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2018-19 CONCERT SEASON
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TANGENTS
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2018 at 7:00pm BROADMOOR COMMUNITY CHURCH 315 Lake Ave, Colorado Springs, CO 80906 SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2018 at 2:30pm FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH 16 E Platte Ave, Colorado Springs, CO 80903 Pre-concert talk begins 45 minutes prior to the performance with Michael Grace, Colorado College Susan Grace piano Sponsored by Kathy Finney Jacob Klock violin Sponsored by Dee Thrash Gerald Miller cello George Walker Tangents for Chamber Orchestra Ethel Smyth Serenade in D Major Beethoven Triple Concerto in C Major for Piano, Violin & Cello Thanks to a special grant from:
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Program Notes by Mark Arnest
Concert overview:
George Walker’s Tangents is aptly named: It’s full of surprising shifts of pace and mood. But the term also applies to the other works on this program. Beethoven’s Triple Concerto is a tangential piece in the composer’s output – more respected than beloved, never out of the repertoire but never a bedrock of the repertoire like the composer’s other concertos. And with Ethel Smyth, we encounter a composer whose entire career was tangential. Although supremely skilled, she was never fully accepted by the British musical establishment, and remained forever an outsider, not a composer but a female composer.
Overview: George Theophilus Walker
Born June 27, 1922,Washington, D.C.; died August 23, 2018, Montclair, New Jersey
Work Composed: 1999, rev. 2002
Why It Matters: A modest work by an important American composer
The life of composer/pianist George Walker was a string of firsts, including first black graduate of Philadelphia’s fabled Curtis Institute for Music, first black instrumentalist to perform in New York’s Town Hall, first black instrumentalist to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra – and finally, first living black composer to win a Pulitzer Prize, though he was preceded by a posthumous award to Scott Joplin.
Walker wrote some brief program notes for Tangents:
Tangents was commissioned by the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus, Ohio to celebrate the New Millennium with a four-minute fanfare tribute. The work that resulted is far more complicated and slightly longer than the original proposal. Its premiere was given in Columbus, Ohio, on January 9, 2000.
The beginning of the work is appropriately declamatory. The second theme is derived from a pop tune easily identifiable in its proper context. A brief closing idea completes the exposition of a compressed sonata form. After a section of new material is presented, the first theme reappears. A second tune, extracted from the world of jazz, begins with the cellos and ends in the woodwinds. Tangents concludes with a reiteration of the second theme from the exposition.
At some point early in its composition, Walker called the piece Juxtaposition, and the piece explores these twin concepts through strong contrasts and a wide diversity of styles, especially with regard to harmony. The opening theme is strongly dissonant; the transition to the second theme is octatonic (a symmetrical scale beloved of jazz musicians and French composer Olivier Messiaen); and the second theme itself is harmonically almost static. There are hints of Copland and Stravinsky, as there are in the music of nearly every American composer of Walker’s era. The end result is a piece of nervously shifting moods, even though it is predominantly slow-to-moderate in tempo.
And the “easily identifiable” pop tune? Nobody is sure what it is, although one of the candidates is “April in Paris.”
Overview: Dame Ethel SmythBorn April 23, 1858, Sidcup, United Kingdom; died May 8, 1944, Woking, United Kingdom
Work Composed: 1889
Why It Matters: A major early work from a composer well worth knowing.
Numerous neglected composers have been resurrected in recent years. Many are worthwhile, but few are as fascinating as Ethel Smyth, a larger-than-life figure whose friendships ranged from Johannes Brahms to Virginia Woolf, who was jailed for her activities as a suffragette, and who was – until 2016 – the only woman to have had an opera performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Smyth was well trained in Germany, though she had to fight her father to get there. The critic and musicologist Ernest Newman left a marvelous sketch of Smyth:
She never flinched from combat, never minced her words. Her immense physical vitality and the exuberance of her temperament must in her younger years have made her company sometimes trying even for the people who loved her most. She had been inured from childhood to strenuous outdoor sports. She was used to breaking in fractious horses and subduing big dogs. (For the smaller specimens of the dog tribe she never had much liking.) She became a hardy rider to hounds, a mountaineer with nerves of steel, and quite late in life an ardent golfer. Every company she came into in her young days she went through like a hurricane.
As for her music, Newman wrote that “Her quality as a composer was high, certainly the highest ever achieved by a woman.” (He wrote this in 1946.) But in Great Britain, her sex worked against her, and when her opera Der Wald was performed at the Met in 1903, she had to endure such reviews as this from The Telegraph: “This little woman writes music with a masculine hand and has a sound and logical brain, such as is supposed to be the especial gift of the rougher sex. There is not a weak or effeminate note in Der Wald, nor an unstable sentiment.” (Imagine praising a work by a woman for not being “effeminate”!) She had more success in Germany, where she had made numerous connections during her student years; but the 1914 outbreak of World War I largely put an end to her career there.
In addition to her compositions – which include six operas and a Mass in D that inspired George Bernard Shaw to write her that “it was your music that cured me forever of the old delusion that women could not do man’s work in art and in all other things” – she wrote copiously on a variety of subjects, revealing a curious, immensely energetic, and unflinchingly honest personality.
The Serenade will remind you of Brahms, but that’s more of a compliment than a criticism: Of all the great composers, Brahms – with his supple phrase structures, his mastery of harmony and counterpoint, and his rhythmic quirkiness – is one of the most difficult to imitate. Smyth acquired her deep knowledge of Brahms’s style not from Brahms himself, but from her teacher Heinrich von Herzogenberg, Brahms’s close friend.
The Serenade is symphonic in scope and style. It’s missing only a proper slow movement to be a symphony; perhaps Smyth’s energy at this time in her life was simply too torrential to allow for one.
The opening movement is in sonata form, with three main themes that are developed and recapitulated. The opening theme is yearning yet energetic; the flute introduces the second theme; and the third theme, in a wonderfully Brahmsy touch, doesn’t fulfill the traditional closing theme function of grounding the musical tension, but instead pushes us forward. The development section is vigorous, but the transition to the recapitulation is gently reminiscent of Mendelssohn. The ending marvelously toys with our expectations – will it be loud or soft?
The second movement begins as a fugal gigue. This kind of counterpoint didn’t come naturally to Smith, and she recounts her first meeting with Brahms, where he responded to the introduction by saying, “as I then thought by way of a compliment, but as I now know in a spirit of scathing irony, ‘So this is the young lady who writes sonatas and doesn't know counterpoint!’” She eventually mastered the subject, as this movement, composed eleven years later, demonstrates. The second theme is jollier – and less contrapuntal.
There’s a hint of pensiveness in the third movement, which like the first movement is a sonata form but much smaller in scale. The energetic finale’s opening theme features one of Brahms’s favorite rhythms. Another sonata form, it features multiple tempos and meters as well as multiple themes, giving it an epic quality.
Overview: Ludwig van BeethovenBaptized December 17, 1770, Bonn, Germany; died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1803-04
Why It Matters: A subtly original piece by one of the greatest of all composers.
Beethoven’s Triple Concerto has been described as the “ugly duckling” of the composer’s concerto output. While his violin concerto and the five piano concertos – especially the last three – are bedrocks of the concerto repertoire, the Triple Concerto is rarely programmed.
To be sure, it’s never actually called “ugly.” But it’s not unusual to find it described with such terms as “awkward” (Leon Plantinga, in his book on Beethoven’s concertos), “a lowering of his high standards” (Antony Hopkins, in his study of the concertos), and “tiresome” (anonymous reviewer of the first public performance).
But if the concerto is not a staple of the repertoire, it also stubbornly refuses to disappear. It’s been recorded many times, partly because it provides the only solo cello part in Beethoven’s concertos, and media companies love assembling three star soloists to, hopefully, improve sales.
And it has its proponents, such as English musicologist Donald Francis Tovey, who wrote that “if it were not by Beethoven, but by some mysterious composer who had written nothing else and who had the romantic good fortune to die before it came to performance, the very people who most blame Beethoven for writing below his full powers would be the first to acclaim it as the work of a still greater composer.”
So where does the concerto rate in Beethoven’s output? It’s no use trying to put it on the same level with the Waldstein Sonata or the Eroica Symphony, works that Beethoven was composing at the same time: It’s neither as original, as concentrated, nor as finely wrought as those masterpieces. But it’s also no Wellington’s Victory, the pot-boiler Beethoven churned out a few years later to take advantage of a military victory won by the British over the French in Spain. The Triple Concerto is an appealing, serious, spacious piece, and as long as you don’t have a pressing appointment, it’s a very pleasant way to spend some time.
The concerto was begun in the fall of 1803 and completed the following year. According to Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s friend and first biographer, it was composed for the then-16-year-old Archduke Rudolph, who would mature into one of Beethoven’s most generous patrons. But Schindler is not always reliable, and when the work was published in 1804, it was dedicated to Prince Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, who perhaps earned the honor by sponsoring a private performance in mid-1804, at which the Eroica symphony was also debuted.
The first movement is unusually thematically rich – one analyst identifies nine themes – but the themes are less dramatically contrasted than is typical for Beethoven. Here, he’s more concerned with creating a sense of diversity within an overarching unity than with creating strong dramatic contrasts. For instance, following the theme’s initial presentation by unaccompanied cellos and basses, the orchestra responds with, not a mere repeat, but a development of this idea; the second theme is based on a motif from the first theme; and nearly all the themes possess the opening theme’s dotted rhythm.
The Triple Concerto stands in the center of Beethoven’s seven concertos, and structurally, its exposition is the finest concerto exposition Beethoven had yet composed. The initial orchestral exposition is perfectly constructed, not giving away too much of the thematic material – Beethoven wants to save some for the soloists – while building suspense for their entry. The soloists enter individually, but soon join together. (Beethoven exploits all possible combinations of soloists and orchestra.) The tonal scheme is highly unusual: Instead of the traditional modulation to the key of the dominant chord – a tension-building device that’s one of the hallmarks of the Classical style – Beethoven modulates to the distant key of A before settling in A minor.
The development section begins with a lengthy repeat of the soloists’s exposition, changing only the tonality from C to A major. This creates a sense of structural ambiguity: Are we beginning yet another repeat? It transitions into a more typical development section, full of key changes and thematic transformations to build up our sense of expectation before the recapitulation, which in contrast to the opening of the piece, begins loud. This section, very unusually for a concerto, contains no cadenza, the section in which the soloists would get to show off their technical skill. In 1803, concertos were typically composed for a single soloist who would improvise this cadenza, and it had not yet occurred to Beethoven that he could write out a cadenza (as he would do eight years later in his final piano concerto), so he omitted it, but gave the soloists some cadenza-like virtuosic passages in the closing coda.
The lovely slow movement, which Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny described as “soft, light, and harmonious,” is tiny between the large outer movements. It leads directly to the finale, in a marvelous transition that will have you wondering for a moment whether it’s a new movement or a new section in the slow movement. This Rondo alla polacca is a Polonaise – a Polish dance, not too fast, in triple meter with an accent on the second beat. In the 1830s, Chopin would transform this charming dance into something dramatic and heroic, but Beethoven’s rondo is more typical of earlier polonaises. The change near the end from triple meter to duple meter, and back again, is brilliant – though by the time it occurs you may already have glanced at your watch. It is one of only three uses of the Polonaise by Beethoven.
Concert overview:
George Walker’s Tangents is aptly named: It’s full of surprising shifts of pace and mood. But the term also applies to the other works on this program. Beethoven’s Triple Concerto is a tangential piece in the composer’s output – more respected than beloved, never out of the repertoire but never a bedrock of the repertoire like the composer’s other concertos. And with Ethel Smyth, we encounter a composer whose entire career was tangential. Although supremely skilled, she was never fully accepted by the British musical establishment, and remained forever an outsider, not a composer but a female composer.
Overview: George Theophilus Walker
Born June 27, 1922,Washington, D.C.; died August 23, 2018, Montclair, New Jersey
Work Composed: 1999, rev. 2002
Why It Matters: A modest work by an important American composer
The life of composer/pianist George Walker was a string of firsts, including first black graduate of Philadelphia’s fabled Curtis Institute for Music, first black instrumentalist to perform in New York’s Town Hall, first black instrumentalist to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra – and finally, first living black composer to win a Pulitzer Prize, though he was preceded by a posthumous award to Scott Joplin.
Walker wrote some brief program notes for Tangents:
Tangents was commissioned by the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus, Ohio to celebrate the New Millennium with a four-minute fanfare tribute. The work that resulted is far more complicated and slightly longer than the original proposal. Its premiere was given in Columbus, Ohio, on January 9, 2000.
The beginning of the work is appropriately declamatory. The second theme is derived from a pop tune easily identifiable in its proper context. A brief closing idea completes the exposition of a compressed sonata form. After a section of new material is presented, the first theme reappears. A second tune, extracted from the world of jazz, begins with the cellos and ends in the woodwinds. Tangents concludes with a reiteration of the second theme from the exposition.
At some point early in its composition, Walker called the piece Juxtaposition, and the piece explores these twin concepts through strong contrasts and a wide diversity of styles, especially with regard to harmony. The opening theme is strongly dissonant; the transition to the second theme is octatonic (a symmetrical scale beloved of jazz musicians and French composer Olivier Messiaen); and the second theme itself is harmonically almost static. There are hints of Copland and Stravinsky, as there are in the music of nearly every American composer of Walker’s era. The end result is a piece of nervously shifting moods, even though it is predominantly slow-to-moderate in tempo.
And the “easily identifiable” pop tune? Nobody is sure what it is, although one of the candidates is “April in Paris.”
Overview: Dame Ethel SmythBorn April 23, 1858, Sidcup, United Kingdom; died May 8, 1944, Woking, United Kingdom
Work Composed: 1889
Why It Matters: A major early work from a composer well worth knowing.
Numerous neglected composers have been resurrected in recent years. Many are worthwhile, but few are as fascinating as Ethel Smyth, a larger-than-life figure whose friendships ranged from Johannes Brahms to Virginia Woolf, who was jailed for her activities as a suffragette, and who was – until 2016 – the only woman to have had an opera performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Smyth was well trained in Germany, though she had to fight her father to get there. The critic and musicologist Ernest Newman left a marvelous sketch of Smyth:
She never flinched from combat, never minced her words. Her immense physical vitality and the exuberance of her temperament must in her younger years have made her company sometimes trying even for the people who loved her most. She had been inured from childhood to strenuous outdoor sports. She was used to breaking in fractious horses and subduing big dogs. (For the smaller specimens of the dog tribe she never had much liking.) She became a hardy rider to hounds, a mountaineer with nerves of steel, and quite late in life an ardent golfer. Every company she came into in her young days she went through like a hurricane.
As for her music, Newman wrote that “Her quality as a composer was high, certainly the highest ever achieved by a woman.” (He wrote this in 1946.) But in Great Britain, her sex worked against her, and when her opera Der Wald was performed at the Met in 1903, she had to endure such reviews as this from The Telegraph: “This little woman writes music with a masculine hand and has a sound and logical brain, such as is supposed to be the especial gift of the rougher sex. There is not a weak or effeminate note in Der Wald, nor an unstable sentiment.” (Imagine praising a work by a woman for not being “effeminate”!) She had more success in Germany, where she had made numerous connections during her student years; but the 1914 outbreak of World War I largely put an end to her career there.
In addition to her compositions – which include six operas and a Mass in D that inspired George Bernard Shaw to write her that “it was your music that cured me forever of the old delusion that women could not do man’s work in art and in all other things” – she wrote copiously on a variety of subjects, revealing a curious, immensely energetic, and unflinchingly honest personality.
The Serenade will remind you of Brahms, but that’s more of a compliment than a criticism: Of all the great composers, Brahms – with his supple phrase structures, his mastery of harmony and counterpoint, and his rhythmic quirkiness – is one of the most difficult to imitate. Smyth acquired her deep knowledge of Brahms’s style not from Brahms himself, but from her teacher Heinrich von Herzogenberg, Brahms’s close friend.
The Serenade is symphonic in scope and style. It’s missing only a proper slow movement to be a symphony; perhaps Smyth’s energy at this time in her life was simply too torrential to allow for one.
The opening movement is in sonata form, with three main themes that are developed and recapitulated. The opening theme is yearning yet energetic; the flute introduces the second theme; and the third theme, in a wonderfully Brahmsy touch, doesn’t fulfill the traditional closing theme function of grounding the musical tension, but instead pushes us forward. The development section is vigorous, but the transition to the recapitulation is gently reminiscent of Mendelssohn. The ending marvelously toys with our expectations – will it be loud or soft?
The second movement begins as a fugal gigue. This kind of counterpoint didn’t come naturally to Smith, and she recounts her first meeting with Brahms, where he responded to the introduction by saying, “as I then thought by way of a compliment, but as I now know in a spirit of scathing irony, ‘So this is the young lady who writes sonatas and doesn't know counterpoint!’” She eventually mastered the subject, as this movement, composed eleven years later, demonstrates. The second theme is jollier – and less contrapuntal.
There’s a hint of pensiveness in the third movement, which like the first movement is a sonata form but much smaller in scale. The energetic finale’s opening theme features one of Brahms’s favorite rhythms. Another sonata form, it features multiple tempos and meters as well as multiple themes, giving it an epic quality.
Overview: Ludwig van BeethovenBaptized December 17, 1770, Bonn, Germany; died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1803-04
Why It Matters: A subtly original piece by one of the greatest of all composers.
Beethoven’s Triple Concerto has been described as the “ugly duckling” of the composer’s concerto output. While his violin concerto and the five piano concertos – especially the last three – are bedrocks of the concerto repertoire, the Triple Concerto is rarely programmed.
To be sure, it’s never actually called “ugly.” But it’s not unusual to find it described with such terms as “awkward” (Leon Plantinga, in his book on Beethoven’s concertos), “a lowering of his high standards” (Antony Hopkins, in his study of the concertos), and “tiresome” (anonymous reviewer of the first public performance).
But if the concerto is not a staple of the repertoire, it also stubbornly refuses to disappear. It’s been recorded many times, partly because it provides the only solo cello part in Beethoven’s concertos, and media companies love assembling three star soloists to, hopefully, improve sales.
And it has its proponents, such as English musicologist Donald Francis Tovey, who wrote that “if it were not by Beethoven, but by some mysterious composer who had written nothing else and who had the romantic good fortune to die before it came to performance, the very people who most blame Beethoven for writing below his full powers would be the first to acclaim it as the work of a still greater composer.”
So where does the concerto rate in Beethoven’s output? It’s no use trying to put it on the same level with the Waldstein Sonata or the Eroica Symphony, works that Beethoven was composing at the same time: It’s neither as original, as concentrated, nor as finely wrought as those masterpieces. But it’s also no Wellington’s Victory, the pot-boiler Beethoven churned out a few years later to take advantage of a military victory won by the British over the French in Spain. The Triple Concerto is an appealing, serious, spacious piece, and as long as you don’t have a pressing appointment, it’s a very pleasant way to spend some time.
The concerto was begun in the fall of 1803 and completed the following year. According to Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s friend and first biographer, it was composed for the then-16-year-old Archduke Rudolph, who would mature into one of Beethoven’s most generous patrons. But Schindler is not always reliable, and when the work was published in 1804, it was dedicated to Prince Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, who perhaps earned the honor by sponsoring a private performance in mid-1804, at which the Eroica symphony was also debuted.
The first movement is unusually thematically rich – one analyst identifies nine themes – but the themes are less dramatically contrasted than is typical for Beethoven. Here, he’s more concerned with creating a sense of diversity within an overarching unity than with creating strong dramatic contrasts. For instance, following the theme’s initial presentation by unaccompanied cellos and basses, the orchestra responds with, not a mere repeat, but a development of this idea; the second theme is based on a motif from the first theme; and nearly all the themes possess the opening theme’s dotted rhythm.
The Triple Concerto stands in the center of Beethoven’s seven concertos, and structurally, its exposition is the finest concerto exposition Beethoven had yet composed. The initial orchestral exposition is perfectly constructed, not giving away too much of the thematic material – Beethoven wants to save some for the soloists – while building suspense for their entry. The soloists enter individually, but soon join together. (Beethoven exploits all possible combinations of soloists and orchestra.) The tonal scheme is highly unusual: Instead of the traditional modulation to the key of the dominant chord – a tension-building device that’s one of the hallmarks of the Classical style – Beethoven modulates to the distant key of A before settling in A minor.
The development section begins with a lengthy repeat of the soloists’s exposition, changing only the tonality from C to A major. This creates a sense of structural ambiguity: Are we beginning yet another repeat? It transitions into a more typical development section, full of key changes and thematic transformations to build up our sense of expectation before the recapitulation, which in contrast to the opening of the piece, begins loud. This section, very unusually for a concerto, contains no cadenza, the section in which the soloists would get to show off their technical skill. In 1803, concertos were typically composed for a single soloist who would improvise this cadenza, and it had not yet occurred to Beethoven that he could write out a cadenza (as he would do eight years later in his final piano concerto), so he omitted it, but gave the soloists some cadenza-like virtuosic passages in the closing coda.
The lovely slow movement, which Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny described as “soft, light, and harmonious,” is tiny between the large outer movements. It leads directly to the finale, in a marvelous transition that will have you wondering for a moment whether it’s a new movement or a new section in the slow movement. This Rondo alla polacca is a Polonaise – a Polish dance, not too fast, in triple meter with an accent on the second beat. In the 1830s, Chopin would transform this charming dance into something dramatic and heroic, but Beethoven’s rondo is more typical of earlier polonaises. The change near the end from triple meter to duple meter, and back again, is brilliant – though by the time it occurs you may already have glanced at your watch. It is one of only three uses of the Polonaise by Beethoven.