(b. Hanau, Germany, 1895; d. Frankfurt, 1963)
Hindemith composed Kleine Kammermusik, Op. 24, No. 2, in 1922. It is scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn.
Paul Hindemith’s earliest successes came as a performer. In 1914, he joined the first violin section of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra and by the end of the year was sharing a stand with concertmaster Adolf Rebner, his teacher. He also played second violin in Rebner’s quartet and in 1917 took over as the opera’s concertmaster. Then the military called the 22-year-old into service, and the violin virtuoso found himself playing bass drum in a regimental band. After the army, Hindemith switched his focus from violin to viola, and began diligently pursuing a career as a composer. He presented a concert of his works in 1919, the success of which earned him a contract with the publishing house Schott. He gained further attention in 1921 with the premiere of two one-act operas and his String Quartet No. 3, and was soon identified as a musical embodiment of the “Neue Sachlichkeit,” or “new objectivity,” a prominent aesthetic during the short-lived Weimar Republic. Like other artists and writers in that movement, Hindemith worked in a practical and unsentimental style, free of Romantic excesses.
Kleine Kammermusik (Little Chamber Music), from 1922, captures Hindemith’s emerging style. The wind quintet debuted at a festival in Cologne, a few weeks before the Donaueschingen Festival presented its sibling composition for 12 players, Kammermusik, Op. 24, No. 1. These two works began a series of small-ensemble Kammermusik compositions that stretched to 1927, a set some call Hindemith’s “Brandenburgs” after Bach’s famous (and equally pragmatic) concertos.
Hindemith strove to write useful music, and the frequent performances of Kleine Kammermusik attest to his success in that regard. The jaunty march figures and angular melodies of the opening movement display Hindemith’s keen wit and self-assured scoring for the dry quintet texture. The taut snap of the first movement gives way to a relaxed waltz, with a more hollow-toned piccolo replacing the flute. The subdued middle movement interrupts its “quiet and easy” sustained textures for a long-lined melody over a faintly militaristic background figure. The fourth movement, with quick outbursts for each instrument, serves as a bridge to the “very lively” finale.
(b. Vienna, 1943)
Gruber composed Busking in 2007. It is scored for strings, accordion, banjo and solo trumpet. These are the first performances of the work by the SPCO and the U.S. premiere.
Heinz Karl Gruber — better known as HK, or Nali to his friends — is a composer, conductor and dynamic performer. After singing in the esteemed Vienna Boys’ Choir and then attending the Vienna Hochschule für Musik, he established a career as a double bass player. He co-founded the ensemble “MOB art and tone ART” in 1968, and through that group began to perform as a singer and actor. Dubbing himself a “chansonnier,” he developed a neo-Cabaret performance style for his own music and such repertoire as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King. Gruber first earned wide recognition as a composer and performer following the 1978 debut of Frankenstein!! with Simon Rattle and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra; hundreds of performances of that work have helped spread Gruber’s name around the globe. His more recent rise as a conductor has landed him the post of composer/conductor for the BBC Philharmonic starting this year.
Gruber’s 2007 work Busking spotlights the diverse talents of Håkan Hardenberger, who also premiered Gruber’s 1999 trumpet concerto, Aerial. In Busking, the trumpet is cast as a panhandler whose boisterous street music comes with accordion, banjo and strings. Gruber asks his soloist to produce an extraordinary range of sounds, including an opening solo played just on a mouthpiece. The first movement builds from a snappy street tune into a swirling frenzy of lines and driving banjo strums reinforced by strings. After halting at a climax, the smoky second movement begins without a pause, and the flugelhorn (a mellow and darker-toned sibling of the trumpet) croons a melancholy ballad. The soloist’s eerie overtones, prominent toward the end, come from singing one note while playing another. The final movement opens with glassy darting figures in the strings bowed sul ponticello (over the bridge of the instrument) and chords sounded col legno battuto (struck with the wood of the bow). The strings trade licks with the banjo and accordion, until the trumpet enters with the first of a series of jazzy cadenzas. Although fully scripted, the events unfold with the spirit and abandon of group improvisation, coalescing at the last second for a final cadence and the trumpet’s parting blast on a high “E.”
(b. near St. Petersburg, 1882; d. New York, 1971)
Stravinsky composed the Concertino in 1920. It is scored for two violins, viola and cello.
Igor Stravinsky burst onto the world stage with three legendary ballets for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). Stravinsky was heir to a great Russian musical tradition — he was a student of Rimsky-Korsakov and the son of the Mariinsky Theatre’s star bass-baritone — and his three early masterpieces all took up Russian folk themes. Still, he was drawn to the West and spent long periods in Switzerland and France starting in 1910, enjoying the rejuvenating climate and capitalizing on his rising fame. With the outbreak of war he settled his family in Switzerland and, following the rise of the Bolsheviks, established a life in Paris and later in the United States, never resettling in his homeland.
The early years of exile and the disruption of war brought great financial strain for Stravinsky. He fought with Diaghilev over unpaid contracts and unrealized commissions, and struggled to find other income streams. He wrote Renard (1916) for the salon of Princess Edmond de Polignac — formerly Winaretta Singer of Yonkers, heiress to her family’s sewing machine fortune — and attempted to circumvent Russian copyright laws by offering a 1919 concert suite from The Firebird to a London firm. He may have intended The Soldier’s Tale (1918) as a money-making venture, but it only came off with the help of a Swiss philanthropist.
Stravinsky received a small windfall in 1920 from the Flonzaley Quartet, the group that had commissioned his Three Pieces for String Quartet six years earlier. The privately financed quartet premiered the new work at the start of their New York season on November 23, 1920. The New York Times lambasted the premiere in the next day’s paper, complaining, “The consummate ugliness and thin emptiness of this piece was left extremely bare.” For anyone expecting the heart-pounding dances and stout, folk-like melodies of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, the hermetic Concertino would surely disappoint. What it offers instead is a glimpse into Stravinsky’s concept of “pure music,” divorced from choreographic demands, yet still propelled relentlessly by pounding, irregular rhythms.
(b. Vienna, 1943)
Gruber composed Frankenstein!! between 1976 and 1977. It is scored for flute (doubling on piccolo), clarinet (doubling clarinet in A), bassoon, horn, trumpet, percussion, piano, toy instruments, strings and chansonnier.
Program note by the composer:
The origins of this “pan-demonium” go back to the Frankenstein Suite of 1971 — a sequence of songs and dances written for the Vienna MOB art and tone ART Ensemble, which was then active in the field of instrumental theatre. Although the Suite was a success, I was unhappy about its improvisatory structure, and also needed the resources of a full orchestra. So in 1976–77 I completely recomposed the work in its present form. It was first performed on 25 November 1978 by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Simon Rattle, with myself as soloist. For the 1979 Berlin Festival I wrote an alternative version for soloist and 12 players (first performed that year by the Vienna ensemble “die reihe” under Kurt Schwertsik, again with myself as soloist). Since then, the two versions have happily co-existed; and in 1983, at the Espace Cardin in Paris, Frankenstein!! entered the theatre for the first time — an unforeseen development, but one that proved suited to H.C. Artmann’s multi-layered fantasy.
The title of the volume from which I took the poems of Frankenstein!! — Allerleirausch, neue schöne kinderreime (Noises, noises, all around — lovely new children’s rhymes) — promises something innocuous; but Artmann himself has described the poems as being, among other things, “covert political statements.” Typically he refused to explain what he meant. But his reticence is eloquent: the monsters of political life have always tried to hide their true faces, and all too often succeed in doing so. One of the dubious figures in the pan-demonium is the unfortunate scientist who makes so surprising an entry at mid-point. Frankenstein — or whoever we choose to identify with that name — is not the protagonist, but the figure behind the scenes whom we forget at our peril. Hence the exclamation marks.
Artmann’s demystification of heroic villains or villainous heroes finds a musical parallel in, for instance, the persistent alienation of conventional orchestral sound by resorting to a cupboard-full of toy instruments. However picturesque or amusing the visual effect of the toys, their primary role is musical rather than playful — even howling plastic horses have their motivic/harmonic function. In order to do justice to the true significance of the texts it would be enough to provide some extra exercises in structural complexity. By analogy with Artmann’s diction, my aim was a broad palette combining traditional musical idioms with newer and more popular ones, and thus remaining true to the deceptive simplicity of texts whose forms at first glance suggest a naive and innocently cheerful atmosphere.
© 2009 Aaron Grad