Cellobration: St. Ann DC Concert Series 2024-2025

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Dr. Laura Stanfield Prichard
 Dramaturg, New York Philharmonic
 Speaker (since 1995), San Francisco Opera & San Francisco Symphony

Harvard University

J. S. Bach Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) worked mainly as a full-time church musician during his long life, but he also wrote significant works for every kind of keyboard and instrumental available to him. His six Brandenburg concertos (1721) were inspired by Antonio Vivaldi’s collection L’Estro armónico, which he discovered in 1713. His four orchestral suites (BWV 1066-1069) evoke the French style of his day: long overtures, elegant character pieces in contrasting styles, and short movements informed by courtly dance rhythms. The autograph manuscripts for these collections are all lost, and they were never assembled into a single volume, so Bach’s music has been passed down to us as copied by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and his student Johann Ludwig Krebs. 

 Beginning in 1729, Bach directed the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, which gave concerts in Zimmerman’s Coffee House on Friday nights (there was no such thing as a public concert hall in 1729). Selections from his cantatas, suites, and keyboard music were featured there, among friends. The Orchestral Suite No. 3 was composed in 1731 for two oboes and bassoon (always doubling the strings), three trumpets, timpani, strings, and harpsichord (with a few passages for solo violin), but it became a favorite of the Romantics in new arrangements: Felix Mendelssohn performed it before Goethe in 1830, incorporating a few modern instruments into his version. 

The suite’s famous second movement is now known as “Air on the G String” due to a version by the German virtuoso August Wilhelmj (1845-1908), who taught at the Guidhall School. He transposed the melody down more than an octave so that it could be played entirely on his 1725 Stradivari violin’s lowest string. Bach’s beautifully ornamented “air”  is partnered with a gentle line of counterpoint in his original version evoking a clear lyrical operatic voice and the cautious elegance of wrist and hand rotations of the slower Baroque dances.

Luigi Boccherini Allegro from Sonata for Two Cellos in C Major

 Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) was a virtuoso cellist from Lucca, Italy who became a featured cellist in Vienna’s Burgtheater as a young man (1757-1768). A true virtuoso, he often played violin music on his instrument at pitch (without dropping down the typical octave). He was invited to play chamber music with Haydn, who credited him with inspiring a higher level of cello writing: this was the main impetus for the cello to become an equal partner in classical quartet playing. His uncle Giovanni was a librettist for both Haydn and Salieri, and he developed into an avid composer of string quartets and string quintets (over a hundred each), twelve cello concertos, and a dozen guitar quartets. As an adult, he served the Infante Luis Antonio, younger brother to King Charles III of Spain in Madrid and Ávila (1768-1785). He also completed commissions for Lucien Bonaparte, the French ambassador to Spain, and for King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, the same flute- and cello-playing king for whom Mozart and Haydn wrote quartets and Beethoven wrote sonatas. French scholar Yves Gérard published an extensive thematic catalog of Boccherini’s music in 1969, encouraging the beginning of a complete scholarly edition, and a manuscript containing hitherto unknown cello sonatas was discovered in 1982: so much of his music awaits rediscovery.

 Boccherini composed a set of six charming, optimistic cello sonatas in the early 1770s. The early London printings show two lines of music: the top for the virtuosic “solo” cello (mostly in tenor clef) and the bottom for the accompaniment (in bass clef). This lower melody allowed for a 

flexible basso continuo group, which might include a keyboard, a variety of bass melody instruments (like bassoon or another low bowed string), and a plucked chordal instrument (like lute or theorbo). But since Boccherini almost never “figured” his music by adding numbers to indicate chord and interval choices over the bass notes, the second part may be interpreted as a separate solo instrument (in this case, a second cello, in duet with the “soloist”). His lower melodies interrupt the typical “walking” patterns centering around open strings with humorous repetitions and chromatic surprises. This lively Allegro contrasts rough multiple stops (sometimes requiring chords from all four strings at once) with playful triplets, trills, and extensive thirty-second-note passages over a romping bass. Its rococo charm exhibits both melodic and rhythmic invention, coupled with occasional influences from the guitar tradition of his adopted country, Spain.

Jean Sibelius Valse Triste, op. 44, no. 1

The music of Johan (Jean) Christian Sibelius (1865-1957) is richly evocative of a particular sense of time and place. Attractively strung across a series of rocky islands and headlands jutting out into pale Baltic waters, Helsinki, Finland is constantly permeated by its proximity to the sea. Its constantly shifting light and moody wisps of fog swirl over the red domes of the Russian orthodox cathedral, a reminder of its legacy as a former Russian imperial dominion until gaining independence in 1917. Bard’s Summerscape Festival presented dozens of Sibelius’ works and publishing a moving compendium of essays entitled “Sibelius and His World” (Princeton, 2011). A deeply nationalistic composer of brooding symphonies, Finnish choral music, and dozens of songs in Swedish, his own first language, Sibelius was also a master of intimate forms.

His most famous piece (even exceeding the hymn tune Finlandia) is the Valse triste, composed in 1904 for the performance of a theater piece called Kuolema [Death] by his brother-in-law, Arvid Järnefelt. This valse opens the play and is followed by five additional pieces of romantic incidental music, all informed by the first. The original program notes for the play describe the scene:

It is night. The son, who has been watching beside the bedside of his sick mother, has fallen asleep from sheer weariness. Gradually, a ruddy light is diffused through the room: there is a sound of distant music: the glow and the music steal nearer until the strains of a valse melody float distantly to our ears. The sleeping mother awakens, rises from her bed and, in her long white garment, which takes the semblance of a ball dress, begins to move silently and slowly to and fro. She waves her hands and beckons in time to the music, as though she were summoning a crowd of invisible guests. And now they appear, these strange visionary couples, turning and gliding to an unearthly valse rhythm. The dying woman mingles with the dancers; she strives to make them look into her eyes, but the shadowy guests one and all avoid her glance. Then she seems to sink exhausted on her bed and the music breaks off. Presently she gathers all her strength and invokes the dance once more, with more energetic gestures than before. Back come the shadowy dancers, gyrating in a wild, mad rhythm. The weird gaiety reaches a climax; there is a knock at the door, which flies wide open; the mother utters a despairing cry; the spectral guests vanish; the music dies away. Death stands on the threshold.
 
 

Sibelius’ music written for this terrifying psychological vision has become an iconic work in its original orchestral version, the composer’s own piano transcription, and numerous chamber arrangements: the original score called for flute, clarinet, two horns, and single timpani, and strings.

 Konzert für Violoncello und Blasorchester by Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000)
 in a World Premiere arrangement for six cellos Guy Eylon 

I.      Ouverture

II.     Idylle

III.   Cadenza

IV.   Menuett

V.     Final alla Marcia

Friedrich Gulda was a Viennese composer and pianist. Along with his childhood friend Joe Zawinul (later pianist for Cannonball Adderly, Miles Davis, and The Weather Report), Gulda performed forbidden music in violation of the government’s prohibition on the playing of jazz, while a student at the Vienna Conservatory. By the late 1940s, the teenaged Gulda was presenting more than two dozen concerts per year in Europe, touring South America (37 concerts in 1949 alone), and making his 1950 Carnegie Hall debut, which allowed him to hear live jazz performances at New York’s “Birdland” club. Highly sought after as a piano teacher, his students included Martha Argerich and Claudio Abbado. He flaunted classical conventions, playing some recitals in the nude and combining jazz, free improvisation, and classical forms. He once said, “There can be no guarantee that I will become a great jazz musician, but at least I shall know that I am doing the right thing. I don’t want to fall into the routine of the modern concert pianist’s life, nor do I want to ride the cheap triumphs of the Baroque bandwagon.” 
 
 Premiered at the Münchner Klaviersommer 1988, his popular Concerto for Cello and Wind Orchestra blurs musical genres. Originally scored for a modified eighteenth-century wind ensemble with the addition of a jazz rhythm section of guitar, bass, and drum set, the work alternates seamlessly between what Gulda described as “jazz, a minuet, rock, a smidgen of polka, a march, and a cadenza with two spots where the star cellist must improvise.” Heinrich Schiff, the soloist who premiered the work, commented that the Concerto “not only fulfilled my dream of cello playing in the idiom of jazz and rock, but also excites the listener with its rock-hard tension.”

 Schiff provides the definitive description of the work: “The first movement of the concerto presents completely new challenges to the cellist. Besides the immensely difficult techniques involved, the aggressive rock-rhythm needs to be mastered. It must be played exactly, without vibrato. Three times, two choruses are interrupted by gentle lyrical interludes (or second themes); then, almost surprisingly, the second movement forms the complete opposite. Idylle precisely describes the Austrian Salzkammergut as the source of the beauty, the greatness, and the simplicity of this music. (The fact that I myself was born in this region is pure coincidence and meant an additional challenge for me.) The jovial middle part of the movement brings happy country-like relaxation, and its center is a tribute to the cellist, who may excel, like a tenor, in the best register of his instrument.”

“The central point of the Concerto develops out of the last B-flat major chord of the second movement. The first cadenza with its wild double stops and the second (according to Gulda) with ‘lovingly whistling’ harmonics, both contrast charmingly with thoughtful, hesitant monologues, as well as with wild rhythmic memories of before (thanks to the composer for making use of the lower strings as well!). The listener then finds himself calmed, as if in a dream, in the fantastically unrealistic Minuet, which seems to have glided from its Central European origins into an Eastern reverie. The wonderful maggiore-trio seems to float in space.”

“The last movement overwhelms us with earthly happiness (Alpine brass music and an alpine thunderstorm). A jazz-like middle part develops, followed by a “coda par excellence” which, first smilingly, then outright laughingly, stimulates the already breathless soloist.” This Finale – part march and part polka – recalls earlier classical and rock themes before drawing to a thrilling close, complete with a “screaming high note” originally intended for the lead trumpet.