CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAM NOTES
​by Judith Eckelmeyer

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The Cleveland Museum of Art

Australian Chamber Orchestra
​
Richard Tognetti, leader
David Leisner, guitar

Wednesday, March 24, 1993
​Gartner Auditorium

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Program

Béla Bartók (1881-1945): Divertimento (1939)
     Allegro non troppo
     Molto adagio
     Allegro assai
        

Leo Brouwer (1939-): Tres dansas concertantes
     Allegro
     ♩= 120
     Toccata
     

Peter Sculthorpe (1929-): Nourlangie (1989)

Leoš Janáčk (1854-1928): String Quartet No. 1, after Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata (1923) (arranged by Richard Tognetti)
​     Adagio (con moto)
     Con moto
     Con moto (Vivace-Andante)
​     Con moto (Adagio)
​

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Program Notes by Judith Eckelmeyer

Some of the most powerful incentives for artistic creativity are the characterization of one's cultural or national heritage or, as a foil, an attempt to represent the culture of the "other." There has been some manifestation of this creative direction in every age. An example in traditional European music is the tonus peregrinus, one of the medieval psalm tones (melodic formulas for singing the verses of biblical psalms). Like the other eight psalm tones, it consists of two musical sections corresponding to the traditional two verbal sections of a psalm verse; unlike them, however, the tonus peregrinus contains a tenor (principal chanting pitch) which changes at the second part of the verse by dropping a step rather than staying the same. The name of this unusual formula, peregrinus, literally means "wandering." It was originally thought to refer to the fact that the tenor had changed or wandered. Scholars now think, however, that the reference is to the "wandering" of the formula from another "foreign" service into the Roman liturgy. The awareness of the presence of the "other" is thus documented from a very early period of European history.

As the development of the concept of nationhood reached an apex in the nineteenth century, many artists assumed the concerns of their countrymen and sought to express them with distinctively regional attributes. In music, national characteristics were conveyed by rhythms associated with regional dances, harmonic or melodic constructions derived from or simulating music of a recognizable district or people, melodies borrowed from authentic folk tunes, and the operatic or programmatic depiction of legends and historical events related to a particular constituency.

The nineteenth-century nationalistic movement in central and eastern Europe (especially Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, Italy and Russia) was succeeded in the twentieth century by nationalistic compositions of smaller or newly-independent nations (such as Finland, Romania, Lithuania, and Estonia) and works glorifying the heritage of older, more established nations (such as England) that were experiencing critical expansion or upheaval. A new interest in the formalized study of the music of indigenous peoples, pioneered in Hungary and Romania by Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók, broke the trail for what is today the discipline of ethnomusicology. Under that heading a number of composers in the Western formal tradition have explored the musical resources of Africa (Olly Wilson, Talib Rasul Hakim) and South America (Villa Lobos, Ginastera), while (more recently) other areas of the world have begun to excite the composer's imagination. One such region, Australia, is the source for the unusual sounds and sites represented in music on this evening's program.

​Béla Bartók's Divertimento for strings was written in 1939, during the troubled time just prior to the outbreak of World War II. Bartók had been suffering a composition block in response to the threat of a military action that would involve his homeland, Hungary. Conductor Paul Sacher offered him the use of his own chalet in Switzerland as an opportunity for Bartók to remove himself from the distress of the situation and possibly begin composing again. Sacher commissioned a work for string orchestra, and Bartók, eased by the pleasant surroundings and congenial summer weather, finished the piece in fifteen days. The three movements strongly reflect the composer's fascination and experience with Hungarian folk modes and rhythms, which had been such a prominent influence on the fourth and fifth string quartets during the previous decade. In a way, the new Divertimento simply continued and expanded the sonorities of these remarkable quartets by exploring the possibilities of the expanded string range (with the addition of the double bass) and the effects of massed strings in contrast to soloists in the context of folk idiom; the work might also be regarded as a step toward the Concerto for Orchestra, which Bartók would compose in the United States only four years later.

The first movement's infectious rhythms permeate broadly-structured chords, often with rich dissonances, in alternation with more delicate passages of canon or cantabile melodies. It is a kind of rondo.

The second movement explores the sounds of the instruments (with and without mutes) and solo-versus-ensemble sections in the style known as Bartók's "night music". Structured like an arch, it begins with muted violas, cellos, and basses forming a trembling foundation over which the two violin sections (in almost fugal sequence) propose a slow melody. At the pinnacle of the movement, all the instruments play without mutes. When the initial melody returns, it is intimated briefly by solo violins against the muted lower string sections; the remaining violins then join in. 

The third movement is a fast dance in duple meter but with uneven phrase lengths and many instances of solo-versus-ensemble sonorities. A contrasting slower section contains fugal material but concludes with a solo cadenza for first violin. After a return of the first idea there is a faster section in triplets and a slower, scherzando section played pizzicato. The final vivace contains several changes between duple and triple meter and between solo and ensemble sections for a brilliant conclusion

Leo Brouwer was born in Cuba in 1939 and received his early education there. His earliest published works date from 1956. As a citizen of the country during the Cuban Revolution he had been affected by issues of the artist in a revolutionary society. Although he was able to study at the Juilliard School with Persichetti and Wolpe and at the Hartt College of Music in 1960 and 1961, his experience at the 1961 Warsaw Autumn Festival was particularly important in forming his direction in composition. Returning to Havana, he was appointed a music assistant for Radio Havana, director of the music department of the Instituto de Arts Industry Cinematograficos, professor of composition at the Havana Conservatory, and director of the experimental music department. His works range from the jazz-influenced Homage to Mingus and adaptations of several songs by the Beatles to compositions such as Sonata pian e forte, interfacing pre-existing works by traditional composers with his own music. He is also a widely recognized guitarist.

In his note on Tres Danzas Concertantes, David Leisner writes:

Tres Danzas Concertantes was completed by Leo Brouwer in 1958, when he was a 19-year-old student. It shows remarkable confidence and originality for such a young composer and is a piece worthy of becoming a part of the mainstream guitar concerto repertoire. Scored for guitar and string orchestra, it is in three lively movements, each of which incorporates melodic and rhythmic elements of Cuban folk and popular music.

The first movement is in simple A-B-A form. The middle section is slower and lighter than its surrounding sections, which are more driven and excited. It ends efficiently with a brief coda. An eerily beautiful passage for muted strings opens the second movement, which is a mostly quiet and quirky nocturnal dance. A very few musical motives are discussed, dissected, and passed from one instrument to another. Lovely counterpoint abounds. A solo guitar cadenza quietly intervenes before the strings take over the dominate and final measures. The last movement, a toccata, is a vivacious exploration of syncopated rhythms, and it swings! During a brief interruption in the middle by a calmer contrapuntal section, a viola subtly introduces the theme that dominated the remainder of the piece. The opening material returns and is varied; a faster tempo then brings the work to its swift conclusion.

Born in Launceston, Tasmania, Peter Sculthorpe studied at the University of Melbourne and Wadham College, Oxford. As a Harkness Fellow in 1966-67, he was composer-in-residence at Yale University; in 1972-73 he was visiting professor at the University of Sussex, England. He has been a reader in music at the University of Sydney since the late sixties. Sculthorpe has received many awards and several honorary doctoral degrees, is being recorded increasingly, and is the subject of a book by Michael Hannan treating his life and works to 1979. 

Sculthorpe is unique in that his native country is a great influence on his style. Further, he has absorbed aspects of much of the music of Asia (especially Japan and Indonesia) owing to the proximity of Australia to this areas. Concerning his Nourlangie for solo guitar, strings and percussion he has written:

Early this year I spent some time around Nourlangie Rock, in Kakadu National Park. A place both powerful and serene, it houses some of the best aboriginal rock art in the area. Flying over it, one can see across the floodplains to Port Essington, to the Arafura Sea, and to the Torres Strait. From the air one can also see the site of a proposed uranium mine which lies just to the east of the rock.

It was inevitable that I should write a piece about Nourlangie. This work, in one movement, is more concerned with my feelings about the area than it is concerned with an actual description of it. All the same, the work contains many bird-sounds, and, in order to give a sense of place, the main melody contains some characteristics of the music of the Torres Strait.

Leoš Janáček's "Kreutzer" Sonata (actually his first string quartet is a composition born from multiple layers of references. The most obvious is to Beethoven's violin sonata Op. 47, called the "Kreutzer" after the violinist to whom it was finally dedicated. The second reference is to a novella of the same name by Leo Tolstoy. The narrator in this novella tells of his jealousy of a violinist whom he has introduced to his wife. The violinist and the wife, a pianist, perform Beethoven's sonata together. Some time later, the narrator returns from a trip to find his wife and violinist together and believes they are having an adulterous relationship; he murders his wife. A third reference layer is Janáček's own long-term "passionate friendship" with Kamila Stösslová, which had begun in 1917 when he was 63 and she was 25. Janáček's wife and Kamila's husband were not pleased with the situation, but there is no evidence that the "friendship" was anything more than the composer's infatuation with the young woman; in fact, the friendship continued through Janáček's last years. The analogous relationship to that of the violinist and the narrator's wife in Tolstoy's novella is the source for the title of Janáček's quartet, written in 1923. This was not Janáček's only work with this title, however. In 1908, while a student in Vienna, he wrote a piano trio with the same name, also based on Tolstoy's story; the work is now lost, but since Janáček completed the quartet in just over a week, he may have used the trio as its basis.

The four movements have "con moto" in their tempo designations, but they actually have different characters. The first alternates between impassioned melody and a more lively, fluid theme. Paul Myers' note for the Crossroads recording by the Janáček Quartet indicates that this movement's themes resemble ones in the composer's opera Kát'a Kabanová (Katya Kavanova), which has a plot similar to Tolstoy's novella. The second movement is a polka, interrupted by tremolos and fragmented phrases. In the third, slow movement there is a reference to the second theme of the first movement of Beethoven's sonata; Janáček alternates slow, melancholy sections with faster passages. The final movement, built around a dramatic descending three-note motive from the first movement, begins muted and slowly, and progresses to unmuted and passionately fast with pizzicato points and tremolo.

Judith Eckelmeyer © 1993

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As the Australian Chamber Orchestra original performance is not available on YouTube, please enjoy these performances:

Bartók's Divertimento (1939)
Chicago Symphony Orchestra | Pierre Boulez, conductor

Brouwer's Tres danzas concertantes (1958)
Allegro
Ensemble Amati | Raymond Dessaints, conductor | Alvaro Pierri, guitar

Brouwer's Tres danzas concertantes (1958)
Andantino
Ensemble Amati | Raymond Dessaints, conductor | Alvaro Pierri, guitar

Brouwer's Tres danzas concertantes (1958)
Toccata
Ensemble Amati | Raymond Dessaints, conductor | Alvaro Pierri, guitar

Sculthorpe's Nourlangie (1989)
​John Williams, guitar

Janáček's String Quartet No. 1 "Kreutzer Sonata"
Meccore String Quartet

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