Alessio Bax - Program Notes

Notes on the Program

By Aaron Grad Keyboard Concerto in D Minor after A. Marcello, BWV 974 JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Born March 21, 1685 in Eisenach, Germany Died July 28, 1750 in Leipzig, Germany While working as the court organist for a prince in Weimar, Germany, Bach created a series of transcriptions that allowed Italian concertos to be played on a harpsichord. It was a time of rapid development for the solo concerto, with most of the progress taking place in Venice and other northern Italian cities, and Bach benefited from access to unpublished manuscripts of recent works that the prince brought back from travels abroad. Assembling and performing such a trove of virtuosic harpsichord music surely made Bach’s patron happy—especially since it coincided with a time when the court organ was out of commission for upgrades—and it also allowed Bach to dissect the Italian concerto style that he came to adopt his own.

A number of Bach’s transcriptions start with Vivaldi as the source material, but this example in the key of D minor departs from an Oboe Concerto by a lesser-known musician from Venice, Alessandro Marcello. Bach’s arrangement of the opening movement captures the concerto’s strong contrast between robust orchestral statements and flowing solo episodes, adjusting the density and range of the keyboard part to make up for the harpsichord’s lack of dynamic control. The understated pulsing of the Adagio transfers quite effectively to the keyboard, and the right hand uses ample ornaments to let the melody approximate an oboe’s sustained breath. In the concluding Presto, Bach’s restless part for the left hand generates far more propulsion than Marcello’s blocky bass line, showing that Bach was not just imitating but elevating the Italian style he loved so much.

Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42 [1931] SERGEI RACHMANINOFF Born April 1, 1873 in Oneg, Russia Died March 28, 1943 in Beverly Hills, California Rachmaninoff composed his final score for solo piano, the Variations on a Theme of Corelli, in the summer of 1931. The theme he used, known as “La Folia,” came from a legendary violin sonata published in 1700 by Arcangelo Corelli, the violinist and composer who reshaped instrumental music for small and large groups from his perch in Rome. Corelli, however, did not invent the “Folia” theme; Jean-Baptiste Lully had notated the same chord progression several decades earlier, and the music had existed in oral traditions long before that, going back to a fifteenth-century dance tune from Portugal. The telltale harmonic skeleton of “La Folia” rolls out in the opening phrases,

but Rachmaninoff’s variations migrate beyond these age-old harmonies, allowing Corelli’s melody to glide over surprising and unconventional chord progressions.

Quaderno musicale di Annalibera [1952-53] LUIGI DALLAPICCOLA Born February 3, 1904 in Pisino d’Istria (now Pazin, Croatia) Died February 19, 1975 in Florence, Italy The Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola was born on a disputed peninsula controlled at the time by the Austrian Empire (then Italy after World War I, then Yugoslavia after World War II, and now Croatia). It’s fitting that composer born at a crossroads managed to rise above the strident nationalism and tribalism that roiled Europe in his day, demonstrating admirable independence as a musician and, more broadly, as a deepthinking humanist. As Italy’s foremost ambassador for the twelve-tone method developed in Vienna by Schoenberg and company, Dallapiccola was fluid in music’s most avantgarde language, and yet his devotion to Italian Baroque masters as well as Bach grounded his scores in a historical context.

Dallapiccola’s “Musical Notebook for Annalibera,” named for his daughter and dedicated to her on the occasion of her eighth birthday, is riddled with references to Bach, starting with the title that recalls the Notebook for Anna Magdalena, a collection that Bach assembled for his second wife. In Dallapiccola’s opening movement, titled Symbol, the right hand begins with a drawn-out motive that transposes Bach’s musical signature, the first of many appearances of this four-note gesture. (The German note B corresponds to our B-flat, and H corresponds to B, so that BACH constitutes two creeping pairs of descending half-steps: B-flat down to A, then C down to B.) At the same time, this Bachlike prelude incorporates twelve-tone principles.

Of the eleven short movements, some are studies of particular techniques, including Accents, Lines and Rhythms, while others are more poetic, with headings like Friezes and Shadows. Three notable sections take the form of strict canons in which voices follow each other according to specific rules, elaborating those techniques that proved so useful both to Bach and to twentieth-century composers looking to impose a different sort of order on music that operated outside of traditional tonality.

St. François d’Assise: La prédication aux oiseaux [1863] Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata [1849] FRANZ LISZT Born October 22, 1811 in Doborján, Hungary (now Raiding, Austria) Died July 31, 1886 in Bayreuth, Germany

Franz Liszt, the greatest virtuoso performer of his generation, retired from the concert stage at the age of 35 to focus on conducting, teaching, and above all composing. He developed an adventurous and groundbreaking approach to harmony, and he left an indelible mark on the art of program music (instrumental works with references to specific stories or images), in formats ranging from intimate piano albums to grand symphonic poems.

In 1863, Liszt wrote a set of Two Legends for piano, each inspired by a religious scene.

The first depicts St. Francis of Assisi delivering his sermon to the birds, an ecstatic and transcendent scene full of birdcalls and heavenly chords.

Liszt published the second volume of the collection known as Years of Pilgrimage in 1858, featuring music that he had conceived in Italy. It came twenty years after he first drafted an early version of the piece that he placed at the end of that volume under the title After a Reading of Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata, which pianists simply know as the “Dante” Sonata. Liszt was hiding out in Italy at the time with his mistress and their growing brood of children, and he became fascinated by the works of Dante Alighieri, the great Italian poet of the Middle Ages.

The “fantasia” part of Liszt’s title plays up the free-flowing, improvisatory nature of the music, whereas a true sonata would demand a more formal treatment of themes in a particular structure. (He only wrote one official sonata, and even that one challenges many of the form’s conventions.) Springing from the “Inferno” portion of Dante’s Divine Comedy, this dark fantasy paints an unsettling picture of Hell, rife with the augmentedfourth interval that musicians had long characterized as a diabolical sound. Taking advantage of the latest developments in instrument design, Liszt created textures that still define Romantic virtuosity at the keyboard, using rapid repetitions, rumbling tremolos and strategic pedaling to give the piano an orchestral breadth of sound. © 2019 Aaron Grad.