Johann Sebastian Bach

Concerto for Two Pianos and String Orchestra in C Major, BWV 1061

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Germany on either March 21 or March 31, 1685 and died in Leipzig, Germany on July 28, 1750. This concerto, originally for 2 harpsichords and strings, dates from the 1730s and is scored for the solo instruments plus an orchestra of Violin 1, Violin 2, Viola, Cello and Bass.

The letters BWV stand for Bach Werke Verzeichnis, a catalog of all known works by J. S. Bach that was the life work of musicologist Wolfgang Schmieder. First published in 1950, it reappeared in a second edition in 1990.

*****

Late on a warm Philadelphia evening long ago, I hailed a taxi, weary after a long trip back from an out-of-town concert. The door closed and the trip home begun, I realized the driver’s radio was playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, in the piano version recorded by Glenn Gould near the end of his life. We drove slowly through the sleeping streets, cab windows open, silent as we listened to this great performance of Bach’s masterpiece. The music descended from the spheres and across the centuries through the crackly radio, connecting a cab driver and a young musician with worlds of dreams past and future. I wanted the trip to last forever.

Listening, I knew that Bach could be played convincingly, even magically, on a modern piano, though the composer never heard such a thing while he lived. He himself was a renowned organist who often  played the harpsichord. There are also documented instances of his playing the pianoforte (the instrument we now call the piano) late in life, years after its invention around 1700. That instrument could play graduated dynamics, soft to loud and back again, depending on the pressure the player used on the keys, but was smaller and gentler in sound than our modern pianos. The harpsichord’s  mechanism does not allow a player’s touch to produce variety of tonal volume. It relies instead on greater or lesser massing of tones, trills, rolled chords for dynamic variety.

Controversy swirls, a battle between purists and romantics: should Bach be played on a period or modern instrument? The harpsichord faction—putatively reactionary–has often seemed progressive, pushing  the public to embrace the unfamiliar sound of the ancient instrument Bach knew. In the last hundred years or so, audiences have grown accustomed to the harpsichord sound and embraced its unique qualities; pianists have gradually adapted their ideas of sound and articulation, moving away from cushy Nineteenth Century conventions and toward something cleaner and livelier.

The result for present-day listeners is that there is a bracing variety of approaches available, and the conversation is far from over. Try an experiment. Google around a little bit. Compare performances of the opening aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations in performances by Gould, Simone Dinnerstein, Angela Hewitt and Jean Rondeau—the first three on modern piano, the last on harpsichord. Try listening to the harpsichord first, then to one of the piano versions. Or start with Hewitt, the most Romantic of the bunch, then try Gould, and then Rondeau. You may find you love one approach, hate another, with no middle ground. Or you may find that each performer, having spent a lifetime playing and thinking about this music, has something important to say about it.

Do the abrupt articulation and slender thread of sound produced by the harpsichord feel right to you for this music? Is the relative monotony of the sound reassuring, stimulating, enervating? Perhaps you find the tone seems to take you more directly to the music’s essence. Do you notice how the performer uses slight shifts in tempo, small added ornaments, tiny pauses and emphases, to vary the texture?

When you hear, for example, Hewitt play this music on the modern piano, what do you notice first? Is it the richness and variety of sound, the power of the instrument to sustain a melodic line, the less apparent moment of contact between hammer and string? At the same time, do you hear how this great artist has been influenced by performances she’s heard on harpsichord? The point, again, is that any great performer of Bach, on either instrument, contributes to the conversation about this astonishing music. Dogma yields to joy for player and hearer.

Bach’ s Concerto in C Major (for two keyboards), BWV 1061 first saw light as a work solely for two harpsichords, without orchestral accompaniment. Even in the version with string orchestra heard on today’s concert, also by Bach, the major thematic material remains in the two solo instruments; the orchestra is purely supportive, broadening the range of colors and emphasizing melodic contours, occasionally doubling a melody. Performance on pianos will make it easy to hear successive entrances of the subject (main melody) in the fugal third movement and might encourage a more leisurely tempo in the second movement. Tonight’s duo pianists, who have toured together for many years, will show us their well-seasoned ideas of what matters in this piece, through tempo choices, voicings and articulations. Their interpretation keeps the conversation going, neither completely right nor wrong. How fortunate we can be part of it.

– Martin Webster

 

********

 

Wolfgang Amadè Mozart

Concerto for Two Pianos & Orchestra in E-flat major, K. 365

Wolfgang Amadè Mozart (he never used “Amadeus” except when making a joke) was born in Salzburg, Austria in 1756 and died in Vienna in 1791. He composed this concerto largely in 1779, though he seems to have experimented with some of its themes a few years before. It is likely that the first performance featured the composer and his sister Nannerl as soloists in Salzburg, probably also in 1779. The score calls for 2 solo pianos, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, and strings.

*****

We don’t know why, exactly, Mozart composed this piece. It’s always been assumed that he wrote it for himself and his sister Nannerl, who by many accounts was as gifted at the keyboard as her brother Wolfgang. But the days of the siblings touring the cities of Europe—with their father presenting them much as he might trained seals—were over. Now it was just Wolfgang doing the touring with his father or mother, with the object of finding a post.

No post was forthcoming, but the young Mozart was exposed to the latest music from around Europe, and in particular the current fad for concertos with multiple soloists. He tried his hand at several of these and came up with two real gems: the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola and his Concerto for Two Pianos.

The Concerto is different from his one-piano concertos because it had to be: the expected dialog between the soloist and orchestra now had to include dialog between the two soloists as well. The solution was to reduce the influence of the orchestra. Here the orchestra is more of an accompanist, while the two soloists advance most of the musical plot-lines.

The two soloists are equal partners: both piano parts are equally difficult, and both are equally important. Sometimes the pianos answer each other, while other times their dialog overlaps—brothers and sisters, of course, know each other so well that they can finish each other’s sentences. Mozart slyly varies the phrase lengths for each, keeping the audience guessing as to who will speak when.

Mozart poured so many engaging tunes into the work that a lesser composer might have made several concertos out of them. The opening melody of the first movement is a typically Mozartean two-sided theme, with the first half martial and triadic and the second half lyrical. But when the two pianos enter the focus is squarely on their interplay: sometimes noisy and bumptious, at other times sweet and affectionate. When we expect a recapitulation of the opening themes, Mozart gives us a surprising diversion into a minor key episode. The shared cadenza is equally stunning.

The Andante reminds us that Mozart considered himself to be, above all things, a composer of opera: the movement is a seamless aria of great depth and even greater beauty. The Finale is essentially a rondo, but its theme-and-variations style and its symphonic level of development make it a wonder. Mozart’s amazing generosity with his lively and joyous tunes make it a delight.

– Mark Rohr

 

********

 

Carl Orff

Carmina Burana

Carl Orff was born in 1895 in Munich, Germany and died in 1982 in Munich. He composed Carmina Burana from 1935 to 1936, and it was first performed in Frankfurt under the direction of Bertil Wetzelsberger in 1937. The score calls for soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists, large chorus, small chorus, boy chorus, 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, celeste, 2 pianos, and strings.

*****

Carl Orff’s reputation as a composer derives from a mere twelve works. He wrote many more than that, but with Carmina Burana he changed his methods of composition so radically that he disavowed all his previous music. “Everything I have written to date,” he wrote his publisher, “and which you have unfortunately printed, can be destroyed. With Carmina Burana, my collected works begin.”

Actually, Orff’s name would still be known among musicians and music educators even if he had never composed a note. Orff believed that even very young children had latent musical abilities. By the 1930s he had developed a system that combined movement and dance with musical improvisation on simple pitched percussion instruments. His methods were so effective that his ideas still inform early-childhood music education today.

Those ideas seem to have changed his approach to composition, too. He simplified his music greatly, and came to believe that for music to have the maximum impact it must be part of a theatrical presentation including the spoken word, singing, movement, and dance. When he first encountered the poems of Carmina Burana, he saw his chance to put his new theories about composition into effect.

Carmina Burana means “Songs of Beuren,” and refers to a 13th-century manuscript discovered in the Benedictine abbey of Benediktbeuern in 1803 and published in 1847. It is a collection of some 250 poems left by the goliards, itinerant clerics and scholars who rejected what the church had become and concerned themselves instead with earthly delights. Today we might call them college dropouts.

The poems are mostly in Latin, the international language of the day, but some are in medieval German and old French as well. Their subject matter is wide-ranging, with particular emphasis on eating, drinking, gambling, and love-making, all peppered with a lively distrust of authority. The theme that binds them together is fortune, that mysterious force that may lift us to great heights one moment only to dash us to the ground the next.

In fact it was the manuscript’s cover, with its depiction of the goddess Fortuna standing with her wheel of Fate, that inspired Orff to read on and ultimately compose this work. Orff creates a cover to his own book by beginning and ending Carmina Burana with the dramatic chorus “O Fortuna,” a mesmerizing lament on how the “whirling wheel” of Fortune is invariably fickle.

Three main sections follow. The first of these is Primo vere (In Springtime), and as the first song begins you can hear the frost still clinging to the leaves. The baritone soloist warms things up, and the words and music progress from the awakening of Nature to the awakening of sensual desire.

Next comes In Taberna (In the Tavern), an ode to drinking and its ability to soften the blows of misfortune. Listen for the tenor soloist (in his only appearance) as the swan lamenting his presence on a rotating spit, and the concluding song that lists, in comprehensive detail, all those who partake of drink.

The third section is Cour d’amours, or Court of Love. It begins rather innocently, but things become steamier as the songs follow one another. Finally a reprise of “O Fortuna” brings the work to a close—the wheel has turned another full circle.

Orff’s new style of composing burst forth fully-formed in Carmina Burana. The music may be characterized as much by what is left out as by what is put in. Melodic lines are simple and repeated without variation; they may have a long flow similar to Gregorian chant, or be made up of short repeated motives. Harmonies are basic and often static. Blocks of homogeneous color are used instead of subtler combinations. Counterpoint and development are simply absent.

The ruling force is rhythm: primal, urgent, hypnotic, it is the lifeblood of Carmina Burana. It comes in all varieties, from free-sounding recitative-like passages to severely regimented patterns. Much of it flows directly from the text itself.

This is music reduced to a state more elemental than even the neo-classicists could imagine; it has been called primitive by detractors and admirers alike. It exists outside any identifiable mainstream of music—it evolved from no other sort of music, nor was any school of composition founded upon it. Yet it succeeds just as Orff intended it to, for there are few more powerful experiences in music than this.

-Mark Rohr

 

Mark Rohr was the Portland Symphony Orchestra’s Bass Trombonist from the mid-1980’s and program annotator from 1991 until his passing in 2019. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes at his bequest.