Jiyoon Lee & Giuseppe Guarrera

Wit, Wisdom, Verve

Music for Violin and Piano

Gavin Plumley

Born 50 kilometers north of Athens, in Chalcis, Nikos Skalkottas moved with his family to the Greek capital when he was two years old. He had the good luck to be born into a musical family, particularly on his father’s side, who, along with Skalkottas’s uncle, encouraged the young musician in his studies. After graduating from the Athens Conservatory — where his fellow students included Dimitri Mitropoulos—as a violinist, he moved to Berlin in 1921 and eventually joined the composition class of Arnold Schoenberg at the Prussian Academy of Arts, an extraordinary hotbed of creativity and exchange. He returned to his homeland in 1933, where he continued to write tonal, free-atonal, and serial works, though the latter were always informed by a spirit of spontaneity and wit, until his untimely death in 1949.

A significant part of Skalkottas’s impulsive approach to serialism was his ability, like Alban Berg, to bend the tenets of twelve-tone composition to more tonal ends. The thematic material in the second movement of his Petite Suite No. 1 for violin and piano, for instance, composed in 1946, is based on a seven-note melody, with the other five notes of the row providing accompanimental motifs. This simpler brand of serialism fits well with the Greek folksong that constitutes the Andante and provides a marked contrast with the hustle and bustle of the first movement. Contained within that opening Preludio’s hectic charge is a swaggering dance in parallel fifths. And there is a similarly strutting quality to the final movement, headed “Like a Peasant Dance,” the parallel fourths and sixths of which provide a distorted reflection of the first movement.

The Suite No. 2, composed shortly before Skalkottas’s death, is couched in a similar language, though the approach is even freer. Indeed, the folksy nature of this music strikes a Bartókian note, especially in the context of this evening’s concert. Freedom is certainly evident in the form of the first movement, a kind of rich and passionate fantasia. More pensive and sultrier by far is the Andante, before Skalkottas’s playful spirit and innate virtuosity comes to the fore in the finale, another strident jig, as informed by the serialism he gleaned in Berlin as by the folk music of his native land.

Such a hybridist approach is likewise to be found in the music of Béla Bartók. Although he never pursued serialism wholeheartedly, there are elements of the technique in his Fourth String Quartet of 1928 and the Violin Concerto of 1937–8. Instead, Bartók relished plurality and, of course, his musical language was not just governed by simple dichotomies of tonality and atonality, but also by the intricacies of the music he had collected in the field, offering a wealth of motivic, harmonic and tonal possibilities.

A case in point is the Sonata for Solo Violin, written right at the end of Bartók’s life, while he was in exile in the United States. It is, effectively, an adumbration of all the influences on the composer’s work, as well as testament to his extraordinary ability to sublimate these stimuli into a unique musical language. The use of quarter-tones, the constant interchange of major and minor thirds in the fugue, and the folk-like melodies that run throughout the Sonata speak of the lasting impact of the music that Bartók, with his great friend and colleague Zoltán Kodály, had collected over many years. There is also the unmistakable ghost of Bach, not least his mighty Chaconne, in the first movement. And, with its lone voice, the Sonata, played on the instrument for which Bartók had written his first chamber work in 1895 (now lost), seems to speak of the isolation he felt at the end of his life.

The work begins with the Baroque-infused Tempo di ciaccona, though Bartók’s movement title is at pains to stress that this is not a true chaconne, in the manner of the finale to Bach’s Partita in D minor for Solo Violin. There may be a constant sense of variation, as in the original genre, but Bartók’s movement is more clearly characterized by the principles of sonata form. Equally evident is a yo-yoing between aggression and reflection, as brusque pizzicato gives way to pensive but searching counterpoint. Particularly wistful is the movement’s pentatonic material, striking a very different note to the knotty chromaticism of its argument to date. And it is the serenity of that later music that will return at the close.

Not so the fugue that follows, whose focus rarely relents. Beginning in four parts, its counterpoint’s strict nature may quickly dissolve but the music remains obstinate to the end. So too, in its way, does the ensuing Melodia, though it is fixated instead on finding a way back to the past, a simpler time. The whispered reflections that ensue, however, speak of an inability to recapture that memory. So too does the last gasp of Bartók’s “night music” sound world, before the movement closes with a final, ethereal iteration of the main theme.

And there is something equally distant about the scurrying buzzing opening to the finale, before it launches headlong into a folksy-cum-Baroque jig. But as soon as one character is established, it changes, including a more immediately generous second theme. Yet this too proves hard to pin down, as does the coda, in which the full impact of Bartók’s study of Hungarian music comes dazzlingly to the fore.

Before Bartók embarked on his extraordinary ethnomusicological project with Kodály, he had been an avid Straussian. Of particularly impact was a 1904 performance of Also sprach Zarathustra in Budapest. “From this stagnation I was roused as by a lightning strike,” he remembered in 1921. Strauss himself had experienced similar bolts in his youth, when he was drawn to Wagner, much against his horn-playing father’s wishes, just as he would be to Nietzsche. And yet there remained something of Strauss the Classicist, much to his father’s delight, the lover of Mozart—until the day he died—and, though the works are decidedly less celebrated than his operas and orchestral works, an avid composer of chamber music.

Look at Strauss’s early output and you find a whole host of chamber works, including piano trios, smaller pieces for violin and piano, quartet movements, even a completed String Quartet in A major Op. 2 from 1880, as well as the Sonata in F major for cello and piano Op. 6, written between 1880 and 1883, and the Piano Quartet in C minor Op. 13, completed the following year. The Violin Sonata Op. 18, the next catalogued chamber work, dates from 1887, the year Strauss also completed Aus Italien and began work on his first opera, Guntram, thereby announcing the exciting new paths that would dominate the rest of his career.

And yet the Violin Sonata is not so easily dismissed, as the piano declaims, with great panache, at the start of the first movement. The violin’s response is, at first, more introverted, though we are soon launched into the drama proper of this sonata-form Allegro. Throughout, a rhapsodic piano accompaniment sets the tone, with the narrative moving with alacrity through various tonal centers, the melodic honors shared equally between the two players. It is a rising motif in the violin, however, that really lends the movement its impassioned tone, a prequel, perhaps, to the mood of Ein Heldenleben or to the audacious climaxes of many of Strauss’s operas.

The second (ternary-form) movement is more tranquil, even melancholy at times; its aching melody shows kinship with Strauss’s lieder and, again, his works for the stage, albeit in their more touching moments. The second section is less formal—Strauss published this movement separately under the title “Improvisation”—as shorter phrases pass between the players. Rumblings in the piano, however, suggest something more profound at foot, and when the initial melody returns, its melancholy has been disturbed and the shadows linger in the introduction to the third and final movement. These prove to be but brief disturbances, however, and the finale takes off into another courageous chronicle. Indeed, with its breathless melodies and quasi-orchestral accompaniment, the Sonata as a whole provides a perfect distillation of Strauss’s style, heard in, for him, unfamiliarly chamber-like form.