Tony Bennett, Amy Winehouse - Body and Soul

49,137,087 views Sep 14, 2011 #TonyBennett #Body #AmyWinhouse

49,137,087 views • Sep 14, 2011 • #TonyBennett #Body #AmyWinhouse

Tony Bennett performing Body and Soul with Amy Winehouse from Duets II: The Great Performances

19 January: Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 Was Premiered

By Georg Predota, Interlude

Saint-Saëns, 1875

On 19 January 1873, the French cellist, viola da gamba player and instrument maker Auguste Tolbecque premiered Camille Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 33, a work specifically composed for him. Tolbecque was a close personal friend, and the solo cellist of the Conservatoire orchestra. He was a composer himself, and also a published music historian. Tolbecque was influential in the performance of early music as he conducted research into historical instruments and their restoration.

Saint-Saëns as a boy, 1846

His compositions tend to be light in style and influenced by Mendelssohn and Schumann. Tolbecque retired before he was able to produce a recording, and he does not figure prominently in the review of the Saint-Saëns concerto published in the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris immediately after the premiere. “If Mr. Saint-Saëns should decide to continue in this vein,” the reviewer wrote, “which is consistent with his violin concerto, the Trio in F, and other works of lesser significance, he is certain to recover many of the votes that he lost with his all-too-obvious divergence from classicism and the tendencies in a number of his recent works. We must say that the Cello Concerto seems to us to be a beautiful and good work of excellent sentiment and perfect cohesiveness, and as usual the form is of greatest interest.” 

Auguste Tolbecque

At the time Saint-Saëns composed his first Cello Concerto he had already reached the age of thirty-seven. He was highly regarded in French musical circles, but as a composer he was still searching for his breakthrough work. He clearly possessed a mastery of compositional technique, and his ease, ingenuity, naturalness and productivity was compared to “a tree producing leaves.” Although he was living in a period of extreme musical experimentations, Saint-Saëns remained stubbornly traditional. Romain Rolland wrote in 1908, “He brings into the midst of our modern restlessness something of the sweetness and clarity of past periods, something that seems like fragments of a vanished world.” In his first Cello Concert, Saint-Saëns takes a deliberate stance away from what the critic calls “the (modernist) tendencies in a number of his recent works.” His unmistakable melodic charm and characteristic freshness and vitality are clothed in a formal clarity that undoubtedly accounts for the widespread popularity the 1st Cello Concerto enjoyed from the very onset. 

Opening of Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1

For Saint-Saëns, “form was the essence of art.” As he once wrote, “the music-lover is most of all enchanted by expressiveness and passion, but that is not the case for the artist. An artist who does not feel a deep sense of personal satisfaction with elegant lines, harmonious colors or a perfect progression of chords has no comprehension of true art.” As the anonymous critic had written after the premiere, “it should be clarified that this is in reality a “Concertstück,” since the three relatively short movements run together. The orchestra plays such a major role that it gives the work symphonic character, a tendency present in every concerto of any significance since Beethoven.” Saint-Saëns might have been looking at Franz Liszt, a composer he greatly admired, as the three movements of the concerto are interconnected. In fact, the principle theme is sounded in legato running triplets, and it appears in all movements of the concerto. 

Saint-Saëns, circa 1880

Sir Donald Francis Tovey later wrote “Here, for once, is a violoncello concerto in which the solo instrument displays every register without the slightest difficulty in penetrating the orchestra.” The orchestra clearly plays a role beyond that of mere accompaniment, “as this work never succumbs to the imbalance frequently encountered in cello concertos whereby for long stretches the soloist is seen bowing furiously but is scarcely heard.” As Saint-Saëns tellingly suggested, “Virtuosity gives a composer wings with which to soar above the commonplace and the platitudinous.” Uniting the lyrical quality of the cello with instrumental virtuosity and carful orchestral scoring produced a work valued by performers and loved by audiences. But what is more, a good many composers, including Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff considered Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 to be the greatest of all cello concertos.

Saint-Saëns: 1. Cellokonzert ∙ hr-Sinfonieorchester ∙ Gautier Capuçon ∙ ...

Camille Saint-Saëns: 1. Cellokonzert a-Moll op. 33 ∙ Allegro non troppo – Allegro molto – Tempo I – Allegretto con moto – Tempo I – Un peu moins vite – Più allegro comme le premier mouvement – Molto allegro hr-Sinfonieorchester – Frankfurt Radio Symphony ∙ Gautier Capuçon, Violoncello ∙ Alain Altinoglu, Dirigent ∙ hr-Sinfoniekonzert ∙ Alte Oper Frankfurt, 14. Februar 2020 ∙

Stephen Hough-Rach 3rd, 1st Movement excerpt

Sir Stephen Hough: The Composer

by Georg Predota, Interlude

One of the most distinctive artists of his generation, Sir Stephen Hough combines an international career as a pianist with those of composer, writer, and painter. The first classical performer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (2001), Hough is a true renaissance man, exceedingly gifted as a pianist, educator, writer, painter, and composer.

Sir Stephen Hough

While his achievements as a pianist are well-known and documented, Hough is also a respected author with four books and hundreds of articles to his name. In addition, a solo exhibition of his paintings was presented in London in 2012. It’s hardly surprising that The Economist included him in the list of “Twenty Living Polymaths.”

In addition, Hough is also a published and frequently commissioned composer, having crafted works for orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble, organ, harpsichord, and solo piano. He has received commissions from the Takács Quartet, the Cliburn, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, and the Gilmore Foundation, among many others. 

First Compositions

According to his father, Hough had memorised seventy nursery rhymes by the age of two. Be that as it may, singing was indeed his first form of musical expression, “especially as we had no classical music in my childhood home.” Hough sang hymns in primary school and church; later, he joined a choir in high school, and he joined the compulsory chorus at Julliard.

Hough started piano lessons at the age of six, and he began to compose at around the same time. He remembers writing a “Mass” in his teenage years, but Hough is generally dismissive of his juvenilia compositions. As he writes, “the Mass 

Transcriptions

Apparently, Hough composed a substantial number of works, but as he related in an interview, “mercifully, that pile of smudged sketches has disappeared.” These early efforts culminated in a viola sonata, the only early work that was actually published. However, for the next twenty odd years, Hough composed next to nothing, except an odd transcription or two. Hough related the story that after a recital in New York in the late 1990s, when he played his transcription of Rodger’s Carousel Waltz, he was chatting with the composer John Corigliano. 

Corigliano told Hough, “You should compose your own music. The only real difference between a transcription and writing your own pieces is using your themes rather than someone else’s.” This conversation became the starting point for a renewed engagement with compositions. Hough started to write little pieces for friends, and the bassoonist Graham Salvage from the Hallé Orchestra asked him to write a concerto. As Hough explained, “In a mad moment or reckless courage, I agreed to have a go and started sketching what eventually became The Loneliest Wilderness, my first serious piece in two decades.”

First Commissions

The Loneliest Wilderness was inspired by the poem “My Company” by Herbert Read (1893–1968), containing the following lines:

But, God! I know that I’ll stand
Someday in the loneliest wilderness,
Someday my heart will cry
For the soul that has been, but that now
Is scatter’d with the winds,
Deceased and devoid.

I know that I’ll wander with a cry:
‘O beautiful men, O men I loved,
O whither are you gone, my company?’

The work is based on two main musical ideas: the interval of a descending fourth and a rising chain of thirds. Introvert and restrained, this musical oration has a strong Jewish flavour to it, taking its inspiration from “the heart-breaking regret of an army officer as he looks back at the loss of the company of soldiers under his command.” 

Takács Quartet

Stephen Hough’s String Quartet No. 1

Dedicated to the Takács Quartet, Hough’s first string quartet premiered in December 2021. As it was commissioned as a companion piece to works by Ravel and Dutilleux, the composer set out to explore “not so much what united their musical language, but what was absent from them.” Although there are no quotes or direct references to the composers of Les Six, as captioned in the subtitle, the composer imagines unspecified places and memory where meetings might have taken place.

This string quartet “evokes a flavour more than a style,” according to Hough, “but a flavour rarely found in the music of Ravel and Dutilleux. In Les Six it’s not so much a lack of seriousness, although seeing life through a burlesque lens is one recurring ingredient; rather it’s an aesthetic re-view of the world after the catastrophe of the Great War. Composers like Poulenc and Milhaud were able to discover poignance in the rough and tumble of daily human life in a way which escaped the fastidiousness of those other two composers.”

Sonatas and Beyond

Stephen Hough’s Broken Branches

The term “Sonata” had a multiplicity of meanings over the years, but for Hough “it has kept its wordlessness and its seriousness; a sonata, regardless of form, is a statement of unity, if not uniformity.” And although the composer is wary of words or descriptions attached to them, he argues that “music is neither a thought nor an emotion nor a person, but very much its own entity. His sonata “Broken Branches,” is an oblique tribute to Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path, and a passage from Scripture: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Cut off from me you can do nothing.”

The sonata is constructed of sixteen small and inconclusive sections, like branches from a single tree. “Broken branches” functions in three ways; fragments of fragility, related in theme but incomplete and damaged.” The work seems to grow naturally out of Hough’s style of playing, and it opens with a “Prelude” and ends with a “Postlude” of identical music, but the anguish of the opening G-sharp minor becomes a glowing G major at the end. “Branches beginning life anew in a new spring.” The climax of this sonata is a section called “non credo,” based on “material from the Credo of my Missa Mirabilis, which explores issues of doubt and despair in the context of the concrete affirmations of the Nicene Creed.” 

A Statement of Faith

Stephen Hough joined the Roman Catholic Church at the age of 19, and he considered becoming a priest, in particular joining the Franciscan Order. Hough has extensively written about his homosexuality and its relationship with music and his religion. As he wrote, “Catholicism is still home for me. And despite everything, I haven’t found anything that suits me better.” Hough is attracted to the idea that Catholicism doesn’t emphasise rich and powerful people, but embraces poverty and simplicity. “Christianity celebrates what is ultimately important about being human—community, and concern for the widows, the prisoners, the prostitutes, people who are outcasts. I find that very attractive.”

The Missa Mirabilis is connected with a highly personal experience. Hough had been working on the piece for about one year when he had a serious car accident, overturning his car on the motorway at 80 mph. “I stepped out of the one untouched door in my completely mangled car,” he remembers, “with my Mass manuscript and my body intact, then wrote part of the “Agnus Dei” in St. Mary’s Hospital, waiting for four hours for a brain scan. I was conscious, as I was somersaulting with screeching metallic acrobatics on the M1, of feeling regret that I would never get to hear the music on which I’d been working so intensely in the days before. Someone had other ideas.” 

The Partita was commissioned by the Naumburg Foundation for Albert Cano Smit in 2019. As Hough explains, “composing four sonatas of a serious, intense character, I wanted to write something different – something brighter, something more celebratory, more nostalgic.” Scored in five movements, the outer movements “Overture” and “Toccata” are inspired by the world of a grand cathedral organ. The short three inner movements, “Capriccio,” and “Canción y Danza I & II,” are based on the interval of a fifth and partially represent an explicit homage to Federico Mompou.

Stephen Hough’s Fanfare Toccata

In 2002, Hough was commissioned to write a work for the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, performed by all 30 competitors. Hough took his inspiration from a variety of toccatas he had learned over the years, including Scarlatti, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff, Poulenc, Prokofiev and Samuel Barber. This inspiration accounted for the fanfare flourish complemented by a deeply romantic tune. It really does speak well of Hough’s composition that all 30 competitors have decided to make the Fanfare Toccata a part of their regular recital repertoire.