Opening Night with Joana Carneiro and Cantus

Following the death of Haydn’s longtime patron Prince Nicolaus Esterhazy in 1790, the prince’s son and successor Anton curbed the court’s musical activities and reduced Haydn’s salary to a modest pension. Meanwhile, Johann Peter Salomon, a German violinist and impresario working in London, saw in Prince Nicolaus’s death an opportunity to lure the illustrious Haydn to England. Salomon offered Haydn a generous contract and, for the first time in decades, Haydn secured extended leave from his Esterhazy service. Haydn composed six symphonies for his initial trip to London in 1791–92 and added six more for a follow-up visit in 1793–94. 

Another work from Haydn’s first London season, the Sinfonia concertante in B-flat, offers insight into the commercial and competitive interests at hand. While Salomon and Haydn presented weekly concerts on Mondays in the Hanover Music Rooms, the rival Professional Concert group occupied the same venue on Thursdays for performances featuring Ignaz Pleyel, a former composition student of Haydn. (As Haydn put it in a letter to a friend in Vienna, “Now a bloody harmonious war will commence between master and pupil.”) Pleyel’s signature concertante works featured colorful solo groups, including two pieces for mixed string and woodwind soloists. Not to be outdone, Haydn designed a sinfonia concertante in direct competition with Pleyel, choosing a solo quartet of violin, cello, oboe, and bassoon. The new work premiered on March 9, 1792, with the presenter Salomon as the solo violinist. 

The sinfonia concertantegenre only emerged around 1770, with early proponents concentrated in Paris and Mannheim, Germany. These works, featuring multiple soloists and orchestra, combined aspects of the Classical symphony and concerto styles and also updated aspects of the Baroque concerto grosso tradition, which centered on the interplay between small groups of soloists and larger supporting ensembles. Haydn’s Sinfonia concertante shows an affinity with those Baroque ensemble works, at times using the solo quartet to enrich the larger ensemble. After the full ensemble’s first pass through the exposition, the concertante group assumes the shared role of concerto soloist, the four players exchanging solos and rotating through various pairings. Above all, this opening movement reveals a kinship to Haydn’s pioneering symphonic craft. As in the symphonies, the formal structure of the Haydn’s Sinfonia concertante becomes a framework for exquisitely prepared moments of surprise and whimsy. Unexpected shifts in trajectory (such as the wayward harmonies in the development section, or the moody minor-key episode in the through-composed cadenza) make the returns to established keys and themes all the more satisfying.

The central Andante movement elaborates on an innocent tune, with the soloists spinning transparent textures over refined accompaniment from a pared-down orchestra. In contrast, the finale is bold and theatrical, with the solo violin standing in for an operatic soprano. An imploring recitative builds anticipation for the Allegro con spirito romp to the finish.

© Aaron Grad

Premiere: March 9, 1792, London. First SPCO performance: October 24, 1964. Most recent SPCO performance: April 15–18, 2009. Instrumentation: solo oboe, bassoon, violin and cello; flute, oboe, bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.

Luminous Body is a collaboration between me and Craig Lucas, written in the period immediately following our narratively charged opera Two Boys. Luminous Body is, as a result, abstract and poetic in gesture and form. The text interpolates, among other things, stylized versions of the teachings of Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, and Plato; these are scrambled and re-contextualized and, in a sense, serve as background for the textures of the combination of nine male voices and orchestra.

Part 1 introduces the chord structure that governs the entire piece, and ends with the repeated words, "only your will is your own." The second and third parts, loosely dealing with the Devil and the importance of choosing one's words, are based on drones generated by the voices and the strings; the constant (but slightly morphing) texture is meant to be meditative and vague. I have always wanted to set the Beatitudes, and Craig has paraphrased them beautifully here; the tenors intone the word “blessed” over and over while the strings and winds reiterate the passacaglia from the opening of the piece. The fifth and final part is a series of proverbs. The orchestra begins in a series of loose, ecstatic drones, which increase in intensity ("Make your own family!") until we jump suddenly to the garden of Gethsemane, where Christ was betrayed while his disciples slept. "Why are you sleeping? Couldn't you stay awake for one more hour?" he asks, while the strings and winds lazily chant in the background.

© Nico Muhly 2011

Premiere: These performances. Instrumentation: male chorus, two flutes second doubling piccolo, oboe, English horn, two clarinets second doubling bass clarinet, bassoon, con- trabassoon, two horns, two trumpets, one percussion, piano, and strings.

Bach spent most of his professional life in church positions, composing sacred music almost exclusively. He wrote extensive secular music (including the Brandenburg Concertos and many of the suites for solo instruments) while working for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen from 1717 to 1723, but upon his move to Leipzig, church duties again consumed him. In 1729, he found a new secular outlet when he took a side job as director of the Collegium Musicum, an ensemble of professional and amateur musicians that performed weekly concerts. Bach wrote various new works for the Collegium, and he also regularly mined his catalog of old compositions (especially the instrumental music from Cöthen), creating new versions tailored to the ensemble. The source materials for the Concerto for Two Violins date from the Leipzig period, but some scholars suspect that the work was recycled from earlier.

In the Concerto for Two Violins, Bach combined the florid instrumental textures he had absorbed from Vivaldi with the rigor of his own contrapuntal craft. The memorable subject of the concerto’s fugal opening begins with an ascending scale fragment that leaps up and then gradually snakes its way back down an octave to the starting pitch. In counterbalance, the solo episodes wrangle an incisive theme of dramatic leaps and descending scale fragments. The movement proceeds in this ritornello format, interspersing ensemble statements of the subject around churning elaboration by the soloists.

The stately slow movement again begins with a fugal pattern. The two solo lines dance in subtle opposition of each other, creating a smooth stream of nearly constant motion. When the voices do unite in descending harmonies, this simplest music speaks with uncanny elegance.

The Allegro finale returns to the propulsive D-minor mood of the concerto’s opening movement. The first solo violin takes the first statement, followed just two eighth notes later by the second violin, at the same pitch instead of transposed. This echo effect, featured throughout the movement, harkens back to similar examples in works for soloists by Corelli and Vivaldi, reinforcing the Italian influence in Bach’s concerto style.

© Aaron Grad 2011

First SPCO performance: December 2, 1959. Most recent SPCO performance: March 30, 2008. Instrumentation: Solo two violins; harpsichord, and strings.

Brahms struggled for a long time to find his orchestral voice. He wrote the First Piano Concerto and two Serenades (for reduced orchestra), opuses 11 and 16, in the late 1850s, but then stalled for over a decade on his First Symphony. He was all too aware of the legacy of his forebears (none looming larger than Beethoven), and the genre of the symphony carried particular baggage. Brahms was forty and already one of the most esteemed composers of his generation by the time he finally issued his first work for full orchestra without soloist, in the unprecedented format of an extended set of variations. The Variations on a Theme of Joseph Haydn established Brahms’s lucid and refined approach to orchestral writing and led to a torrent of music for large ensemble: his First and Second Symphonies in 1876 and 1877, respectively; the Violin Concerto in 1878; and the Third and Fourth symphonies, Second Piano Concerto; and Double Concerto among other works in the decade to follow.

The theme at the heart of Brahms’s piece is likely not the work of Joseph Haydn, despite the work’s title. It came to Brahms by way of an unpublished divertimento score, discovered in 1870 by the Viennese music librarian Carl Ferdinand Pohl while he was preparing a Haydn biography. Knowing Brahms’s fascination with early music, Pohl showed the composer the manuscript. Brahms was particularly struck by the movement headed “St. Anthony Chorale,” scored for eight wind instruments. Brahms copied out the chorale and returned to it in the summer of 1873 as the basis for the set of variations, fleshed out in parallel versions for two pianos (completed first, but given the secondary Opus number of 56b) and for orchestra.

There is no clear evidence of who composed the St. Anthony Chorale. One name that gets bandied about is Ignaz Pleyel, a onetime student of Haydn. It is also possible that whoever notated the theme borrowed an existing tune of the day. What is most fascinating about this chorale is not its smooth melody, nor its ceremonial dotted rhythms; the aspect that reverberates throughout Brahms’s novel treatment is the chorale’s unusual phrasing. The irregular groupings—especially the five-measure sections at the opening, rather than the expected four-measure units—create a viscous sense of structure perfectly suited to Brahms’s own flowing, elided approach to phrasing.

Brahms’s treatment of the theme retains the source material’s wind band emphasis, adding only cellos and basses to warm the low register. In the eight short variations that follow, the surface charms are self-evident; such is the paradox of Brahms that the formality (and asymmetry) of this variation structure elicited some of his most playful and inventive music. The finale builds a contrapuntal passacaglia over a cycling ground bass five measures long. A coda brings back the valedictory theme, enlivened by rapid, swooping scales and the shimmer of a triangle.

© Aaron Grad 2011

First performance: November 2, 1873 in Vienna by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Brahms. First and most recent SPCO performance: January 5–7, 1996. Instrumentation: two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabas- soon, four horns, two trumpets, tim-pani, percussion, and strings.