THEATER WITHOUT WORDS: VIVALDI, BACH & MORE
Sunday, February 17, 7:30 PM
First United Methodist Church, Evanston Ticket price: $55, $45, $35
A free pre-concert lecture by Jim Kendros begins at 6:30 PM in the church chapel.
Monday, February 18, 7:30 PM
Harris Theater, Chicago
(Millennium Park)
Ticket Prices: $75, $60, $50, $40, $30
PROGRAM
Concerto for violin, La tempesta di mare
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Concerto for violin, La tempesta di mare |
Johann Christian Bach, arr. Wallfisch
Lament, "Ach, das ich Wassers gnug hätte"
Concerto grosso, Il Pianto d'Arianna
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Concerto grosso, Il Pianto d'Arianna |
Concerto for violin, after BWV 1056 (second movement)
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Concerto for violin, after BWV 1056 |
Concerto for viola d'amore and archlute
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Concerto for viola d'amore and archlute |
Concerto No. 8, La Pazzia
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Concerto No. 8, La Pazzia |
Concerto grosso, La Follia, after Corelli
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Concerto grosso, La Follia, after Corelli |
Music of the Baroque Orchestra
Elizabeth Wallfisch, director and violin
David Miller, archlute and baroque guitar
Baroque instrumental music is dazzlingly dramatic-in both conception and performance. Virtuoso violinist Elizabeth Wallfisch stars in an evening of theater without words as she leads the Music of the Baroque Orchestra in works by Antonio Vivaldi, J. S. Bach and other early masters. From a vivid portrait of a great storm, to an abandoned lover's grief, to the descent into madness, this evening of fiery, passionate, thrilling music will keep you on the edge of your seat.
Program Notes
Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto for Violin in E-flat Major, La Tempesta di mare
As the violin increased in importance during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so did its players. Italian virtuosi like Antonio Vivaldi left indelible impressions on audiences. As a witness at one of Vivaldi’s performances remarked, “…he appended a fantasia that left me literally terrorized, because one like it was never played nor ever will be played, since with the fingers [of his left hand] he reached a point just a hair away from the bridge, so close that there was no room for the bow; and he did this on all four strings, with fugal passages and with incredible speed. He shocked everyone with this.” This fascination with virtuoso playing went hand in hand with the development of the concerto, a genre that Vivaldi played a major role in creating. Pitting solo performer against ensemble, the concerto showcases the soloist’s prowess while stretching the capacity of the instrument to its limits.
The emphasis on display also made the concerto the perfect vehicle for the women of the Ospedale della Pietà, the institution with which Vivaldi was connected for most of his life. While the Pietà was often called an orphanage, it was in reality a home for illegitimate daughters of Venetian noblemen and was well financed by its “anonymous” benefactors. In addition to room and board, the residents were given an excellent education in music, which while originally intended to augment moral and religious instruction took on a life of its own. The Pietà performances, which took place every Saturday, Sunday and feast day, were wildly popular, and soon became a major attraction for any visitor to the city. As one traveler wrote, “All year long the presence of foreigners in these pious places was great, there being not a single important person visiting Venice who left before honoring them with their presence.” Constantly in need of new music for these occasions, the bulk of Vivaldi’s output—including nearly 500 concertos, 46 sinfonias, 73 sonatas, chamber music and a small number of sacred compositions—was likely intended for the Pietà’s talented performers.
Known for its theatricality, Vivaldi’s music sometimes incorporates direct extra-musical references (most famously, The Four Seasons). Although listeners probably would not have been aware of the narrative, the inscriptions serve as a springboard for heightened expression. As musicologist Ellen Rosand writes, “In addition to describing a general plot or some specific subject matter…the titles serve to justify or even stimulate particularly exaggerated treatment of the instrumental forces—which without such justification might seem excessive, even gratuitous.” The Concerto for Violin in E-flat Major, La Tempesta di mare (Storm at Sea) is precisely one such work. Part of the composer’s Op. 8 collection entitled Il Cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione (The Contest of Harmony and Invention) that also includes The Four Seasons, the concerto contains the power of nature’s wrath in three brief movements. In the first, marked Presto, the wind swirls in brilliant string flourishes. Uneasy calm pervades the following Largo, which ends on a note of eerie foreboding. The storm is unleashed once again in the concluding Presto, with rolling waves of string scales finally subsiding in the final measures.
Johann Christoph Bach: Lament, “Ach, daß ich Wassers g’nug hätte” (arr. Wallfisch)
A cousin of Johann Sebastian’s father, Johann Christoph Bach is considered by many to be the most important member of the family before Johann Sebastian. Educated in music by his father, Johann Christoph held posts as a harpsichordist and organist, working for several years in Arnstadt and then in Eisenach—Johann Sebastian’s birthplace—from 1665 until his death in 1703. Although his career was unfortunately marred by vehement quarrels with the town council, he was highly respected within the Bach family; Johann Sebastian certainly heard his cousin play the organ, and referred to him in 1735 as a “profound composer.” In J. S. Bach’s obituary, Johann Christoph was said to be “as good at inventing beautiful thoughts as he was at expressing words. He composed, to the extent that current taste permitted, in a galant and cantabile style, uncommonly full textured.” Among his extant works, which include instrumental works and sacred music, is the passionate lamento for alto and strings, “Ach, daß ich Wassers g’nug hätte.” The text, drawn from Lamentations and Psalm 38, expresses the desire to “have enough water in my head” that “my eyes would be springs, so that I might weep day and night for my sins.” In Bach’s evocative setting, striking dissonances make the speaker’s grief almost palpable, while tears cascade in gently falling chromatic lines. The singer’s part is played here on the violin by Elizabeth Wallfisch.
Pietro Locatelli: Concerto grosso, Op. 7, No. 6, Il Pianto d’Arianna
Born in Bergamo in September 1695, Locatelli was a violin prodigy who went on to study with Arcangelo Corelli in Rome. His playing was legendary; he was rumored never to have played a wrong note (except once, when his finger slipped in the midst of a wildly difficult run and got trapped in the instrument’s bridge). After spending much of his youth as an itinerant virtuoso, Locatelli settled in Amsterdam around 1729 and remained there for the rest of his life. Amsterdam had few opportunities for formal employment, but its large publishing industry gave Locatelli the chance to earn a living under his own auspices, which was unusual for an eighteenth-century composer. (In addition to the income from his own publications, he made money by selling books that he had acquired during his travels.) Despite Locatelli’s status as one of Europe’s leading violinists, he remained oddly removed from performance, absenting himself from Amsterdam’s concert life and refusing to accept students. While he gave regular concerts in private homes, he refused entry to musicians in the fear that they might steal his secrets, leading critics to suggest that Locatelli was less a virtuoso than a person terrified of making mistakes.
Since he was essentially self-employed, Locatelli had a great deal of compositional freedom, a fact that the Concerto grosso, Op. 7, No. 6, Il Pianto d’Arianna, perhaps illustrates. Based on the story of Ariadne—in this version, killing herself in despair after her paramour Theseus leaves her—the work is essentially an instrumental cantata, with the solo violin playing the role of Ariadne and the orchestra serving as the chorus so prominent in Greek tragedy. The uncontrolled passion of abandoned women had long been a source of musical inspiration in the baroque, and Ariadne’s story is the clear impetus for both style and form in Il Pianto. Throughout the work, Locatelli moves freely between recitative and arioso-like textures, employing frequent changes in tempo and mood to take listeners through Ariadne’s bewildering shifts in emotion.
Johann Sebastian Bach: Concerto for Violin in G Minor, after BWV 1056 (2nd movement)
From 1729–1737 and 1739–1741, Johann Sebastian Bach served as the director of Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum, an association of professional musicians and university students that gave weekly concerts at a coffee house. It is generally thought that Bach performed many of his instrumental works at these gatherings, and it was for this group that he likely originated the idea of a concerto for harpsichord. Since the harpsichord was typically a solo or continuo instrument, Bach began his foray into the new genre with arrangements of existing concertos for melody instruments, such as the violin. While five of the harpsichord concerti can be linked to extant works, the others—although believed to be arrangements—cannot be traced to original models. In the absence of a score, scholars have undertaken the project of unearthing these original sources, in some cases reconstructing an “original” from the subsequent harpsichord arrangement. The Concerto for Violin in G Minor (after the F Minor Harpsichord Concerto, BWV 1056) is one of these re-created works.
To complicate matters further, the origins of the second movement have been the subject of additional debate in recent years. Scholars have come to believe that only the outer movements of the harpsichord concerto were derived from an extant string concerto, while the slow movement is based on an entirely different source—the identity of which is unclear. Some believe that the movement is taken from the 1729 cantata, “Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe,” BWV 156, while Bach scholar Joshua Rifkin has suggested that it actually derives from an oboe concerto that itself only survives as part of the 1726 cantata, “Geist und Seele wird verwirret,” BWV 35. Finally, in recent years it has been suggested that Bach’s model was actually a slow concerto movement by Telemann. Regardless of its source, the Largo’s wonderfully poignant, almost elegiac melody is legendary.
Vivaldi: Concerto for Viola d’amore and Archlute in D Minor, RV 540
Vivaldi is well known for his creative use of timbre and instrumental color, a facet of his composition that also likley stemmed from the needs of the Pietà. The students were accomplished on many different instruments; as one eighteenth-century writer observed, “[They] play the violin, the recorder, the organ, the oboe, the cello, the bassoon; in fact, there is no instrument large enough to frighten them.” The most well-known violinist at the institution, a girl named Anna Maria, was also an expert on the viola d’amore, an instrument with six or seven playing strings and an equal number of sympathetic strings that has an unusual timbre and longstanding associations with night. Taking advantage of this unique situation, Vivaldi composed numerous works for odd combinations of instruments, particularly for special occasions. The Pietà’s unusual performance conditions may also have motivated Vivaldi’s emphasis on aural effect. Audience members were not able to see the performers, who were hidden behind an iron screen, taking away the visual element of performance and perhaps heightening the auditory experience. Contemporary accounts cite this as one of the most striking features of these concerts, and one that could also be frustrating; as Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes in his Confessions, “What grieved me were those accursed grills, which allowed only tones to go through and concealed the angels of loveliness of whom they were worthy.”
Written for a performance in March 1740 in honor of Frederick August II, the Prince-Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, the Concerto for Viola d’amore and Lute is an excellent example of Vivaldi’s vivid use of instrumental color. Because of the solo instruments’ soft timbre, the ensemble is muted throughout the work, creating a mysterious, almost exotic mood. The relationship of orchestra to soloists is also of interest: rather than aggressively trading phrases, the ensemble seems to set the stage on which the viola d’amore and lute appear. This is particularly true of the opening Allegro, in which the soloists subtly—almost casually—interact in between orchestral statements. The nostalgic Largo features the viola d’amore as both solo and ripieno as it retells a story without words. The concerto concludes with a triple-meter Allegro, marked by brilliant improvisatory-style solo statements against a dance-like orchestral backdrop.
Francesco Durante: Concerto No. 8 in A Major, La Pazzia
Born in 1684 in Frattamaggiore, Francesco Durante began his musical studies at an early age in Naples, eventually studying with Alessandro Scarlatti. While exact details of his life remain unclear, he worked as a composer and teacher at several institutions in Naples, including the Conservatorios di Sant’Onofrio and Santa Maria di Loreto. Renowned for his pedagogical skills, Durante counted such famous composers as Niccolò Jommelli, Giovanni Paisiello, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Niccolò Piccinni and Leonardo Vinci among his students, who referred to themselves as “Durantisti.” Although Durante was apparently a man of “simple manners,” his knowledge and wisdom on the topic of music was reportedly unparalleled, and his students often sought his counsel.
While most Neopolitan composers wrote at least some opera, Durante concentrated on sacred music, composing works that often favored expressive use of dissonances, dynamics and harmony over rules of counterpoint. This innate theatricality is also present in his small oeuvre of instrumental music, which is known for its diversity of stylistic and formal features. Just as desire to express text must have prompted the composer’s unconventional choices in his sacred music, the conceit of “madness” in the Concerto No. 8 in A Major, La Pazzia, liberates Durante from certain dictates of form, as he overlays the concerto’s three movements with the solo violin’s frequent interjections of lunatic ranting.
Francesco Geminiani: Concerto grosso No. 12 in D Minor, La Follia, after Corelli, Op. 5, No. 12
Francesco Geminiani, born in Lucca in December 1687, displayed considerable aptitude for the violin at an early age. After studying in Lucca and with Corelli in Rome, he was named concertmaster of the opera orchestra in Naples. His genius proved to be his undoing, however; as Charles Burney reported, “he was soon discovered to be so wild and unsteady a timist, that instead of regulating and conducting the band, he threw it into confusion; as none of the performers were able to follow him in his tempo rubato, and other unexpected accelerations and relaxations of measure.” In 1714 he moved to London, where the rage for Corelli’s music was in full swing, and quickly cultivated fame as Corelli’s student and, eventually, a virtuoso in his own right.
In 1726 and 1729, Geminiani published two sets of concertos that are essentially arrangements of Corelli’s famous Op. 5 sonatas. While a desire to capitalize on Corelli’s fame may have prompted Geminiani to rework the older pieces, he perhaps had another motivation as well. Corelli’s La Follia variations were extremely popular and highly prized by their creator; Corelli was reported to have told Geminiani of “the Satisfaction he took in composing it, and the Value he set upon it.” In transforming Corelli’s solo piece into a work for orchestra, Geminiani both heightens its remarkable theatricality and pays homage to a respected mentor.
© Jennifer More Glagov 2008