Notes on the Program By Aaron Grad Cello Suite No. 3, Op. 87 [1971] BENJAMIN BRITTEN Born November 22, 1913 in Lowestoft (Suffolk), England Died December 4, 1976 in Aldeburgh (Suffolk), England The enduring friendship between Benjamin Britten and Mstislav Rostropovich began in 1960, when the Russian cellist came to London to perform the British premiere of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, with the composer in attendance. When Shostakovich introduced Britten and Rostropovich after the concert, the adventurous cellist immediately asked for a new piece (apparently this was his routine with all composers), and Britten soon obliged with the Sonata for Cello and Piano. Rostropovich performed that new sonata at Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival in 1961, establishing a routine that brought the Russian star back to perform new suites for solo cello in 1965, 1968 and 1974. It didn’t even matter that they could not speak each others’ native languages, since they both knew just enough German to conduct their friendship in a bastardized idiom they dubbed “Aldeburgh Deutsch.” Britten composed the Cello Suite No. 3 in 1971, incorporating four Russian tunes as a tribute to his friend. Three of the melodies came from a collection of folksong arrangements made by Tchaikovsky, while the fourth quotes the Kontakion, a hymn for the dead from Russian Orthodox liturgy. The short, linked movements function as ephemeral variations, hinting at the themes but not stating them outright until the final Passacaglia. Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007 [c. 1720] JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Born March 21, 1685 in Eisenach, Germany Died July 28, 1750 in Leipzig, Germany From 1717 to 1723, while working in a secular position as the Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Cöthen, Bach focused more on instrumental music than at any other point in his career. During that time he produced such landmark works as the Brandenburg Concertos, the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, and the first book of the WellTempered Clavier, and he most likely composed his Six Cello Suites in Cöthen as well, probably before the solo violin set from 1720. Bach’s own manuscript has been lost, so the few reliable sources for the suites are surviving copies made during Bach’s life, including one in the hand of his second wife, Anna Magdalena.
Most of Bach’s pieces fell out of favor for some period after his lifetime, but the cello suites suffered a particularly dark hibernation through much of the 19th century. One early champion was Friedrich Grützmacher, a German cellist and composer who created a performing edition of the suites in the 1860s, liberally elaborating Bach’s material and even transposing music to different keys. A dog-eared copy of that Leipzig edition found its way to a second-hand music shop in Barcelona, where the 13-year-old Pablo Casals discovered it in 1890. Casals worked on the suites privately for years, and he eventually introduced them into his concert repertoire. His recordings of the six suites, completed in 1939, finally brought Bach’s solo cello music into the limelight after two centuries of neglect. Each suite begins with a Prelude, and none is more recognizable than the noble opening of the First Suite in G Major, with its broken chords that maximize the resonance of the cello’s open strings. The suites also share a consistent sequence of dances, using styles popularized in France in the late seventeenth century. (King Louis XIV was an avid dancer, and his court composers established the template for the instrumental dance suite.) The Allemande, so named for its adaptation of an older German style, is even and flowing, and then the Courante, which translates as “running,” is quite spry in its threebeat pulse. The Sarabande, by contrast, is a slow and stately dance, imported to France by way of Spain and its American colonies. The First Suite turns next to a pair of Menuets with three moderate beats per measure, using the da capo structure that returns “to the head” of the first Menuet after playing through the second. The final dance is a Gigue, a French adaptation of the barreling jigs from the British Isles. Although the nature of a suite is to lump together a collection of disparate dances, Bach’s approach creates true cohesion and integrity within each work. In this case, the Prelude’s first three notes—G, up to D, and up again to B, completing a G-major triad—appear in some form or another within the first few measures of each subsequent movement. Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8 [1915] ZOLTÁN KODÁLY Born December 16, 1882 in Kecskemét, Hungary Died March 6, 1967 in Budapest, Hungary The son of a railway stationmaster, Zoltán Kodály grew up in the countryside of what is now Slovakia, and his music remained grounded in the folksongs and traditions of the Magyar (Hungarian) people who had occupied those lands for more than a thousand years. Kodály’s friend and collaborator in the systematic collection of folksongs, Béla Bartók, once wrote, “If I were to name the composer whose works are the most perfect embodiment of the Hungarian spirit, I would answer, Kodály. His work proves his faith in the Hungarian spirit. The obvious explanation is that all Kodály’s composing activity
is rooted only in Hungarian soil, but the deep inner reason is his unshakable faith and trust in the constructive power and future of his people.” Chamber music involving strings functioned as an important laboratory for Kodály early in his career. He made his public debut as a composer with the First String Quartet in 1910, and in the next years he added a cello sonata with piano, a duo for violin and cello and then this Sonata for Solo Cello from 1915. War delayed the sonata’s premiere until 1918, and it was finally published in 1921 as Kodály’s Opus 8. Since then it has become an indispensable part of the solo cello repertoire, eclipsed only by Bach’s immortal suites. The cellist plays the entire sonata with the two lower strings tuned down a half-step to B and F-sharp, a feature that gives this work its distinctive resonance. The B-minor chords that begin and end the first movement make the most of that alternate tuning, with three of the four notes played as open strings. The central Adagio, to be played “with great expression,” is a marvel of voice-like lyricism, supported by accompanying plucks that the cellist executes with the fingers of the left hand without breaking the right hand’s bow-strokes. The Allegro molto vivace finale comes closest in spirit to the Hungarian folksongs and dances that seeped into Kodály’s musical language over the course of his ethnomusicology research. © 2020 Aaron Grad.