Notes on the Program By Aaron Grad “In this program, we confront four strategies for renewing and refreshing the compositional language at pivotal points in music history. In each case, this renewal involves the hybridization of two different—even completely opposite—musical traditions.” Pierre-Laurent Aimard Echo Fantasia à 4 in Dorian Mode, SwWV 260 [unknown] JAN PIETERSZOON SWEELINCK Born May 1562 in Deventer, Netherlands Died October 16, 1621 in Amsterdam, Netherlands Like his father and grandfather, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck was an exceptional church organist who played for more than 40 years at Amsterdam’s historic Oude Kerk. He was also an influential teacher, with his students winning jobs in the top churches of northern Germany, establishing a lineage that eventually reached J. S. Bach at the end of seventeenth century. As a composer, Sweelinck wrote hundreds of polyphonic vocal works, many of which were published in his lifetime. His 70-odd keyboard compositions survived only in private copies, and the technical challenges in the keyboard parts suggest that Sweelinck wrote such pieces to support his pedagogy. This Echo Fantasia mixes the free development of a Fantasia with structured canons and counterpoint among the four voices, forming a bridge between the smooth polyphony of the waning Renaissance style and the more ornate fugues that flourished over the next century, culminating in Bach’s High Baroque style. The Dorian mode mentioned in the title comes from the type of liturgical singing that filled churches for centuries before composers devised the tonal system of major and minor keys. Shadowlines [2001] GEORGE BENJAMIN Born January 31, 1960 in London, England Currently resides in London, England In 1980, the 20-year-old George Benjamin became the youngest living composer ever to have music performed at the BBC Proms, a popular summer concert series in London. Commissions and recordings by major orchestras have kept Benjamin in the limelight ever since, and his recent operas have elevated him to a new level of stardom—especially Written on Skin from 2012, hailed by Alex Ross of The New Yorker as “the work of a genius unleashed.”
Benjamin wrote Shadowlines in 2001 for Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who premiered the sixmovement score at London’s Barbican Centre in 2003. The composer wrote the following description: This sequence of pieces, all canons in different ways, was conceived as a continuous, cumulative structure: 1) A brief, seemingly improvisatory prologue. 2) The high register, fierce and harshly chromatic, against the lower, which is consonant and calm; a compact coda reconciles these opposites. 3) A miniature scherzo, all within the space of one-and-a-half octaves in the bass, leading immediately to: 4) Explosive and monolithic, the pianist’s hands perpetually rifting apart then re-uniting in rhythmical unison. 5) The most expansive and lyrical movement; at its heart a slow ground-bass, over which builds a widely contrasted procession of textures. After a short pause: 6) A simple and gentle epilogue. Piano Sonata, Op. 1 [1908] ALBAN BERG Born February 9,1885 in Vienna Died December 24, 1935 in Vienna Until the age of 19, Alban Berg’s only formal training in music consisted of piano lessons from the family’s governess during his childhood. His early, self-guided attempts at composing focused on lieder, and he wrote some 80 songs in a Romantic style indebted to Schumann and Brahms. Berg entered a new phase in 1904, when he began seven years of private study with Arnold Schoenberg. Berg was only 11 years younger than his teacher, and Schoenberg was still a work-in-progress himself, grappling his way toward free atonality and ultimately the twelve-tone method that defined his later works. But Schoenberg was a natural leader and teacher, and the first two pupils that joined him in 1904—Berg and Anton Webern—remained his most celebrated disciples, forming the nucleus of the socalled “Second Viennese School” (the first being the cohort centered around Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven). Initially Berg’s lessons with Schoenberg focused on harmony and counterpoint, those basic building blocks of music. They progressed to the study of composition in 1907, and Schoenberg’s emphasis on formal structure led Berg to make sketches for five different piano sonatas in the next year. As Schoenberg wrote in a letter to his publisher in 1910, “Alban Berg is an extraordinarily gifted composer, but the state he was in when he came to me was such that his imagination apparently could not work on anything but lieder. Even the piano accompaniments to them were songlike. He was absolutely incapable of writing an instrumental movement or inventing an instrumental theme.”
Under Schoenberg’s supervision, Berg finally completed this Piano Sonata in 1908, a work he published two years later as his Opus 1. Structured in a single movement in sonata form, this music is ostensibly in the key of B-minor, but it hardly ever comes to rest in a stable key area. Instead it builds a rich harmonic landscape full of chromatic dissonances, whole-tone scales and sonorities built from stacked fourths, putting the focus on fleeting gestures and momentary relationships instead of traditional tonal expectations. It is a heartfelt and remarkably assured work for a student, one that the pianist Glenn Gould rightfully assessed as being “among the most auspicious Opus Ones ever written.” Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major, Op. 110 [1821-22] LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December, 1770 in Bonn, Germany Died March 26, 1827 in Vienna, Austria Beethoven made his last public appearance as a pianist in 1814, and his composing over the next several years slowed to a trickle. He was preoccupied by a custody battle over his nephew and his caretaking of the troubled boy, and his failed attempts at marriage and the total loss of his hearing, among other health afflictions, left the composer more alone and miserable than ever. It took years for him to regain his drive to compose, and the works from his final years marked a split from his previous life. Having achieved financial independence, and no longer needing to please any audience besides himself and his maker, Beethoven turned inward in this late period, channeling some of his most profound and surprising thoughts into two intimate genres: piano sonatas and string quartets. The Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major (Op. 110) was the second of three sonatas Beethoven agreed to write for a publisher who offered a healthy commission fee. These related sonatas, composed between 1820 and 1822, turned out to be Beethoven’s final contributions to the genre, and each is groundbreaking in its own distinctive way. The Aflat sonata begins with a poetic movement that defies easy categorization, with its “moderate, singing and very expressive” tempo making it unusually slow for a fast movement (or perhaps unusually fast for a slow movement). A brief and rhythmically jarring central movement makes for a stark contrast with the slow introduction to the finale, where Beethoven quotes from the poignant aria in Bach’s St. John Passion that marks the moment of Christ’s death. From that state of minor-key anguish, the finale launches into a smooth fugue in the home key of A-flat major, paying homage to a forgotten past and asserting Beethoven’s total liberty to reimagine the piano sonata according to his own inner vision. © 2020 Aaron Grad.