Duo Amal: Notes on the Program
“Expanded sonorities; expanded emotions”
There is a profound satisfaction, I think, to be had in a recital of duets and two-piano pieces, something that PPI offers every now and then. In today’s program, we get to hear some of the best repertory from those two genres. In the proceedings we get to reflect on a time when music was available to anyone only in live performance (Schubert) and to explore modern music with many sources of inspiration (all the others.)
For, indeed, two players at one or two pianos provide greatly expanded sonorous possibilities and, hence, expanded possibilities of artistic, even emotional, expression. We will hear music from a Frenchman who soaked up the native music of Brazil when posted there diplomatically. Vivid dances, transcribed from another composer’s own ballet scores, will get more than just toes tapping. Remarkably intimate, albeit virtuosic, music written by a famous composer for his pianist son (they played the debut together!) will reveal, beyond just the terrific beauty of the music, their special bond, father and son. Finally, we can have lovely reveries, inspired by several poems in a “series of musical pictures,” as the composer called his alternatively titled “Fantaisie Tableaux.”
It promises to be an extra-fun ride. You might like to know more about these several fine compositions a bit more deeply. Thus . . .
Franz Schubert
SCHUBERT
“My love for Schubert is a very serious one, probably just because it is not a fleeting fancy. Where is genius like his, which soars aloft so boldly and surely, where we then see the first few enthroned? To me he is like a child of the gods, who plays with Jupiter's thunder, albeit also occasionally handling it oddly. But he plays in such a region, at such a height, to which the others are far short of raising themselves . . . .” -Johannes Brahms
In Vienna in Schubert’s lifetime, more and more families of the rising middle-class were able financially to acquire pianos, thus enabling more people to hear music (pre-recordings, radio, etc.) in their own homes. Thus, there came a growing need for music for the piano that could delight player and audience in these intimate settings. That said, few families could afford two pianos, but many loved that aforementioned “expanded sonority,” not to mention the normal presence of more than one pianist in a household, thus leading to the market for “piano four-hands” scores. With his exceptional gift for melody and resourcefulness at the piano, Schubert was quick to become the master of this special way of composing.
He was exceptionally productive in this field, bringing out teaching pieces as well as distinguished works that have endured in the concert repertory, particularly today’s Fantasy. It was written expressly for and dedicated to a countess (his prior student) who was a member of the famed Esterhazy family, one-time patrons of Haydn.
Schubert thought it the best of his four-hand works. Sending it to his publisher in 1828, he called it “my strivings after the highest in art.” The publisher, unfortunately, thought the piece too difficult and took only other things that Schubert had included in the sent package. This Fantasy was not published until three months after his death.
So much could be said about the Fantasy’s unusual form, its four movements played without pause, its abrupt shifts in key (a Schubertian trademark) to press certain emotions foremost, how it has a connecting thread via its opening song-like melody that returns several times throughout, the astounding fugue at the end, the waltz-like scherzo in the middle, etc. Most of all, though, we would probably do best to be (re-) astonished at its almost symphonic form, to embrace its elegiac atmosphere at the outset that sets us up for a remarkable aesthetic and personal journey. There are wheelbarrows of melody here and compositional “devices” to keep the musicologists and analysts happy for days, but we listeners get to delight in its wholeness/completeness, its charm.
Schubert gave its title originally in French, Fantaisie, but the term has two different meanings in German: fantasieren, the verb “to improvise” and Fantasie, the noun “imagination.” Let’s just delight in his flawless writing, dynamic contrasts, and moods ranging from soulful to fierce in this deservedly very popular work.
Darius Milhaud
MILHAUD
“I had a marvelously happy childhood.” -- Milhaud
At the Paris International Exhibition of 1937, some jaunty music from Darius Milhaud got its debut by duo-pianists Marguerite Long and Marcelle Meyer by virtue of their having pestered him for something new for their concert at the Exposition. Milhaud, as he often did, borrowed bits from some of his other compositions, but nonetheless found it tough going (“It gave me enormous trouble.”) and was then dismayed that it attracted such immediate attention. Scaramouche would follow him troublesomely for years, forcing arrangement for various ensembles. The final movement was even converted into a pop song, complete with added lyrics. It has remained quite popular in ensuing decades, especially among classical radio programmers who resort often to its beguiling ways. It grabs one’s attention, gives lots of listening delight, and does it all in just about ten minutes.
The dance-hall fun of the opening catches one’s ears and imagination right from the get-go. I hope someone has choreographed this wonderful stuff. The Modéré has a grace and an easy motion that might make one feel that thing that one feels with a favorite popular tune. In the final movement, with its fidelity to the Brazilian folk idiom sound that Milhaud closely observed during his working years in Brazil (he was secretary to the poet, dramatist, and foreign officer Paul Claudel), one could be tempted to think (wrongly) that some of it is merely transcribed material, but Milhaud’s writing is far more fun than that. I should have sent an e-mail blast last week inviting you to wear Carmen Miranda-style banana hats today!
(Fun side note: PPI’s former Board member Mary Tooze studied with Milhaud at Mills College some years ago. Her daughter, Kris Kern, is now chairperson of our Board!)
Aram Khachaturian
KHACHATURIAN
“I grew up in an atmosphere rich in folk music: popular festivities, rites, joyous and sad events in the life of the people always accompanied by music, the vivid tunes of Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian songs and dances performed by folk bards and musicians — such were the impressions that became deeply engraved on my memory, that determined my musical thinking. They shaped my musical consciousness and lay at the foundations of my artistic personality.... Whatever the changes and improvements that took place in my musical taste in later years, their original substance, formed in early childhood in close communion with the people, has always remained the natural soil nourishing all my work.” – Khachaturian
With a large catalogue of music steeped in modal melodies, driving rhythms, exhilarating dance patterns, and (in orchestral works) surprising instrumental combinations reminiscent of the folk orchestras of his Armenian heritage, coupled with official recognition of his prowess at a young age, it is easy to understand why Khachaturian is widely known as the “Father of Armenian Music.” He suffered much criticism of his compositions in the awful 1940s by Soviet music officials, although his music contained few of the objectional traits found in the music of many more adventuresome colleagues. Reputation restored after political upheaval, in 1950 he joined the composition faculty of the Moscow Conservatory and the Gnesin Academy. In the following years, he traveled extensively in Europe as a conductor and even came to Washington, D.C., in 1968 to conduct the National Symphony Orchestra in a program of his own works.
His overall aesthetic reveals the synthesis of two wonderfully contrasting principles: first, the fascinating rhythmic diversity of dances of his native region; second, the exceptional improvisations of local bands with whom he grew up. The result is a dynamic and vivid music, full of contrasts, at once enchanting in their lyricism, in the next moment poignant in its tension and drama.
It is that unique approach that brought forth three ballets from Khachaturian and from them he compiled several suites of music for concert performance. From his first ballet, Spartacus and Phrygia, inspired by a tale of a rebellion by the Romans against immoral and conquering westerners, this Adagio expresses unparalleled passion and depth of emotions when the two characters are reunited following the uprising and her being rescued from slavery. Many will recognize its sweeping, romantic melody as the theme song for the long-running 1970s television series, The Onedin Line; others will know it from the animated film Ice Age: The Meltdown.
Dmitri Shostakovich
SHOSTAKOVICH
“A fresh approach to a work of music . . . usually comes to those who have a fresh approach to aspects of life, to life in general.”
“A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That’s how music should be written, so that no one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.” – Shostakovich.
Shostakovich did, indeed, have a “fresh approach to aspects of life, to life in general” as well as the same for the art and craft of composition. His biography reveals an admirable spontaneity and humor in his young years and, of course, a very strong spirit in the face of the terrible challenges to his creativity via the official Soviet music critics in the Stalinist era. Condemned the first time after his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, then somewhat rehabilitated after his First Symphony in 1937, only to get in trouble again after his Ninth Symphony, but then back to relative freedom with Stalin’s death in 1953. Throughout these dramatic years, Shostakovich remained exceptionally productive. His compositional aesthetic is immediately recognizable and, for me, thrilling. It might best be described as sometimes sparse in texture, but always friendly to the ear as it steers in new directions from traditional tonal musical language.
He was a proud dad, too. He wrote his Second Piano Concerto for his son, Maxim, in 1957, having prior composed today’s Concertino (1953) for him, age 16, when Maxim was about to become a student at the Central Music School of Moscow. There is a very fun historic recording of the two of them playing the Concertino, very fast in the fast bits. On the whole, it is a quiet and private work, but with wildly boisterous moments sprinkled in throughout, leading to a sparkling ending. The plain unison octaves, alternated with hymn-like passages, with which it opens belie the jaunty second theme (one writer called it “circus music”) that sets up a remarkable development of the two principle themes. There is great drama in this one-movement work. Measured by Shostakovich’s own comment above, I think that it is great music. It could be played in a number of ways and still move the listener, no matter what.
Sergei Rachmaninoff
RACHMANINOV
This recital ends poignantly with music in four movements inspired by four poems that touched the young Rachmaninov in the summer of 1893, just a year after he had graduated from the Moscow Conservatory. He had been supported in his studies and his first compositional efforts by no less than Tchaikovsky, to whom these Fantaisie Tableaux (their alternate title) are dedicated. Tchaikovsky had intended to attend the premier performance in November of 1893, but died just five weeks before the performance.
In the spinning out of Barcarolle, The night . . . the love, Tears, and Easter, one may hear the influence of Tchaikovsky and other Russian composers more pronounced than in most of Rachmaninov’s later music, but his typical heart-wrenching, sensuous melodies and harmonic adventures are still there. This “series of musical pictures,” as he called them, are quite narrative and offer the listener so many cues – unabashed romance, nature sounds, rippling water, bird calls, bells – that lovely daydreams must surely come to mind.
Most of all, it seems to me that the final movement, Easter, with its insistent and propulsive rhythms, almost an ostinato, and vacillation between major and minor as Orthodox church bells seem to peal ecstatically, is a profound paean to hope. (Hope, of course, is the translation of amal in this duo’s name.) This is such a welcome sentiment in our current times.