Our December concert is comprised of familiar pieces built on memorable themes and many curious and wonderful connections.
Two of our composers, Bach and Handel, were revered by everybody’s ‘composer of the month,’ Ludwig van Beethoven. (He turns 241 on December 16!) Beethoven came to the attention of Viennese audiences and musicians with his superb playing of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. He was known to have been an avid collector and student of Bach’s works, asking his publishers to send to him as many as possible.
In Beethoven’s last year of life, he warmly received a special gift from a friend named Johannes Andreas Stumpff. He wrote:
“My pen is unable to describe the great pleasure afforded me by the volumes of Handel’s work which you have sent me as gift–a royal gift…”
Cellist Peter Stumpf will be making a welcome visit after a long absence and career as principal cellist of the LA Philharmonic to open our program with Beethoven’s Twelve Variations for Piano and Cello on ‘See The Conqu’ring Hero Comes,’ from Handel’s Oratorio, Judas Maccabæus. This piece, which also welcomes the season of lights called Hanukkah (starting this year on December 20), will be the least challenging encounter with ‘variations’ that afternoon!
The most challenging may be in the most familiar piece on the program: Trio for Piano, Clarinet and Cello in A minor, Op. 114 by Johannes Brahms. It was premiered on December 12, 1891, 120 years ago! Why is such a gorgeous and listenable piece so challenging in terms of its use of variation? Perhaps because the ways in which its themes are derived and developed are so artfully hidden! To quote analyst Donald Francis Tovey:
“Where a melody has marked features of rise and fall, such as long scale passages or bold skips, the inversion, if productive of good harmonic structure and expression, will be a powerful method of transformation. This is admirably shown in Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations, in the fifteenth fugue of the first book of his Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues, in the finale of Beethoven Sonata, op. 106 and in the second subjects of the first and last movements of Brahms’s Clarinet Trio.”
Fortunately, we can enjoy this work for its harmonies, sentiments and colloquy without being aware how every note and following phrase are specifically derived from the contours of rising arpeggio and falling scale that open the first movement.
That is just how Schoenberg would want his own music to be heard and enjoyed! He closely identified with Brahms’s working process and use of theme shape. He devoted a chapter of his book, Style and Idea, to describing how Brahms’s use of “continuing variation” influenced his own development. When I conducted the full fifteen-instrument version of the Chamber Symphony Op. 9 in Kresge Auditorium many years ago, a colleague remarked that he could recognize the influence of Brahms in my reading. The Piano Quintet version, arranged for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano by his student Anton Webern, will continue our series of Piano Quintets and introduce the first of the composers whose lives and work are the subject of our third upcoming January Winter Festival–Exiled to Hollywood: Outcast Artists in Southern California. This version has been in our BCMS repertoire since our first season 29 years ago, and repeated in 1988, 1989 and 2002!
For any ticket holders, students and the Goethe-Institut Boston newsletter subscribers interested in having a close encounter with the musicians and discussion of the piece, on Saturday, December 10 at 4 p.m. we will be hosting an open rehearsal and discussion of the Schoenberg at the Goethe-Institut Boston in Back Bay. Please call BCMS for further information.
The Schoenberg will be preceded on the second half by Bach’s Trio Sonata from the “Musical Offering.” The Trio Sonata scored for flute, violin and keyboard is an island of sublime composition amid a sea of fugues, canons and other variations that comprise the larger work based on a theme given to Bach in person by His Majesty the King of Prussia, Frederick the Great.
Enjoy!
Marcus
