine violinist who, as second violinist of the Bohemian Quartet, averaged nearly 100 concerts a year between 1891 and 1933. (His son, also named Josef, had a major international career as a violinist.)
The Serenade for Strings was composed the summer after Suk completed his conservatory studies. Allegedly Dvorák urged his student to compose something cheerful, and the result became the first of Suk’s pieces to gain international acclaim. This was partly due to Brahms’s support; but Brahms merely noticed the work’s exceptional quality before others. Suk’s marvelous string writing sets off his beautiful melodies, and he shows great compositional skill in such passages as the first movement’s gentle transition from the second theme back to the first.
The Serenade revolves around the key of E-flat, but the key relationships are rarely the traditional goal-oriented 4ths beloved by Mozart and Beethoven. Instead, they are 3rds, which give the lyrical themes even more radiance. The first movement’s sunny opening theme sets the tone for the work. The second theme’s yearning quality is reminiscent of a good-quality Tin Pan Alley song. Following the first theme’s return, there’s a brief reminiscence of the second theme before the end.
The second movement features a playful, almost teasing, main theme. The middle section’s gentle theme almost soars but always pulls back before it becomes sentimental. A highlight is the outsized, dramatic transition back to the first theme.
The slow third movement is the work’s heart, in which Suk demonstrates that he has some of Dvorák’s talent for writing pithy, memorable, melodic hooks. After the prayerful first theme in G, the second theme almost erupts into E major. In contrast to the first theme’s stability, this theme changes key almost constantly, as if it’s searching for something – a something that turns out to be the return of the first theme.
The finale begins with a jolly, bustling theme. Its cheerfulness could hardly contrast more with the second theme, a mystical chorale. This chorale is marginally in B-flat, and while this is a “normal” key for a second theme, the chorale itself has little to do with B-flat aside from beginning and ending there; in between, it’s a labyrinth of deliciously unexpected chords. The other movements feature elaborate transitions from the second theme back to the first theme, but this one puts them to shame; it is, by a wide margin, the movement’s longest section. When he finally returns to E-flat, Suk compresses a reminiscence of the Serenade’s beginning, a reference to the chorale, and an appropriately applause-raising coda into the final 80 seconds.
Overview: Gordon Jacob
Born July 5, 1895, London, England; died June 8, 1984, Saffron Walden, Essex, England
Work Composed: 1927
Gordon Jacob was one of the most tirelessly prolific composers you have probably never heard of. In a career spanning over a half-century, he composed over 200 original works and arranged some 500 more.
Jacob was composing from an early age, but like many Europeans of his generation, was interrupted by the 1914 outbreak of World War 1. He was serving in the artillery when he was captured by the Germans in 1917. As a POW, he organized a small prisoners’ orchestra. The ad hoc nature of the available instruments required Jacob to become very sensitive to each instrument’s tone color and playing techniques; this knowledge of individual instrumental capabilities would become a hallmark of his style, and a major reason he was in such demand as an arranger.
Following the war, Jacob studied at London’s Royal College of Music with many of the most illustrious musicians in Great Britain, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry, and Adrian Boult. Upon his graduation in 1924, the school hired him to teach. He remained on the faculty until his retirement in 1966, but continued to compose up to his death.
Although it’s a fine work, the Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Strings isn’t particularly representative of Jacob’s compositions. It’s comparatively early, before his British Neoclassical style had quite matured; and, although Jacob wrote well for all instruments, he was especially sympathetic towards woodwinds. It’s no coincidence that its style has resemblances to Goossens’s Concertino, composed the following year: Both composers – along with many others at the time – were in the process of assimilating Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassicism.
The concise first movement, in a loose ABA form, begins with a brief piano flourish that leads to the energetic first theme. (The flourish is also a major thematic element.) The middle section combines a folk-song-like shape with more modern harmonies. The concerto’s frequent quartal harmonies – chords arranged in fourths instead of the traditional thirds – would remain a hallmark of Jacob’s work.
The slow second movement begins with a brief repeated motif in the violins under which a faintly eerie theme unfolds. The strangely sweet mood is banished by the piano’s emphatic, almost anguished entrance, but soon the sweetness returns. The remainder of the movement has a pleasantly dreamy, almost improvisational quality.
The finale’s first theme is a dark, aggressive waltz, while the second theme, introduced by the piano, soars passionately. The movement’s lighter-textured middle section is dominated by a nimble theme that gives the piano plenty of opportunity to shine. The first two themes reappear in the highly compressed closing section.
Although the concerto is not always entirely coherent, it is unfailingly inventive, and there’s never any doubt that Jacob possessed a powerful musical mind. Hopefully more of his music will find its way into concert halls.
PROGRAM NOTES
by Mark Arnest
by Mark Arnest
Overview: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria; died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1772
The 16-year-old Mozart composed three Divertimenti shortly after being appointed Konzertmeister to the Salzburg court. This early professional triumph gave him high hopes that would be thoroughly dashed by the time of his angry resignation nine years later. Like its companion pieces K. 136 – heard this season on Concert 4 – and 137, it is sometimes described as a quartet rather than as a divertimento.
Mozart’s music is so polished at such a young age that it’s difficult for us today to comprehend how rapidly musical style was then evolving. The prevailing style of Mozart’s youth was no longer Baroque and not yet the mature Classical style that Mozart and Josef Haydn perfected (and which Beethoven would extend and ultimately transcend). This Gallant style favored clarity and charm over either intellect or emotion, unfolding a profusion of short motifs over a strongly directional harmonic structure. In the 1770s, the divertimento would evolve into the string quartet, with its greater independence of the musical lines; but here, while the second violins get a great deal of attention, and even the violas get their moments in the sun, the cellos and basses mostly provide harmonic and rhythmic support.
The two-part theme – loud, then soft – with which the first movement begins would become a hallmark of the Classical style. It’s in sonata form, albeit an exceptionally compact one, with the exposition lasting about a minute and the development section about 30 seconds. Several hints of the minor mode don’t quite rise to the level of teenage angst, but do add a bit of welcome shade to the generally sunny mood.
The lovely second movement is memorable for its meltingly tender second theme, a beautiful phrase for a composer of any age. The tiny closing movement is a rondo, with a rollicking theme that recurs between several short episodes, including an especially delightful one in which the young Mozart shows off his knowledge of counterpoint.
Overview: Eugene Goossens
Born May 26, 1893, London, England; died June 13, 1962, Middlesex, England
Work Composed: 1928
The son of a musical family, Goossens began his career as a violinist, but switched to conducting in his 20s after successfully filling in for an ailing Thomas Beecham on short notice. In 1921 he formed his own orchestra for the purpose of performing modern music, and achieved a measure of fame for conducting the British concert premiere of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, a performance of which the composer said “his music had never sounded so well before.”
Goossens then spent nearly a quarter century in the United States, most of it as conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. During this period his career as a composer blossomed.
After the war Goossens settled in Australia as conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and director of the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music. He was a tireless orchestra builder and promoter, and the high state of concert music in Australia today owes much to Goossen’s efforts.
But Goossens’s Australian career ended in scandal in 1955 when, on returning to Australia from a trip to London, he was arrested for trying to bring in erotic photographs and other suspect materials. He was forced to resign his positions, and his international career was over. Visiting him a few years later, his former student, the conductor Richard Bonynge, described Goossens as “absolutely destroyed.”
Today Goossens’s music is rarely performed, and he’s best known not for his own compositions but for a piece that only exists through Goossens’s generosity. To raise the public morale during World War II, for the Cincinnati Orchestra’s 1942-43 season, Goossens commissioned nine fanfares by American composers. Eight are forgotten today, but the ninth was Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.
Befitting the work of a violinist who was also an experienced conductor, the Concertino is notable for the richness of its scoring. The work is in a large ternary form, with two fast sections flanking a dreamy slow section. The tone is conversational, and the angular opening theme, through either its rhythm or its melodic shape, gives rise to nearly all the piece’s thematic material. The final section combines and develops elements from the first two sections.
Overview: Josef Suk
Born January 4, 1874, Křečovice, Bohemia; died May 29, 1935, Benešov, Czechoslovakia
Work Composed: 1892
Josef Suk had an impeccable musical pedigree. His combination of talent plus the education he received from his father, a choir director, was sufficient to get him admitted to the Prague Conservatory at the age of 11, where he studied with the leading figures in Czech music. Although he had completed his studies by the age of 17, he stayed an extra year to study with Antonín Dvorák. He became Dvorák’s most illustrious student, and a few years later, married his daughter Otilie.
Suk’s early works – such as the Serenade for Strings, composed when he was only 18 – are very much in the style of his great father-in-law. Suk found his own voice only in the wake of tragedy: the deaths of Suk’s wife and of his father-in-law just 14 months apart in 1904 and 1905. This prompted a dramatic change in his style. His compositions became more chromatic and more introspective, with more complex harmonies. His later works – some of which are enormous – have an allegorical, and even philosophical, dimension. There are not a large number of works, however, partly because Suk was also a fine violinist who, as second violinist of the Bohemian Quartet, averaged nearly 100 concerts a year between 1891 and 1933. (His son, also named Josef, had a major international career as a violinist.)
The Serenade for Strings was composed the summer after Suk completed his conservatory studies. Allegedly Dvorák urged his student to compose something cheerful, and the result became the first of Suk’s pieces to gain international acclaim. This was partly due to Brahms’s support; but Brahms merely noticed the work’s exceptional quality before others. Suk’s marvelous string writing sets off his beautiful melodies, and he shows great compositional skill in such passages as the first movement’s gentle transition from the second theme back to the first.
The Serenade revolves around the key of E-flat, but the key relationships are rarely the traditional goal-oriented 4ths beloved by Mozart and Beethoven. Instead, they are 3rds, which give the lyrical themes even more radiance. The first movement’s sunny opening theme sets the tone for the work. The second theme’s yearning quality is reminiscent of a good-quality Tin Pan Alley song. Following the first theme’s return, there’s a brief reminiscence of the second theme before the end.
The second movement features a playful, almost teasing, main theme. The middle section’s gentle theme almost soars but always pulls back before it becomes sentimental. A highlight is the outsized, dramatic transition back to the first theme.
The slow third movement is the work’s heart, in which Suk demonstrates that he has some of Dvorák’s talent for writing pithy, memorable, melodic hooks. After the prayerful first theme in G, the second theme almost erupts into E major. In contrast to the first theme’s stability, this theme changes key almost constantly, as if it’s searching for something – a something that turns out to be the return of the first theme.
The finale begins with a jolly, bustling theme. Its cheerfulness could hardly contrast more with the second theme, a mystical chorale. This chorale is marginally in B-flat, and while this is a “normal” key for a second theme, the chorale itself has little to do with B-flat aside from beginning and ending there; in between, it’s a labyrinth of deliciously unexpected chords. The other movements feature elaborate transitions from the second theme back to the first theme, but this one puts them to shame; it is, by a wide margin, the movement’s longest section. When he finally returns to E-flat, Suk compresses a reminiscence of the Serenade’s beginning, a reference to the chorale, and an appropriately applause-raising coda into the final 80 seconds.
Overview: Gordon Jacob
Born July 5, 1895, London, England; died June 8, 1984, Saffron Walden, Essex, England
Work Composed: 1927
Gordon Jacob was one of the most tirelessly prolific composers you have probably never heard of. In a career spanning over a half-century, he composed over 200 original works and arranged some 500 more.
Jacob was composing from an early age, but like many Europeans of his generation, was interrupted by the 1914 outbreak of World War 1. He was serving in the artillery when he was captured by the Germans in 1917. As a POW, he organized a small prisoners’ orchestra. The ad hoc nature of the available instruments required Jacob to become very sensitive to each instrument’s tone color and playing techniques; this knowledge of individual instrumental capabilities would become a hallmark of his style, and a major reason he was in such demand as an arranger.
Following the war, Jacob studied at London’s Royal College of Music with many of the most illustrious musicians in Great Britain, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry, and Adrian Boult. Upon his graduation in 1924, the school hired him to teach. He remained on the faculty until his retirement in 1966, but continued to compose up to his death.
Although it’s a fine work, the Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Strings isn’t particularly representative of Jacob’s compositions. It’s comparatively early, before his British Neoclassical style had quite matured; and, although Jacob wrote well for all instruments, he was especially sympathetic towards woodwinds. It’s no coincidence that its style has resemblances to Goossens’s Concertino, composed the following year: Both composers – along with many others at the time – were in the process of assimilating Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassicism.
The concise first movement, in a loose ABA form, begins with a brief piano flourish that leads to the energetic first theme. (The flourish is also a major thematic element.) The middle section combines a folk-song-like shape with more modern harmonies. The concerto’s frequent quartal harmonies – chords arranged in fourths instead of the traditional thirds – would remain a hallmark of Jacob’s work.
The slow second movement begins with a brief repeated motif in the violins under which a faintly eerie theme unfolds. The strangely sweet mood is banished by the piano’s emphatic, almost anguished entrance, but soon the sweetness returns. The remainder of the movement has a pleasantly dreamy, almost improvisational quality.
The finale’s first theme is a dark, aggressive waltz, while the second theme, introduced by the piano, soars passionately. The movement’s lighter-textured middle section is dominated by a nimble theme that gives the piano plenty of opportunity to shine. The first two themes reappear in the highly compressed closing section.
Although the concerto is not always entirely coherent, it is unfailingly inventive, and there’s never any doubt that Jacob possessed a powerful musical mind. Hopefully more of his music will find its way into concert halls.
PROGRAM NOTES
by Mark Arnest
