Boulez Ensemble XVIII

Echoes and Resonances

Works by Janaček, Brahms, and Kareem Roustom

Kerstin Schüssler-Bach

A Natural Philosophy of Sound: Janáček’s Concertino

What an odd beginning: all by itself, the piano plays a scale-like motif in pounding quarters, and yet it does not sound simple because of the addition of chromatic steps. A quarter-note loop, then a descending fifth. The whole structure is stubbornly repeated three times, only interrupted by the horn, which takes up the quarter-note loop like a distant call. This persistent beginning continues until the motifs finally dissolve into a field of lyricism. Leoš Janáček, that great individualist from Moravia, chose a highly idiosyncratic color for his Concertino of 1925. The piano is the central force, but it is flanked by a different combination of instruments in each movement. One typical element of Janáček’s music are the short motifs that seem like linguistic transcriptions. In fact, his lifelong efforts to render the Czech language accurately in rhythm and melody culminated in his operas. On his walks, Janáček was also in the habit of notating birdsong, the sound of waves, and the rushing of the wind: to him, this was the “music of life”, and it appears in his works as the voice of nature.

Only one year before the Concertino, his opera The Cunning Little Vixen had its premiere—a pantheist celebration of the divine spark in all living creatures. Janáček continued these essays in natural philosophy in his Concertino, and although his remarks should not be mistaken for a hint at program music, their illustrative nature is certainly helpful to the listener following the piece (which was originally conceived as a piano concerto with the title “Spring”).

Janáček likens the unusual first movement with its obstinate “running- start” motif to the grumpy frustration of a hedgehog that he once prevented from reaching its softly padded nest by a tree-trunk. The trills and aphoristic dance motifs of the clarinet in the second movement reminded Janáček of a loquacious squirrel locked inside a cage and dancing “for the children’s amusement.” The remaining instruments finally join the break-neck accelerando of clarinet and piano.

The third movement again involves all the musicians. After fanned-out chords, the piano moves on to gentler, arpeggio-like sounds, evoking an enchanted nocturnal atmosphere akin to The Cunning Little Vixen. The piano loses itself in a dream-like, virtuoso cadenza. Then, the bizarre first part is repeated, and Janáček offers the droll comment: “The stupid bulging eyes of the little night owl and the other censorious night-birds stare into the strings of the piano.”

The core of the last movement is a theme borrowed from Slavic folk music. The movement begins with a memorable rising and falling motif in the piano, accompanied by temperamental trills from the violins. These expand into an entire field of trills towards the end, played to a third motif in the piano. After a brief moment of soloistic pondering, the piano drives all those involved into a coda marked “presto,” in which the exuberant dance motif is intensified. “In the end,” Janáček writes, “it is like a fairy tale, where everyone is arguing. And the piano? Someone must, after all, ensure order.”

The “orderly” piano part had been written for the Czech pianist Jan Heřman, an outstanding interpreter of Janáček’s Piano Sonata 1.X.1905. The world premiere of the Concertino, however, which took place in Brno in February 1926, was performed by the pianist and piano teacher Ilona Štěpánová- Kurzová, who also introduced the work to Berlin audiences in December of that same year, having previously premiered it in Prague and Vienna.

The Enchanting Sounds of the Horn: Brahms’s Horn Trio

It is no coincidence that the echoing calls in the first movement of Janáček’s Concertino are given to the horn: as an instrument associated with hunting and forests, it is particularly close to the sphere of nature. Just as it leads us into Janáček’s pantheist cosmos, Brahms too evokes the topos of Romantic sound par excellence: the hunting horn—Waldhorn or “forest horn” in German—whose yearning, dark song beckons the listener to enter a far-away world. (Brahms preferred the natural, valve-less horn to the more modern and voluminous horn with valves.) Whether in the title of the poetry anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”), some of which Brahms set to music, or as a signal in Carl Maria von Weber’s overtures, whether as the bold companion of Wagner’s Siegfried or a mysterious messenger in the form of Mahler’s post horn— the call of the horn returns mankind to nature. This “return” often also implies faint (and slightly melancholy) recollections, which the 32-year-old Brahms indulged in more than the 71-year-old Janáček, although the latter also consciously reverted to “a youthful mood” in his Concertino.

But Brahms was still at the beginning of his career when he composed his Trio for Horn, Violin, and Piano in 1865— even before Ein deutsches Requiem, which was to prove his breakthrough. In both instances, he is said to have woven a memory of his mother into the work: she had passed away in February 1865 and had been particularly fond of her son’s horn playing (Brahms played not only cello and piano, but also the horn). Max Kalbeck, the composer’s first biographer, suspected that the sorrowful attitude of the Adagio was to be understood as “a lamentation for the dead.” The composer himself, however, offered no evidence for this theory.

What we do know for certain is when the piece was written: Brahms once again spent the summer of 1865 in Lichtental near Baden-Baden—close to, but not at the house of Clara Schumann, who had settled in the glamorous spa town two years before. Brahms lived in a simple quarter of the nondescript Lichtental suburb, in a house halfway up the hill that has survived and may still be visited today as an authentic Brahms site. There, among the gentle foothills of the Black Forest, he found the beginning of his Horn Trio near a Marian chapel surrounded by pine trees in May 1865: “One morning I went for a walk, and when I reached this spot, the sun came out, and immediately the idea for the theme came to me,” he reported to his composer colleague Albert Dietrich. This evocation of nature gives way to a soulful, swaying main theme, which curiously moves around the tonic of E-flat major and is answered by a lyrical, yearning second theme—Brahms remains steeped in the atmosphere of introspection, on the enchanted paths of horn calls. The subsequent scherzo is an exercise in staccato cheerfulness and hunting signal motifs, but its humor seems somewhat subdued, especially in the trio in A-flat minor. The melancholy Adagio is written in the related E-flat minor, in which the dialogue of horn and violin over the broken chords of the piano, reminiscent of an elegiac prelude, seems particularly atmospheric. As in all of Brahms’s works, the individual movements are bound together by shared motifs, and so the powerful, final rondo looks back at a melody from the Adagio, now rendered in a brisk 6/8 rhythm. Once again, hunting signals resound, and Kalbeck saw a connection with the folk song Dort in den Weiden steht ein Haus from the Lower Rhine area.

At the end of those summer months, in September 1865, Clara Schumann was introduced to the “charming trio” as well. After a few run-throughs, the first public performance took place in November of the same year in Zurich, with Brahms at the piano alongside the conductor and violinist Friedrich Hegar and the horn player Anton Gläss. The enchanting melancholy of the piece was not immediately recognized—Clara Schumann noted: “People failed to understand this truly bold and extremely interesting piece, despite the fact that the first movement, for example, is very rich in engaging melodies and that the final movement brims with life. The Adagio too is beautiful as can be, yet it is indeed difficult to understand at first hearing.”

An Arabic Offering to Mozart: Kareem Roustom’s Violin Concerto No. 1

In the first movement of Kareem Roustom’s Concerto for Violin and Chamber Orchestra, the horn sings an expressive melody—almost in the tradition of the Romantic cantilena described above, so full of longing. Here, however, it is accompanied by the strings with an Arabic sharqi improvisation: short phrases interspersed with rests, taking advantage of the space between the notated pitches, and modified with a “flute-like” sound by playing close to the instrument’s bridge. Roustom interweaves the musical worlds that have influenced him in a dialogue.

The Syrian-American composer, born in 1971, arrived in the U.S. with his family while still a teenager. His active interest in music was kindled by the guitar, and today he also performs on the oud, the traditional lute of the Arabic world. Stylistically, Roustom recognizes no boundaries—he is equally at home in classical European and classical Middle Eastern music as well as film and television soundtracks. His works have been commissioned by the Lucerne Festival and the Kronos Quartet, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the pop queens Shakira and Beyoncé—to name a diverse few.

Roustom would also seem an ideal embodiment of the idea behind the Barenboim-Said Akademie: musicians engaging in exchange beyond continental and national borders, reaping a shared artistic substrate from their cultural differences. Daniel Barenboim previously gave the first performance of Roustom’s orchestral work Ramal, and a subsequent performance in Buenos Aires in 2014 provided the inspiration for this Violin Concerto. Roustom was listening to the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra rehearse Mozart’s Piano Concerto in B-flat major K. 595. In its first movement, Barenboim was fine-tuning a chromatic phrase in the violins that reminded the orchestra’s Arabic musicians of the maqam (or traditional scale) “hijaz”—leading to a brief spontaneous improvisation. In a way, this experience at a meeting point between different musical worlds gave rise to the Violin Concerto: all of its movements are based on segments of the “hijaz” phrase from Mozart’s Piano Concerto.

When writing their “alla turca” music, Mozart or Beethoven, despite their genuine interest, did not—and could not—aim for ethnographic correctness. Roustom sees this as a chance to lovingly correct such Eurocentricity: “In a way, I’m sharing what I know about this culture and music with their spirits. A humble ‘thank you’ to them,” says the composer.

Even in the short, whirling opening section (headed “Intrada”) of the first movement, “Fragments,” the glissando of the strings is reminiscent of musical practices of the Arabic cultural region. Roustom immediately introduces the sharqi style as well: the notated pitches are to be liberated and enlivened by a broader vibrato and trills as well as portamento. The solo violin begins with an expressive, lyrical melody, in which small intervals also evoke an “oriental” color. A playful, virtuoso element is added through figurations and double stops. An energetic, weighty section is followed by a “doloroso” comment from the violin, which then reverts to delicate ornaments and increasingly drives the orchestra forward. Roustom describes the phrase resembling “hijaz” from Mozart’s Piano Concerto—which, transposed upwards by a fifth, forms the melodic and harmonic heart of the piece—as an Arabic “offering” to Mozart. In addition, the rhythmical structure of the first movement is based on a Turkish 9/8 rhythm known as “aqsaq”.

For the second movement, entitled “Hymn,” Roustom was inspired by a recording of music of Syrian-Orthodox Christians in the city of Sednaya, north of Damascus. Sednaya is home to famous monasteries that he once visited with his family, but also to an infamous military prison where the Assad regime had—and still has—thousands of civilians tortured and killed most brutally. Roustom explains that his aim was to exhibit the idea of faith without a specific religious connotation. As the voice of preserving faith, the violin maintains its tempo while the orchestral foundation, as the “outer world,” becomes increasingly unstable. “Like a Prayer” its solitary song begins, accompanied merely by the sound of the vibraphone, as if suspended in mid-air. Finally, a trumpet call leads into the soloist’s cadenza, which holds technical challenges such as left-hand pizzicato, double-stop passages, and effects such as “flautando” and “bariolage” (rapid shifts between strings). On a wave of arpeggios, the violin glides through a weightless orchestral postlude.

While the form of the slow movement is modeled after its “sibling movement” from Mozart’s K. 595 (both using the structure of AB–cadenza–A), Roustom valiantly hearkens back to Mozart’s rondo form in his final “Rondo & Round,” though not without subjecting it to individual variation: the two returning sections A and B have two different themes. Section A is shortened with each repetition, while B expands with every one. The rapidly changing syncopated rhythms once again recall Middle Eastern dances. The violin races ahead in breakneck figures, often playing repetitive patterns. At the very end, Roustom explains, a North African rhythm appears. All of this makes his Violin Concerto “world music” in the best sense, supported imaginatively by a colorfully diverse percussion section. Kareem Roustom himself does not play the violin, but he maintained a close exchange of ideas with Michael Barenboim while composing the piece. Nor is his the only advisory voice Roustom was able count upon: “My wife is a violinist, and I am continuously learning from her.” He is already busy writing his second violin concerto.