Two Equal Players

Sainte-Colombe—whose richly expressive music Jordi Savall helped bring to the attention of modern audiences via the soundtrack to the 1991 film Tous les matins du monde—kept the tradition of viol playing alive at a time when innovators like JeanMarie Leclair were popularizing the more up-to-date violin. Despite his renown, Sainte-Colombe never held an official post at the French court. Indeed, next to nothing is known about his life, and the manuscript of his 67 endlessly inventive duets “à deux violes esgales” (for two equal viols) was only rediscovered in the 1960s. Le Retour (The Return) comprises four sections of distinct characters, with a suavely elegant “ouverture” and a concluding pianelle (a triple-time dance that Sainte-Colombe seems to have invented) framing a pair of shorter dances. A relaxed, conversational atmosphere characterizes the piece, which takes its name from the repeat sign in the opening section.

Mozart’s G-major Duo dates from the summer of 1783, when he was riding high on the success of his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail and working on a set of string quartets that he planned to dedicate to Joseph Haydn. He had recently left the employ of Prince-Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg to become a freelance composer and pianist in Vienna. In 1782 he further asserted his independence by marrying Constanze Weber over his father’s objections, and it was partly to make amends that the couple visited Leopold Mozart in Salzburg the following year. Colloredo, an amateur violinist and chamber music enthusiast, had commissioned a half-dozen pieces for violin and viola from his court organist, Michael Haydn (Joseph’s brother). When Haydn fell behind schedule, the archbishop reportedly threatened to withhold his salary. Mozart came to the rescue by tossing off a pair of duos, K. 423 and 424, which the ailing composer added to his four to complete the set. Colloredo was none the wiser and Haydn was restored to his good graces.

Mozart’s fondness for the warm, burnished timbre of the viola is manifest in his two duets, which are as light in spirit as in texture. He clearly enjoyed the challenge of creating a kind of pseudo-polyphony with restricted forces, much as Bach had done in his works for unaccompanied violin and cello. In the opening Allegro of the G-major Duo, the violin and viola conduct a lively, evenhanded dialogue, one beginning a thought, the other finishing it, with just enough double-stopping and chordal writing (both expressed and implied) to put flesh on the music’s harmonic bones. The Adagio, a long-breathed arioso in C major, hints at weightier emotions in a string of poignant suspensions that anticipate the darker-hued episodes of the Rondo. But it is the catchy recurring theme of the finale, all unalloyed sweetness and light, that Mozart sends us home humming.

Games and Messages

György Kurtág once described composition as a process of “continual research” aimed at achieving “a sort of unity with as little material as possible.” Like Anton Webern, whose radically stripped-down music he grew to love long before it was widely known behind the Iron Curtain, Kurtág is essentially a miniaturist. Both his aphoristic musical language and the forces he uses to express it are highly compressed. Yet despite the abundance of “white space” in a typical Kurtág score, his music is densely packed, eventful, and richly allusive. Two threads that run throughout his work are a sense of playfulness and a dialogue with friends and fellow composers. Both are present in Jelek, játékok és üzenetek (Signs, Games, and Messages), an open-ended series of short pieces for various instruments that Kurtág initiated in the late 1980s. Szigoruan magánlevél a 80 évesnek was written in 2001 as a birthday greeting to the late Hungarian composer and musicologist András Szöllösy. The title translates as “A Strictly Private Letter to an Eighty-year-old”—a very vigorous octogenarian, judging from the way the two players rambunctiously vault across a span of threeplus octaves before easing into a more sedate chain of smoothly interlocking intervals in contrary motion. Ligatura y is among a series of brief tonal essays in which Kurtág explores the concept of ligatures, or tied notes. In this case, the linkage takes the form of a sequence of slow-moving, densely chromaticized chords, with violin and viola alternately standing out “in rilievo” (in relief).

Echoes of Mozart

Bohuslav Martinů was widely regarded as the most significant figure in Czech music since Dvořák and Janáček. Unlike his predecessors, however, he declined to wear his nationalism on his sleeve; his style and outlook remained obstinately, almost defiantly, cosmopolitan to the last. After emigrating to the United States as a wartime refugee in 1941, Martinů itched to escape from New York (he fled first to Jamaica, then to New England) and never ceased to pine for his native Bohemia. Although he was offered a prestigious conservatory post in Prague in 1946, a severe concussion suffered as a result of a fall while teaching at Tanglewood that summer prevented him from accepting it. Two years later his unhappy exile was indefinitely prolonged by the installation of a communist regime in his homeland.

It was during this time of global unrest and personal hardship that Martinů wrote a lightweight and somewhat backward-looking set of duets for the brother-and-sister team of violinist Joseph and violist Lillian Fuchs. Exemplifying the composer’s longstanding interest in Renaissance and Baroque music, the Three Madrigals are “tonal” in the sense of being fundamentally pitch-centered, rather than adhering to identifiable keys. Certain passages—especially in the lighthearted third Madrigal, with its mincing mordents and dense thickets of arpeggiated chords—evoke the spirit of Mozart’s Duos for Violin and Viola and Bach’s music for unaccompanied violin and cello. Yet the chugging motor rhythms, rhythmic displacements, and angular leaps in the first Madrigal strike an unmistakably modern note. In the second, muted flutterings, slithering chromatic scales, and bustling counterpoint give way to rich homophonic chords and a peaceful, euphonious close.

Musical Memorials

Sainte-Colombe is known as “le père” (the father) to distinguish him from his viol-playing son, with whom he presumably performed many of the “concerts” in his long-lost collection. Le Tendre is one of several character pieces intended to depict a mood or temperament, a favorite conceit of French Baroque composers. A brief prelude in imitative style introduces a tender sarabande, replete with echo effects; a crisply strutting gavotte; and a lilting minuet. Les Regrets—a miniature “tombeau,” or musical memorial—further illustrates Sainte-Colombe’s penchant for intense, searching harmonies, imitative textures, and short, memorable rhythmic and melodic motifs. Lugubrious, minor-mode music alternates with up-tempo sections in major mode, ending with a brisk, bright vision of “the joy of Elysium.” Listen for the four-note carillon peal in the second section, which the composer’s pupil Marin Marais would later echo in his popular Sonnerie de Ste-Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris.

Both mood-painting and musical memorials figure prominently in Kurtág’s oeuvre as well. At one stage of his career the Hungarian made a large number of ink drawings in which he pressed pen to paper and forced his hand to tremble, generating a kind of gestural sketch. Much of his music seems to spring from a similarly spontaneous impulse. Texture, color, and gesture take precedence over harmony, which Kurtág once described, in characteristically evocative language, as “melody pressed like a flower.” The floral metaphor seems particularly apt for Vie silencieuse (Silent Life), with its soft, diaphanous chords and quivering tremolos, and …eine Blume für Tabea… (A Flower for Tabea), a short, hauntingly ethereal epitaph for Israeli conductor David Shallon, the first husband of violist Tabea Zimmermann.

Mozart’s precocious virtuosity on the keyboard is legendary. That he was also a child prodigy on the violin, the instrument on which his father built his reputation, is less well known. In one of his cockier moments, he boasted that he had played a certain piece “as though I were the greatest fiddler in all of Europe.” As time went on, Mozart seems to have fallen out of practice and took up the violin and viola only in the privacy of domestic chamber music sessions. Nevertheless, his youthful facility is evident in the brilliant Duo in B-flat major K. 424, with its abundance of bravura passagework, intricate trills and turns, and acrobatic leaps. The central Andante cantabile features a melodic line for the violin that is as richly embellished as an operatic aria, while the zesty themeand-variations finale is capped with a triple-time coda that flies like the wind.