Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
Fugue [F. fugue, G. Fuge, It. Sp. Fuga] The most mature form of imitative counterpoint developed during the 17th century and brought to perfection by J.S. Bach.
Chaos and order are opposing, yet complementary, fundamental forces representing disarray versus structure. Chaos signifies the unknown, destruction, and potential, while order represents stability, structure, and tradition. They exist as a duality, often acting as a yin-and-yang, where true stability requires a balance between the two extremes.
Our third BCMS program of the calendar year contains some of the most beautiful and challenging music ever created for chamber ensemble players and audiences alike, reminders of both ease and effort with which great ideas are given form—from simple dialogue to complex structure, from capricious whimsy to imposing fugue. The first half contains four statements that range from two to six players, and in timings from five to fifteen minutes.
Picture yourself as witness to a serious debate about the primacy in Art of Poetry vs Music. With the possibility of the hand in marriage of an aristocratic widow at stake, so opens Capriccio, the late Richard Strauss opera in one act from 1942. The first scene is a drawing room ‘rehearsal’ of beautiful music for string sextet played before its protagonists—music which also happens to open our program. The rapturous introduction to the opera played from the stage (rather than from the pit) suggests Strauss’s preferred outcome of the debate before a single word is sung.
From there we present a conversation between the highest and lowest-pitched members of our string family in the Duo Concertante for Violin and Double Bass (2010) by Krzysztof Pendercki. He is best known for his use of extended techniques and searing effects in his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 string players from 1960. Some of those techniques appear in this Duo which is a recollection of one by Giovanni Bottesini, a 19th-century Italian Romantic composer, conductor, and double bass virtuoso.
Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 81 is a posthumous collection. Departing from the long-established four-movement format for string quartet writing, it contains four individual movements that Mendelssohn may have previously discarded unrelated by content and key. Among these movements the third one is named Capriccio (1843)—a title used later by Strauss—that ends with a fugue, followed by yet another whole movement of fugue! Here, the ending fugue of Capriccio is more ‘traditional,’ unlike the one which nearly twenty years earlier Beethoven had been forced to separate from his Opus 130 string quartet in B-flat major.
Our performance of the Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge (1826) will be in observance of its first performance as the original finale of the Op. 130 quartet in March1826, two-hundred years ago this month. By 1827, one year after its premiere, it was separated from the original quartet due to its great size and complexity, replaced by a new Allegro as the finale of Op. 130, and published as Op. 133 in several sections delineated by tempo changes. Today it is still greeted as a highly influential statement that explored extremes of sonority, virtuosity, organization, modulation and contrapuntal technique for its time and since.
Our program concludes with a more recent work from nearly a century ago, that also recalls the use of forces and forms used for one of the earliest groupings of chamber players, i.e., the Baroque Trio Sonata (for two high instruments and keyboard, with figured bass accompanied by a doubling stringed instrument.)
Erich Korngold’s Suite for Two Violins, Cello and Piano Left Hand, Op. 23 (1930) was commissioned from the prodigious young (later well-known Warner Bros. film music) composer by the Austrian-American pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had been wounded in WWI. This chamber piece follows two prior commissions—concertos for the left hand by Korngold and Ravel. It is in 5 movements with titles that recall previous groupings of earlier forms in the Suite: Präludium und Fuge, Walzer, Groteske, Lied, and Rondo (Finale with Variations). It should be noted that the fugue in this work uses intervals that spell out the name of B-A-C-H (something that Bach created on his own name) in note spacing of half-step, similarly used by Beethoven in the subject for Grosse Fuge.
Enjoy!
MT
