Inspired by the Night: Fauré and Szymanowski by Maureen Buja

by Maureen Buja

In a tribute to the places she considers home, violinist Eva Zavaro, joined by pianist Clément Lefebvre, presents works by Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937) and Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924). The recording includes both composers’ violin sonatas (Szymanowski No.1 and Fauré No. 2) and other small pieces.

The choice of the two composers is interesting, mainly because of their separation in time, and the addition of the little works rounds out the composers’ repertoire.

Karol Szymanowski

Gabriel Fauré

The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski changed his style from the early one that followed the German Romantic school to later Impressionistic and then atonal styles. Folk music was another influence. He attended the State Conservatory in Warsaw from 1901 to 1905 and was its director from 1926 to his retirement in 1930. He didn’t serve in WWI due to his lameness and devoted his time to composition and study, working on Islamic culture, ancient Greek drama, and philosophy. He travelled extensively in Europe and North Africa and much of this came out in his opera Król Roger (King Roger); one critic raved about it: ‘we have a body of work representing a dazzling personal synthesis of cultural references, crossing the boundaries of nation, race and gender to form an affirmative belief in an international society of the future based on the artistic freedom granted by Eros’.

He died in 1937 of tuberculosis while under treatment in Switzerland. He’s buried at Skalka in Kraków, where the most distinguished Poles are interred.

It is not known if Szymanowski ever met Fauré, although we do know that Szymanowski met with Ravel. There is much to connect Fauré and Szymanowski, such as Szymanowski’s activities in the Société Musicale Indépendente, which promoted French music and was under the directorship of Fauré. They both studied early musical styles and counterpoint and, later, both forged individual styles that were linked to classical form and tonality, but which were unique to each composer. Both wrote songs early in their career, and this lyrical link carries through each composer’s music.

Szymanowski’s violin sonata was written when he was 22, and it is quite Romantic in style. Zavaro sees a link to the night theme of the recording through its second movement, which begins ‘with the calm of a starry sky’. Fauré’s more rarely played Second Sonata was written after he’d started to become deaf. It’s inward-looking and has a kind of ‘sonic opacity’, which she calls an ‘acoustic night’. Repeated hearings help you see through the darkness and end in a night-seeing clarity. Composer Charles Koechlin called Fauré’s sonata ‘a magnificent ascent to the summits of joy’ and Zavaro imagines the top of the mountain as a first step to flight.

Eva Zavaro (photo by Olivier Lalane)

Clément Lefebvre (photo by Jean-Baptiste Millot)

Other works on the album include Szymanowski’s La Berceuse d’Aïtacho Enia, Op.52 and Notturno e Tarantella, Op.28; Fauré’s other works include his Berceuse, Op.16 and Après un rêve, Op.7 n°1. By closing with Après un rêve, Zavaro chooses to close with an example of Fauré’s melodic genius. The work is one of his most popular, and she says, ‘ It possesses an expressive intensity unique to its composer, present from his earliest works, whose apparent lightness and deceptive simplicity conceal great depth’.

Fauré, Szymanovski: Notturno
Eva Zavaro violin, Clément Lefebvre, piano
La Dolce Volta LDV 127

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The Sounds of Summer

by Maureeen Buja

Summer is here! School’s out, weekends never seem long enough if you’ve been at work all week, and the outdoors becomes the place to be. We’ll look at summer through sound, and a few pieces of music, and see how many different sounds evoke this wonderful season.

The sun has come up, and the birds start to make their statements. The European Robin, the Hooded Crow, and doves all greet the new day.

Dawn at the Acropolis (photo by Maureen Buja)

Your friends are up and about on their bikes because you can hear their bicycle bells in the distance.

The local church sounds the hour with the Westminster Chime. It’s time to get out and go!

Now, where to go? If off to the countryside, then it’s the sounds of animals in the fields that you might hear.

Cows with bells

If you go to the seaside, then it’s the roar of the waves and the equally loud roar of all the beach people.

The Jersey shore

If you go down to the pond, then there will be different water sounds.

Pond

Out in the countryside, the little insects are active: grasshoppers and, as it gets hotter, the katydids come out.

Perhaps it’s time to just lie down and rest your eyes for a bit. Nope, nope, nope, that couldn’t possibly be you making that noise!

William Sydney Mount: Boys Caught Napping in a Field, 1848 (Brooklyn Museum)

In the evening, let’s go to a concert. Down at the park, there’s something fun going on, and the crowd is waiting for it to start!

New York Philharmonic, Concert in the Park

The orchestra tunes.

In our concert, Samuel Barber brings us back to his childhood in Knoxville, in the summer of 1915.

Afterwards, as you step out into the plaza, children are celebrating with some small firecrackers.

But, down in the park, the big fireworks show is on.

After the show, the local band starts with Sousa Marches.

Dekalb, IL Municipal Band, Kirk Lundbeck, dir. – Concert Shell with fireworks

And closes with one of Sousa’s most familiar works. Listen out for those piccolos at the end!

It’s late, and everyone is home, tired after a long day outdoors, and it’s only the owls who patrol to watch through the night.

Tawny Owl at Night

How does your summer day go?

Writing in a Rush: Mozart’s Turkish Violin Concerto No. 5

by Maureen Buja

Written for his time at the Salzburg court, Mozart’s five violin concertos were all produced between 1773 and 1775, probably with himself as the intended conductor. The final three (k. 216, 218, and 219) were all completed in just a few weeks at the end of 1775.

Anonymous: Wolfgang Amadé Mozart with a diamond ring, gift of Maria Theresa, ca 1775 (Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum)

Mozart’s concertos are built on dialogues – a constant conversation between the soloist and the orchestra. This is true of his piano concertos as of his violin concertos. Most follow the same pattern: in the first movement, the orchestra presents most (but not all) of the thematic material with an additional theme being left for the soloist to present. The first movements, in sonata-allegro form, also have short development sections, but ones that can be full of surprises in terms of harmonies and themes. Themes may vanish for the development section, only to reemerge in the recapitulation to a greater effect.

Slow movements are built around long, singing, and often complex melodies. The soloist takes the fore, but the orchestra still has a valuable role to play, particularly in the development sections.

The rondo finales are where Mozart lets himself loose. Dance music of the day is used, or perhaps even a traditional melody (Violin Concerto No. 3 introduces a melody called the Straßburger) and in the fifth concerto, an ordinary minuet is disrupted by a Turkish dance scene. One writer referred to these as ‘burlesque inserts’ and saw them as appropriate for the Salzburg scene but not the more refined Parisian music scene. The interjection of the ‘temperamental and gruff’ in a minor key really breaks up the introspection of the minuet.

The Turks had first menaced Vienna in 1529, in their first unsuccessful siege of the city, which was barely defeated by the Viennese. Winter and epidemics helped to defeat the besieging Turks. The Second Turkish Siege of 1683 held Vienna in thrall for 2 months, until the Polish army under King John III Sobieski pushed the Turks out again. The Ottoman wars with southern Europe (Venice and Vienna included) didn’t end until the early 18th century. Although Mozart was writing some 60 years later, the Turks were still a concept to be reconciled with, albeit perhaps only as an uncultured figure of fun, here interrupting a civilised minuet.

These works are Mozart’s last compositions as a violinist. Following this, the new fortepiano caught his attention, and he changed instruments. At one point, in discussing a return to Salzburg, he made it a condition to return as a keyboardist and not a violinist.

This recording was made in 1952, with Marina Kozulupova as soloist, performing with the Soviet State Orchestra under Nikolaï Anossov.

Marina Kozulupova (1918–1978)

Russian violinist Marina Semyonovna Kozolupova studied at the Moscow Conservatory and, in 1937, was awarded fifth prize at the International Ysaÿe Violin Competition in Brussels. She’s noted for her recordings of Beethoven and Bach. She taught at the Moscow Conservatory and became a professor there in 1967.

Nikolai Pavlovich Anosov

Russian conductor Nikolai Pavlovich Anosov (1900–1962) also studied at the Moscow Conservatory, although as an external student in composition. He made his debut as a conductor in 1930 and was active in more remote parts of the Soviet Union, being chief conductor of the Rostov Philharmonic Orchestra (1938–1939) and the Baku Philharmonic (1939–1940). In addition, during these years, he taught at the Azerbaijan Conservatory. Finally, he returned to Moscow in 1940 and taught opera and symphony conducting at the Moscow Conservatory. One of his students was his son, Gennady Rozhdestvensky. He was an active promoter of 20th-century foreign music and Russian music of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Performed by

Marina Kozulupova
Nikolaï Anossov
Soviet State Orchestra

Recorded in 1952

Official Website

From Orchestra to Piano: Debussy’s La Mer

by Maureen Buja

With its full title, La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestre (The sea, three symphonic sketches for orchestra), we can understand what Claude Debussy (1862–1918) was trying to show in his 1905 orchestral work.

I. De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From dawn to midday on the sea)
II. Jeux de vagues (Play of the Waves)
III. Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the wind and the sea)

The three sections let us know that Debussy is capturing different aspects of the sea. The three great influences on his work at the time, Impressionism, Symbolism, and Japonism, all played a role in this work. If we look at the first edition of the work, the cover makes the Japan connection clear as it shows a detail from Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Mount Fuji and all the boats in the water have been removed.

The cover for the full score, published by Durand et Fils in 1905, recoloured the wave from its original blue to ‘various shades of green, blue, tan, and beige.’

First edition cover

The work was given its orchestral premiere in October 1905 by the Orchestre Lamoureux conducted by Camille Chevillard. Early reception of the piece was poor, with audiences expecting rather more of the sea than the ‘agitated water in a saucer’ that the critics reported. It was only later, in 1908, that the work was a success. As conducted by the composer, it was felt that the 1908 concert presented the ‘first real performance of the piece’.

André Caplet, a long standing friend of Debussy’s made a two-piano arrangement of the work, which is used by the duet on this recording. It was published the same year as the premiere.

André Caplet and Debussy

As recorded by the piano duet team of Vaness Wagner and Wilhem Latchoumia, the use of the two keyboards to replace the orchestra gives us a different kind of work. We’re on the top of the waves, rather than in the darker waters that the orchestral version can take us into.

Vanessa Wagner and Wilhem Latchoumia (Photo by William Beaucardet)

The two performers are well aware of the different ways in which they play the piano and see value in the fact that their ‘respective touches, while not necessarily similar, go together very well (VW)’. They take up the challenge of Debussy’s orchestral timbres and how it requires a certain finesse, fluidity, and shimmer to complete the early 20th-century sound on the piano. Latchoumia quotes Debussy: ‘It was Debussy who encouraged pianists to look for a mellow sound that would make you forget the instrument has hammers. I think that sums up the way we should approach French music’.

The pianists deliberately chose to use André Caplet’s version of La mer for 2 pianos rather than Debussy’s version for 1 piano 4 hands. Even Debussy thought Caplet’s version was better than his!

Wagner and Latchoumia’s recording presents the best of French music at the turn of the century with the trio of Debussy, Satie, and Ravel, but in works that are often more famililar in the orchestra versions. Ravel’s La Valse, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune are given in their piano transcriptions. Works so familiar heard in a new guise can be so rewarding.

Debussy, Ravel, Satie: Piano Twins
Vanessa Wagner and Wilhem Latchoumia
La Dolce Volta LDV 120

Official Website

An Introspective Journey: Vanessa Wagner’s Miniatures

by Maureen Buja  

The idea of the piano miniature has largely faded from the scene, but in the 19th century, particularly fuelled by the rise in home ownership of pianos, composers by the score wrote little consequential pieces for their audience.

Vanessa Wagner

French pianist Vanessa Wagner (b. 1973) has taken piano miniatures by four different composers and used them to weave a world of the imagination.

Wagner opens with Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, Op. 37a, written for a monthly musical magazine based in St Petersburg, Nouvellist. The editor, Nikolay Matveyevich Bernard, commissioned Tchaikovsky for 12 character pieces, one for each month. Bernard gave Tchaikovsky the titles and all through 1876, the pieces appeared. In January we are by the fireside, in May are the White Nights, and we’re riding in a troika in November.

Nikolai Dmitrievich Kuznetsov: Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1893

Next follows selections from Edvard Grieg’s Lyric Pieces. This collection of 66 short pieces for piano was published in 10 volumes from 1867 to 1901. She chooses two of the best-known pieces, Wedding Day at Troldhaugen and Butterfly, and supplements them with Little Bird and other works, closing her Grieg section with Grandmother’s Minuet.

Hjalmer Peterssen: Edvard Grieg, 1891

Selections from the rarely heard Six Impromptus, op. 5, by Jean Sibelius, bring us a side of Sibelius we aren’t as familiar with. Sibelius’ orchestral works are what made him famous, but Wagner finds these little piano pieces to be ‘absolutely sublime’.

Daniel Nyblin: Jean Sibelius, ca 1898–1900

Yakov Yanenko: Mikhail Glinka, 1840

The recording closes with Glinka’s nocturne entitled La Séparation. Just as little known as the Sibelius Impromptus, the Glinka work brings an end to Wagner’s fantasy narrative. She says, ‘It depicts the loneliness that can result from the quest for an unattainable, fantasy love, …and is a favourite theme of Romanticism. Glinka’s piece seemed to me to be the end of the story I had imagined for myself. It was a gentle, sensuous conclusion to a journey tinged with tenderness, sadness and hope, like the cycle of the seasons’. She ties Glinka’s melancholic work back to the opening piece by Tchaikovsky and makes it a fitting end.

One writer comments on the collection that ‘she follows the paths less travelled and takes us to places where we might not have expected her to go’. By connecting these works, she takes us from the miniature worlds of Tchaikovsky and Grieg, which were very much influenced by the Songs Without Words by Mendelssohn, and takes us into the more introspective works by Sibelius and Glinka. It’s a lovely journey and is a recording that, in addition to impressing you with its skill, leaves you at the end in a pensive mood, reflecting on the journey taken and the one that now lies ahead.

Everlasting Seasons: Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Sibelius, Glinka

La Dolce Volta: LDV 126
Release Date: 4 October 2024

Official Website

Fast and Furious: Gounod’s Faust Ballets

 by Maureen Buja 

The story of Faust has captured composers’ imaginations for centuries. There was a historical figure, Johann Georg Faust (c. 1480–1540), who made the original deal with the devil at the crossroads when he exchanged his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. The idea of a ‘Faustian’ pact always carries with it the idea of sacrificing good (or the spiritual) for the evils of power, knowledge, and material gain. In preferring human knowledge over divine knowledge, Faust is damned from the beginning. From 16th-century puppet plays to Goethe’s tragic figure in the 19th century, Faust is always the symbol for ‘what if’ or ‘going to the dark side’.

The French composer Charles Gounod (1818–1893) met Faust in 1859. His opera, first given at the Théâtre Lyrique as an opéra comique, i.e., an opera with dialogue, in 1859, evolved over the next decade to have recitatives added (Strasbourg 1860), scenes removed (La Scala, 1862), and dances added (Paris Opéra, 1869). In working with Goethe’s text, Gounod slimmed down the number of characters and conflated them to better serve as opera. Opera moves more slowly than a play, so refining is always necessary.

Bayard & Bertall: Charles Gounod, 1860

The addition of ballet music was required for performance at the Paris Opéra. At first, Gounod didn’t want to write it and asked his student, Camille Saint-Saëns, to do it. Saint-Saëns, appalled at the request, went straight to Gounod to change his mind. Gounod finally agreed and created a score that more often had a life separate from the opera.

The ballet section was inserted into the first scene of the final act for the Paris Opéra performance, and that final addition made the former opéra comique a grand opera. It became the most frequently performed opera in Paris.

Charles-Antoine Cambon and Victor Coindre: The palace of Méphistophélès, Faust, 1859 (Paris: Bibliothéque national)

At the start of the last act, Méphistophélès and Faust are in the Harz Mountains on Walpurgis Night. An ‘orgiastic ballet’ becomes the focus for the revelry and concludes with Phrynes’s Dance. Phryne was an (in)famous Greek courtesan from the 4th century who was very wealthy. Put on trial for impiety, for profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries, she was acquitted when the jury saw her bare breasts.

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Phryne before the Areopagus, ca 1861 (Hamburger Kunsthalle)

Other dances in the ballet are by Nubian slaves, Cleopatra, and Trojan Women, all strong and well-known ideals of women that would appeal to Faust. It’s Phryne’s Dance that closes the ballet sequence.

This 1958 recording was made by the Orchestre de l’Association des Concerts Colonne, led by Pierre Dervaux. The Colonne Orchestra was founded in 1873 by the violinist and conductor, Édouard Colonne. Colonne wanted an orchestra that could play contemporary music (Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Charpentier, Fauré, d’Indy, Debussy, Ravel, Widor, Enescu, Dukas, Chabrier, and the like), as well as the big German composers such as Wagner and Richard Strauss.

Pierre Dervaux

Pierre Dervaux (1917–1992) was President and Chief conductor of the Colonne orchestra from 1958 to 1992, starting his career as principal conductor of the Opéra-Comique (1947–53), and the Opéra de Paris (1956–72). He led many of France’s finest orchestras, including the Concerts Pasdeloup (1949–55) and was Musical Director of the Orchestre des Pays de Loire (1971–79) as well as holding similar posts at the Quebec Symphony Orchestra (1968–75), and the Nice Philharmonic (1979–82). He taught at the École Normale de Musique de Paris (1964–86) and the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal (1965–72).

Performed by

Pierre Dervaux
Orchestre de l’Association des Concerts Colonne

Recorded in 1958

Official Website

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Finding a New Creative Path: Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto

by Maureen Buja  

When he finally arrived in Vienna as a permanent resident in 1795, Beethoven fit into an interesting hiatus in the city’s music life. Mozart‘s recent death left a place open for a daring piano virtuoso and composer. In his first 10 years in the city, Beethoven wrote 20 of his 32 piano sonatas and 3 of his piano concertos—who better to show off his skills than himself?

Joseph Willibrord Mähler: Ludwig van Beethoven, ca 1804–1805 (Vienna Museum)

Completed in 1803 and revised in 1804, Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto started with sketches as far back as 1796, and the first and second movements were completed around 1800. It was given its premiere with the composer at the keyboard on 5 April 1803 in a concert that included the Second Symphony and Christ on the Mount of Olives, his oratorio.

Beethoven was starting to have problems with his hearing as he approached this concerto, and this set him on his new creative path. Music, for him, became a dynamic process, rather than the filling in of architectural forms. One example of this can be seen in his 3rd Symphony, the Eroica, where the first theme isn’t as it is first stated but comes to define its form through the progress of the first movement.

The 3rd Piano Concerto falls between this new compositional method of the Eroica and his earlier Viennese style, when he was more concerned with establishing his name and credentials as a composer and performer.

If we look at just the first movement, we seem to be starting with a theme more intended for a symphonic movement, rather than a concerto movement. The orchestra gives the first statement of the theme, and Beethoven uses the orchestra to create motivic blocks that can be moved around as necessary. He plays with the different registers of the orchestra and inserts his ‘heavy beats on light places’ to play with the rhythms. His focus, however, is the soloist, and the piano is given a brilliant placement that foreshadows much of his later piano writing.

The repeat of the opening gives him the opportunity to play with the opening theme, but the following development is kept short. It’s the final section, with the Coda where the theme seems to really blossom and show its potential.

There’s so much in this work that gives us an indication of the unique way that Beethoven will progress – always challenging the norm, pressing forward with new ideas, and rethinking the usual to create the unusual. 

This recording was made in 1958, with Alexander Jenner as soloist under Kurt Richter leading the Symphony Orchestra of the Volksoper Vienna.

Alexander Jenner

Alexander Jenner (b. 1929) studied in Vienna and, upon graduation in 1949, was awarded the ‘Bösendorfer-Preisflügel’, a grand piano given to the best student of that year graduating from the Vienna State Academy of Music. In 1957, by unanimous jury vote, he was awarded first prize in the Rio de Janeiro Contest for Pianists. As a performer, in addition to the classics, he was active in the promotion of modern music, becoming the first Austrian pianist to perform George Gershwin’s two great piano works, the Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F in 1951; he also gave the premiere of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka for solo piano.

Kurt Dietmar Richter

Kurt Dietmar Richter was a German composer and conductor (1931–2019) who lived in Pilzen, Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. He received his musical training in Erfurt, where he fell under the influence of Paul Hindemith and, throughout his life, continued to promote modern music. In 1990, he founded the Berlin artist initiative die neue brücke.

Performed by

Alexander Jenner
Kurt Richter
Symphony Orchestra of the Volksoper Vienna

Recorded in 1958

Official Website