Program Notes: Stephen Burns Goes for Baroque

Featuring virtuoso trumpeter Stephen Burns.

Friday, October 19, 2007 at 8 pm
Sunday, October 21, 2007 at 3 pm

• C. P. E.  Bach - Symphony No. 1, G Major
  
• Georg Philipp Telemann
  
• C. P. E.  Bach - Symphony No. 2, B-flat Major
  
• C. P. E.  Bach - - Symphony No. 4, A Major
  
• Tommaso Albinoni

C. P. E.  Bach - Symphony No. 1, G Major, Wq 182

Four of the sons of Johann Sebastian Bach became composers, and although his youngest, Johann Christian is perhaps the most popular today, it might be that Christian’s half-brother, Carl Philipp Emanuel was the greatest of the four.  Even if he had not been a son of the great Bach,, Emanuel would likely be regarded today as one of the finest composers of the Rococo (ca. 1725-1775).  His many keyboard compositions were greatly admired and studied by his contemporaries and by later composers, Beethoven among them.  Indeed, in his own day he and his brother were better known than their father, whose music was considered old-fashioned and was mostly ignored.

Part of the credit for the reassessment of Sebastian Bach’s work goes to one of the greatest patrons of music of the 18^th century, Baron Gottfried van Swieten.  It was van Swieten who introduced to Mozart the by that time largely forgotten works of Emanuel’s father and those of Handel, and these discoveries had a significant influence on Mozart’s later work.  It was also van Swieten who specifically commissioned a set of six symphonies from C. P. E.  Bach in 1773.  At the time, van Swieten was Austrian ambassador to Frederick the Great, for whom Emanuel Bach had toiled for nearly three decades, leaving his service in 1768.  Emanuel had moved from Berlin to Hamburg, and van Swieten might have sought him out there, partly in hopes of acquiring manuscripts of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music.

The symphony of Emanuel Bach’s milieu was not the fully developed article it was becoming in the hands of Haydn and Mozart in Austria and southern Germany.  The six symphonies collected under the rubric of Wq. 182 are all scored for an orchestra of strings alone without winds and are all in three movements without minuet.  One must not conclude, though, that Emanuel’s symphonies are stylistically or even structurally backward.  On the contrary, when Emanuel left the court of Frederick he was able to pursue the greater freedom of the newer galant style, which is evident in all these symphonies.

One of the hallmarks of Emanuel’s music is his tendency to unexpected shifts in mood and key.  To modern ears such shifts are routine, so one must listen with some care in order to perceive them in context.  In the present symphony, for example, we begin in a bright G major, but it is not long before there is an unexpected move into the minor.  This Allegro di molto first movement, as is so often the case in his symphonies, does not come to a full cadence at its end, but modulates into another key and thus leads directly—stylistically indirectly—into the slow movement, which in turn is connected to the finale.

Telemann - Suite in D Major for trumpet, strings & continuo TWV 55:D8

The interrelationship between the Symphony and the Suite (or Overture, a term with which “suite” is virtually interchangeable in the baroque) is intimate.  Both genres arose ultimately from the overture to an opera or ballet.  Often such an overture would consist of three sections, two fast ones sandwiching a slow one.  This was the origin of the type of symphony we heard at the outset of this concert (and the two that will follow).  Over the course of the 18^th century, this three-section overture would develop into the full-fledged, three- or four-movement symphony we associate with Mozart and Beethoven and their successors.  But the other branch of this fecund root would evolve instead into the introduction to a series of dance movements that came to be called a Suite (“that which follows” the Overture) or simply Overture, with the “and dances” implied.  Such suites could consist of any number of movements, often with non-dance forms interspersed for variety, for example, the fourth movement Aria of the present Suite, and could be scored for as large a group as several soloists with orchestra or for a single instrument, often keyboard or lute.  This genre largely disappeared with the baroque era, but was successfully revived, with modifications, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  (Look to next month’s concert, for example, which includes Holst’s Saint Paul’s Suite of 1913.)

Georg Philipp Telemann was one of the most prolific exponents of the Suite/Overture:  he wrote hundreds of them, although, alas, only about 135 survive today.  The prevailing tone of this graceful suite in D is one of stateliness, an adjective that can easily be applied to all of the first four movements, the Overture proper, a march, a pair of minuets, and an aria.  The fifth movement is styled La Réjouissance (rejoicing); this was a term Telemann used very commonly in his orchestral suites.  (J. S. Bach also used it for the last movement of his Fourth orchestral suite.)  The following Sarabande is all serenity, whereas the succeeding Gigue is a bouncy number marked by high notes for the solo trumpet.  Stateliness resumes for the pair of Passepieds that make up the eighth movement, and the final section is a Rondeau in galloping triplets.

This is surely one of the most striking of C. P. E.  Bach’s symphonies, rich with felicitous ideas of a high order of quality.  Another of this composer’s characteristics was his melancholy, which often seems to manifest itself in these pieces by a tendency to veer into and linger in minor keys, even when the home key is in the major.  The first movement of this nominally B-flat major symphony is a prime example.  The work has hardly begun before things turn rather dark.  But mood shifts being a norm for Emanuel, the sunshine frequently breaks through.  The slow movement is all grace and galant, but again permeated with the heartfelt depths of Emanuel’s troubled soul.  Once again, the movement comes not to a stop but rather to a pause in mid-breath before we are launched into a sudden key change—to E-flat!—and the busy finale.  Small scale to be sure, but a great symphony nonetheless.

Another beauty this, with the opening descending from the airy heights.  Delicacy is the order of the day, with frequent detours into Emanuel’s typical pensive terrain.  Even the listener habituated by now to Emanuel’s surprises might be taken aback by the sudden shift in key that ends the Allegro ma non troppo and leads us into the haunting slow movement, which bears the unusually descriptive tempo marking Largo ed innocentamente—very slowly and with innocence.  The finale is ambiguous, sounding as if it might actually begin in the minor, another instance of Emanuel’s brilliant sleight of hand.

Tommaso Albinoni was initially something of a musical dilettante and styled himself as such on his first musical publications.  Son of a well-to-do Venetian paper manufacturer and merchant, it was only after his father’s death in 1709 that Albinoni dropped the “dilettante” from his published works and began to refer to himself as musico di violino, a professional musician.  The family business was left to the composer’s two younger brothers.

He began writing sacred works and operas in the last years of the 17^th century, and although he continued writing operas off and on until 1741, it is his instrumental works and especially his concerti that are most popular today.  His first collection of concerti, Op. 2, appeared in 1700, more than a decade before Vivaldi’s first set, the great L’Estro Armonico of 1711.  Thus, Albinoni had a hand in the development of the solo concerto right alongside Corelli and Vivaldi.

Our concerto originated as a work for oboe and was published as part of Albinoni’s Op. 7 in 1715.  The Op. 7 is not a set of oboe concerti exclusively; four of the twelve works are for solo oboe, four are for two oboes, and the rest are for strings without any solo instrument.  In the solo pieces, Albinoni tended to create the oboe part much as he had written them for the voice in his operas.  To quote Michael Talbot, “Stepwise movement and small leaps are generally preferred to the more agile, arpeggiated style borrowed from the violin which Vivaldi cultivates in his oboe writing.”  (Vivaldi’s first published oboe concerti, by the way, appear in his Op. 7, which was published by the same Amsterdam house shortly after the Albinoni set.)

Baroque oboe concerti are often performed on the trumpet nowadays, just as in the baroque period itself, oboes occasionally were used in place of trumpets as ensemble instruments.  The timbre and range of the two instruments are similar, and transposition is rather easily accomplished.  Admirers of Vivaldi will find much to their liking in this B-flat concerto, although the lovely, autumnal minor-key slow movement is to our ears perhaps more reminiscent of Handel.

 - Doug Briscoe

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