Nils Mönkemeyer & William Youn

Avant-gardes Past and Present

Music from Bach to Gourzi

Harry Haskell

The avant-garde is a moving target: one generation’s musical maverick or cutting-edge style may seem tamely conservative to the next, and the long arm of history sooner or later brings yesterday’s rebels to heel. Consider the four composers represented on tonight’s program. Morton Feldman was one of the 20th century’s most intrepid musical innovators, a friend and soulmate of the arch-experimentalist John Cage and the pathbreaking artists of the Abstract Expressionist school. Konstantia Gourzi’s avant-garde credentials are equally impeccable, as reflected in her long associations with a raft of contemporary-music ensembles in Berlin and elsewhere. Bach, on the other hand, from our perspective appears to be a quintessentially conservative musician, even though generations of forward-looking composers, from Mozart to Gourzi herself, have turned to him for inspiration. As for Brahms, no less an authority than the radical traditionalist Arnold Schoenberg considered him one of the great “progressives” in music history. Novelty, like beauty, is in the ear of the beholder.

Baroque Exuberance and Minimalist Quietude

Unlike Bach’s sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin, which were known and performed in the 19th century, the six Suites for Solo Cello were virtually forgotten until Pablo Casals resurrected them in the early 1900s. Although presumably intended as technical studies, the suites are neither as difficult to play nor as musically sophisticated as Bach’s violin solos. It is likely that he wrote them for one of the cellists in the court orchestra at Köthen, where he served as Kapellmeister from 1717 to 1723. By then the model of the multi-movement, dance-based instrumental suite had been more or less standardized. The G-major Cello Suite—heard tonight in an arrangement for viola by Nils Mönkemeyer—comprises a stately Allemande, a vivacious Courante, a broadly lyrical Sarabande, a pair of minuets of contrasting characters, and a bouncy Gigue. Preceding these is a majestic prelude, an unbroken chain of 16th notes based largely on arpeggiated chords. Although from time to time the player is called upon to execute double and triple stops, the harmonies are for the most part implied rather than expressed. As in his solo violin music, Bach ingeniously manipulates the instrument’s melodic line to conjure an illusion of polyphonic richness.

Bach was probably in his late teens when he wrote the Capriccio sopra la lontananza del fratello dilettissimo (Capriccio on the Departure of a Most Beloved Brother) for solo keyboard. The theory that BWV 992 was inspired by his older brother Johann Jacob’s departure for military service in the Swedish army in 1704 has been questioned, so the identity of the composer’s titular sibling remains a mystery. Although the work’s title suggests a lament, the mood the music projects is on the whole anomalously upbeat, leading some commentators to suggest that Bach was making some kind of private joke. The capriccio is divided into six sections, each of which bears a descriptive rubric alluding to the purported leave-taking. It opens with a serene arioso in B-flat major; not until the second section does pathos enter the picture, as the brother’s friends speculate on the “sundry misfortunes that might befall him in foreign lands.” This heartfelt meditation leads to a more or less conventional lament, built on an inexorably descending bass pattern, to which Bach affixes the whimsical tempo marking “Adagiosissimo.” But the clouds quickly blow over and the capriccio concludes with a spirited aria and fugue, both featuring energetic octave leaps characteristic of the post horn.

American composer Morton Feldman was a minimalist avant la lettre; starting in the mid-1940s, he created a large body of work distinguished by its spareness, stillness, and sonic subtlety, music that often seemed to nestle in the interstices between sound and silence, movement and stasis. Early in his career Feldman expressed his disdain for compositional orthodoxy, both mainstream and avant-garde, by experimenting with indeterminacy, graphic notation, and other innovations. But in 1970—the year he began work on the cycle of four ensemble pieces for viola and other instruments titled The Viola in My Life—he was poised for change. “I still had a preference for very soft sounds,” he recalled, “but I began to notate the music again precisely, if not more precisely than before. The music also became, for lack of a better term, ‘motivic.’” A case in point is the third installment of the cycle, scored for viola and piano. The six-minute essay consists of a series of soft chordal exhalations (decrescendos) and inhalations (crescendos), punctuated by long silences and a thrice-repeated rising motive for the muted viola that hovers in the air at the end like an unanswered question.

Building “Sound Bridges”

Like many contemporary musicians, Greek composer and conductor Konstantia Gourzi has focused much of her creative energy on a search for her musical roots—for what she calls “a connective line between yesterday and today.” The next segment of tonight’s program juxtaposes a recent Bach-inspired work by Konstantia Gourzi with a clutch of the Baroque composer’s late masterpieces. The collection of 18 organ chorale preludes, sometimes called “Leipzig Chorales,” that Bach compiled in the decade before his death are among the greatest and most deeply felt of his sacred works. Like The Art of Fugue, BWV 651–68 are the fruits of a lifetime of study and devotion, both as a practical musician and as a Christian whose faith was central to his artistic life. Sensitively transcribed by Mönkemeyer and William Youn, the solemn strains of the Lutheran chorales Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (Now come, savior of the heathens) and Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich hiermit (Before your throne I now appear) lend themselves admirably to the dark, velvety timbre of the viola and the piano’s unobtrusively supportive harmonies.

Currently based in Munich, Gourzi has been a fixture on Berlin’s new-music scene since the 1990s. Motivated by a desire to “combine my Greek roots with Western influences,” she has long sought to fuse sounds and ideas from disparate cultures, religions, and historical eras. Gourzi’s ongoing quest for what she calls “a transcendent sonic coexistence” is manifest in her series of “homages” to composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Mompou. The viola solo nine lullabies for a new world, written for Nils Mönkemeyer in 2012, was originally designed to “function as a sound bridge between two Bach suites.” Yet Bach’s music is present only in the deep background of Gourzi’s ten-minute-long work. She explains that “all nine miniatures are moments of a certain mood that do not correspond to the character of major or minor modes, but to a distant remembrance of chants from a fantasy world.” In the first lullaby, for example, a shimmering, chant-like melody—marked “sacred” in the score—languorously rises and falls above an unchanging pitch that evokes one of Bach’s organ pedal points. Elsewhere Gourzi combines drones with harmonic overlays, a process she likens to “painting colorfully over the first Bach suite on transparent paper.” The Art of Fugue, on which Bach labored intermittently during the 1740s, was to have been his final word on the complex contrapuntal procedures that had occupied him throughout his career and of which he was the acknowledged supreme master. The posthumously published collection consists of 14 fugues and four canons, all based on a boldly striding melody that begins with an arpeggiated D-minor triad. The Art of Fugue is usually played on the organ, but no instrumentation is prescribed in the score and performances by other ensembles, such as we will hear tonight, are not uncommon. Each contrapunctus (the Latin word for fugue that the academically minded Bach used by preference) in the collection illustrates a different aspect of contrapuntal technique. Contrapunctus I, for example, is a straightforward four-voice fugue in which each entrance of the majestic D-minor theme, or subject, can be clearly heard. Fugues III, VI, and VII add the techniques of inversion (turning the subject upside-down), augmentation (lengthening note values), and diminution (shortening note values) to the mix. In Contrapunctus XI, a so-called triple fugue, Bach weaves together not one but three subjects in a spellbinding display of compositional virtuosity. He was at work on the culminating quadruple fugue when he died in 1750.

Autumnal Romance

Originally conceived for clarinet and piano, the Sonatas Op. 120 in F minor (No. 1) and E-flat major (No. 2) constitute Brahms’s swan song in the field of instrumental chamber music. In both their burnished instrumental colors and their thematic material, the sonatas epitomize the “autumnal” spirit that emerged ever more forcefully in the composer’s twilight years. Like Brahms’s Clarinet Trio and Clarinet Quintet, both written in 1891, they were inspired by the artistry of Richard Mühlfeld, the principal clarinetist of the excellent court orchestra in Meiningen. With the composer’s blessing, violists have enthusiastically laid claim to them as well.

The Allegro appassionato of the F-minor Sonata opens with a lyrical but portentous theme enunciated by the piano in parallel octaves, which the viola picks up and elaborates in broad, sweeping phrases. The music’s growing urgency soon dissolves into plaintive introspection, and the fluid interplay between these contrasting moods gives the movement much of its richness and poignancy. In the slow movement, the viola sings a sweetly sighing melody that descends stepwise, then climbs back valiantly before resuming its downward trajectory. The soft pulses in the piano accompaniment blossom into cascading arpeggios and rocking figures. Brahms might well have continued to mine this vein of tender resignation. Instead, he charted a new course in the Allegretto grazioso: the winsome theme radiates warmth, with its lilting triple meter and phrase endings that bend upward hopefully, like flowers stretching toward the sun. The final Vivace is similarly lighthearted, as playful harmonically as it is rhythmically. A bright peal of repeated notes in the piano ushers in a buoyant, swaggering viola melody in duple time that is repeatedly interrupted by contrasting episodes in swaying triplets. By the end of the movement, the sonata’s somber F-minor tonality has been left far behind, transmuted into a joyous major-key affirmation.