Fauré, Wiancko, Ravel

Gabriel Fauré
(May 12, 1845–November 4, 1924)

In the mid-1870s, Gabriel Fauré was hardly a household name. Though he was just beginning to be an insider in the salon scene, he was fortunate to have the support of Camille Clerc, at whose house in Normandy he was staying in the summer of 1875. Fauré wrote most of the Violin Sonata there and, auspiciously, virtuoso violinist Hubert Léonard was also a house guest of the Clercs, and he would read through parts of the work as Fauré composed it. Through the intercession of Clerc and Leonard, Breitkopf and Härtel agreed to publish the work in 1877, although Fauré signed over the rights, therefore not earning anything from its sales. But for Fauré, having the prestigious German publishing house issue the work was of great benefit. Indeed, the work went on to influence Cesar Franck’s own violin sonata and, as some believe, found a referential home in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. It premiered in concert at the Société nationale de musique on January 27, 1877 with violinist Marie Tayau and the composer at the piano. The scherzo was immediately encored. The work is dedicated to Fauré’s friend Paul Viardot, violinist and composer and son of the famous singer and composer Pauline Viardot.

The Allegro molto opens with a rhapsodic introduction by the piano that obscures the downbeat but offers up rather important thematic material. Most noticeable are the four ascending eighth notes that when fully realized as a motive drops down a fifth. The motive becomes much more obvious when heard in the violin several bars later. The motive provides much of the violin’s material, sometimes enhanced by interspersed leaps. The violin offers a more introspective musing in the development, its phrases occasionally echoed in the piano. The initial four (five)-note motive again returns. An elastic staccato stream of eighth notes in the violin stretches toward an espressivo flurry of descending phrases that carry the same unfettered joy of the ascending motive. Fauré again pulls back the energy, centering the violin against sustained chordal accompaniment in the piano, but it is only a moment before the piano rumbles back with octave iterations of the four-note ascent. Despite the motivic economy and the sonata form, Fauré injects the movement with a truly French sensibility in the overlapping lines and constant sense of fluidity. In the final bars the ascending motive returns, finally reaching its full ascent without dropping down.

The D minor Andante, one of Fauré’s first instrumental barcarolles, offers a reflective first theme that seems content to follow its own whims. Cast in sonata form (somewhat unusual for a second movement), the Andante features dolcissimo slow undulations in the piano that undergird a secondary theme of more contained phrases in the violin. The expression of the violin grows more passionate, but ultimately the final bars land softly to prepare for the scherzo.

Fauré adopts an understated virtuosity for the Allegro vivo, choosing instead a sprightly vivacity of character and obscuring a change of key to D-flat, which is nearly indiscernible at that speed. The violin’s more cantabile melody does seem to connect back to the first movement, at least in gesture. The F-sharp minor trio is graced by an expressively sequenced triple meter melody. Staccato notes in the piano and pizzicato in the violin lead back to a return of the opening scherzo. The essence of the movement is one of elegant fun rather than rambunctious high jinks.

The Allegro quasi presto balances the work with a lyrical sense of flow also present in the first movement. While rhythmically more conservative than the scherzo, the finale embeds syncopated sequences in the piano that are occasionally realized in the violin. The second theme in double stops offers up yet another sonata form movement. The piano has quite a bit of exposure, often echoing the violin’s themes or providing connective passages. The running eighth notes in the violin at the end, however, maintain a sense of decorum. The entire work testifies to what Alex Ross calls “that elusive Fauré style” and one marvels at the combination of form, function, and feeling.

Michi Wiancko
(Born 1976)

“Playing chamber music is one of the deepest, most complicated musical relationships you can have with other people,” said Michi Wiancko in a 2019 interview with Opera America. As a violinist and composer whose work “encompasses a wide spectrum of new composition, collaboration, and interpretation,” Wiancko has received commissions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Camerata Bern, the Aizuri Quartet, and other admired ensembles and soloists. Her collaborations reflect Wiancko’s diverse styles and interests, working with indie rock band Wye Oak, composers such as Missy Mazzoli and Laurie Anderson, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist and composer Vijay Iyer, as well as the Mark Morris Dance Group, just to name a few. She also composes music for short and feature-length films, commercials, and for her own band, Kono Michi. A native of California, Wiancko now lives with her family in Gill, a small farming community in Western Massachusetts, and directs the summer music festival, artists’ retreat, and community organization Antenna Cloud Farm, which also hosts The Experimental Institute (established in 2022), “a radical and holistic educational program prioritizing cultural advocacy and artistic excellence through decolonized curriculum and musical practice.”

Tyranny of Coordinates was commissioned by the Boston Chamber Music Society in 2021 and premiered on April 10, 2022 at Sanders Theatre. Wiancko has this to say about the work:

“This piece is dedicated to those doing advanced work to bring hope, healing, joy, and liberation to all people. It explores the ideas of futurism, longing, and the building of new structures, represented at times by the use of large intervals (most notably the 9th). It also pays a bittersweet and critical homage to the western classical realm in which I was trained from an early age, represented at times by large runs (most notably the C major scale).

Many years ago I visited the gorgeous, touristy, and unfinished church of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and while climbing high up into one of the famous spires, I came face-to-face with an old crushed soda can, cemented to the granite as an integral part of its design. I froze in place, experiencing a deeply emotional reaction to this simple object, a literal piece of trash, being integrated into something so ornate and considered so sacred. This moment, forever etched in my memory, inspires part of the third movement, in which the score calls for a player to hammer the side of a half-full aluminum can with an office clip. It gives me joy to explore atypical methods of creating sound and approaching instruments; in this spirit, I incorporate additional percussive elements by asking players to strike their strings with a large wooden kitchen spoon.

This piece is deeply inspired by an array of people who have changed (or are currently changing) the world. Movement 1 is dedicated to Yuri Kochiyama, a prominent Japanese-American civil rights leader who worked alongside Malcolm X. Movement 2 quotes a line from one of my favorite poems by the teacher and Buddhist monk, Thích Nhat Hanh, widely known as “the father of mindfulness.” Movements 3 and 4 are inspired by adrienne maree brown, whose work has had a significant impact on my life. Finally, the title of the piece comes from one of my all-time favorite living writers, Báyò Akómoláfé. ‘Falling might very well be flying—without the tyranny of coordinates.'”

Maurice Ravel
(March 7, 1875–December 28, 1937)

Despite initial resistance to Gabriel Fauré’s admiration for his teacher Camille Saint-Saëns, Ravel’s appreciation for Saint-Saëns apparently grew beginning around 1910. As Barbara Kelly has surmised, the emphasis on “technique and classical structure” reflect Ravel’s growing respect for Saint-Saëns’s music at the time. The work, however, is dedicated to André Gedalge (1856–1926), who was Ravel’s counterpoint teacher, and there is certainly much in the work that reflects that influence as well.

In addition to its neoclassical tendencies, the piece is an engaging blend of Ravel’s own brand of exoticism, motivated by his own Basque heritage as well as French proclivities for Eastern ideas (rendered with varying levels of authenticity). But the piece is also, particularly in the first two movements, full of “Ravel-isms,” especially in terms of harmonic choices, form, and articulation.

The opening piano melody of the Modéré offers a syncopated theme described by Ravel as “de couleur Basque,” taken from a failed attempt at a piano concerto on Basque themes. Mark DeVoto identifies it as a modified Basque zortzico dance rhythm, traditionally in 5/8, but transferred here to 8/8 by Ravel. While aligned by a conceptual sonata form, there is no modulation to a secondary key area in the exposition, but Ravel offers contrasting ideas within the A minor harmonic frame. Balanced between ethereal reverie and more virtuosic energy, the dotted rhythmic motive provides a consistent anchor, most often in the piano. Even at the end, when the movement maintains pianissimo and triple piano markings, the keyboard almost imperceptibly echoes the motive underneath intimate layers of sound and harmonics in the strings.

The title “Pantoum” of the second movement refers to a Malay poetic form, the pantun. The verse form features stanzas with even numbers of lines—most popularly quatrains—wherein there are, according to Roy Howat, “two alternating strands of narrative” in an antecedent-consequent structure. What makes the form distinctive is that lines two and four may serve as the consequent lines in one stanza, but are then used as the antecedent lines in the next. This general alternation of ideas is present for most listeners, and offers a simultaneous sense of both fantasia and variation, although the most recognizable form is that of a scherzo and trio. Those familiar with Ravel’s String Quartet (1903) and the Sonata for Violin and Cello (1922) will perhaps note the composer’s predilection for both pizzicato and modally-inflected A minor in his similar “Assez vif”and “Très vif” movements. The variety of contrasting articulations in all three instruments provides a measure of whimsy in places, but also intrigue. A quiet chorale in the piano in one moment underscores staccato jumping in the violin and cello, building toward what grow to be loud stacked chords in the piano. The chatter of the piece increases in energy, ultimately exploding in a return to the main theme, ending with a final A major flourish in all three instruments.

The quarter notes heard in the piano evoke a sense of the Baroque form referenced in the third movement, “Passacaille.” The slow theme heard first in the depths of the piano, then taken up by the cello, and finally the violin with some variation, recalls a stile antico aesthetic and provides pentatonic connections to the final movement. Ravel repeats the pattern, slowly increasing the weight of the accompaniment in the piano. An ascent in the cello and violin at a gradual crescendo momentarily disrupts the quasi passacaglia. A final muted duet in the violin and cello returns to the opening melody, and here Ravel reduces the texture, giving the theme then to the cello, and finally one last echo in the piano.

The “Final” packs in pentatonic fluidity against arpeggiated figures, harmonics, and tremolandi. Animated and broad chords are juxtaposed against trills in the strings to provide a moment of arrival before the left hand in the piano once again takes on melodic weight. This central idea quickly grows into a densely polyphonic texture, accelerating toward climactic triplets in all three instruments. Michael Puri, in his book Ravel, Sublimation, and Desireu, presents the movement as a dialectic between the idyllic first theme with harmonics and tremolando strings, contrasted with a more Bacchanale-like ecstatic secondary theme. Both seem to be present in the finale of the movement, which triumphantly ends in brilliant and shimmering majesty.

© 2024 Rebecca G. Marchand