This week’s
montage picks up where last week’s thinking left off, in a sense. Indeed, last
week considered concertos without orchestras, and this week’s looks at
concertos without a soloist.
In many
ways, the pieces considered thios week follow more or less the formula of the
concerto grosso, where the melodic interplay occurs between the orchestra and a
detachment of players within the orchestra (known as the concertino).
This formula is exemplified by the selected concerti by Vivaldi and Corelli,
both masters of the genre in their era.
The other
two pieces retained are 20th Century compositions, which find their
inspiration from the old baroque formula. The concerto in E Flat by Stravinsky
falls within one of his many “compositional perio” where he flirts with
specific formulas or currents. At that time, he turned his sights into baroque
music – a great example of which would be his ballet Pulcinella, where
he liberally borrows from Pergolesi. This concerto (along with another
one he will compose for American sponsors, the Dumbarton Oaks concerto)
are designed to be “modern” concerti grossi, intended for small chamber
ensembles.
Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra
doesn’t pretend to borrow from the baroque – it sits squarely within the modern
language of the 20th Century, as do most of his major orchestral
works. The different movements of the concerto single out specific sections of
the orchestra for concertino duty, which explains why Leonard Bernstein called
it “most democratic”.
Today’s Once Upon the Internet presents tracks uploaded from the site johann-sebastian-bach.org which a few years ago discontinued the distribution of “complete” works, only offering samples or streaming content). We owe the site to Michael Reckling, a trained German organist and visual artist who moved to Spain over 40 years ago.
Reckling, who frequented the Church of Our Lady of the Incarnation of Marbella was impressed with the location’s acoustics, and he took upon himself to engage Monsignor Rodrigo Bocanegra (at that time pastor of the Church) in 1970 to support this initiative. The ambitious project would yield the first large tracker organ and one of the most important instruments built in Spain in the 20th Century: the Organo Del Sol Mayor. The fine construction was carried out between 1971 and 1975 by the master organ builders Gabriel Blancafort and Joan Capella from Collbató, at their workshop near Barcelona.
The organ is composed of almost 5,000 pipes, made of pewter, copper and wood, 4 manual keyboards with 56 notes in each, a complete pedal of 32 notes and a 16 feet principal at the façade. The largest pipe of the organ is six meters tall and weighs almost 100 kilos.
Since 1972, Michael Reckling has been the titular organist and the curator of the instrument as well as the organizer and sponsor of nearly all the concerts, leaving the position in 2004 to undertake a similar project at the Valladolid Cathedral (an Allen electronic-digital organ).
Since its inauguration in 1975, national and international artists alike have participated in the more than 100 concerts given on the instrument. One of the local artists who has been featured on the Marbella organ is Pilar Cabrera, who is the titular organist of the new concert organ at Valladolid's Metropolitan Cathedral in Northern Spain.
(I hope you won't mind programming BWV 540 for a second week in a row...)
Johann Sebastian BACH (1685-1750)
Cantata Nº29 - Symphony Ian Tracey
Triosonata Nr. 4 in E minor BWV 528 Triosonata Nr. 6 in G major, BWV 530 Prelude and Fugue in D major BWV 532 Pilar Cabrera
Toccata and Fugue in F major BWV 540 Jonathan Rees-Williams
Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor BVW 582 Nun kommt der Heiden Heiland - BWV 699 Herzlich tut mich verlangen - BWV 727 Ian Tracey
INSTRUMENT: Organo del Sol Mayor Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación, Marbella, Spain Live performances 1982-86 Downloaded from johann-sebastian-bach.org, 2006
So far,
we’ve considered concertos in the spirit and context that took shape in the
Classical era – that is to say, pieces for soloist and orchestra.
The term
concerto, however, is literally “a concert”, and on the strictest of terms
needs not involve a soloist (or a small soloist group) and a larger orchestra.
Indeed, Johann Sebastian Bach composed a good number of “concertos” for solo
keyboard, some for organ and many for the harpsichord (later taken over by the
piano) – one such example is his Italian concerto
Today’s
podcast takes a pleasant departure from the classical setting of the “solo
concerto” and looks at a pair of – shall I say – mammoth pieces for solo
keyboard that have earned the subtitle “concerto for solo piano”, beginning
with a “cruelly taxing” piano work by Charles Alkan.
The three
pieces that make up this “concerto” are part of a 12 piece cycle entitled Douze
études dans tous les tons mineurs (12 Studies in the Minor Keys), published
in 1857 With sections marked "Tutti", "Solo" and
"Piano", the piece requires the soloist to present the voices of both
the orchestra and the soloist. The pianist Jack Gibbons comments: "The
style and form of the music take on a monumental quality—rich, thickly set
textures and harmonies ... conjure up the sound world of a whole orchestra and
tax the performer, both physically and mentally, to the limit."
How’s that
for sheer length: the piece, including all 3 movements, is 121 pages long and
takes about 50 minutes to perform. The first movement on its own, comprises 72
pages and takes over 29 minutes to play (Jack Gibbons comments that "the
first movement has more bars in it than the entire Hammerklavier Sonata by
Beethoven").
Alkan
authorized the piece to be truncated to make "un morceau de concert, d'une
durée ordinaire" (a concert piece of normal duration). It may be that the
composer himself performed the first movement (alone) in such a shortened
version. Pianist John Ogden, himself known for taking on obscure and taxing
works (such as Busoni’s Piano Concerto), is our soloist.
Robert
Schumann’s piano sonata output – and numbering – can be confusing. The Piano
Sonata in F♯ minor (Op. 11) and the Piano Sonata in F minor (Op. 14) are numbered 1
and 3 respectively. He he later wrote Three Piano Sonatas for the Young
Op. 118. Because it was published before the F minor sonata, it was given an
earlier sequence number (No. 2) but still kept its later opus number (Op. 22).
This has caused confusion, and recordings of the G minor Sonata have sometimes
been published as "Sonata No. 3". There was also an earlier sonata in
F minor, which Schumann abandoned; this is sometimes referred to as
"Sonata No. 4".
The Dritte
grosse Sonate, Opus 14, was completed a year after the first, in June 1836,
and dedicated to the pianist Ignaz Moscheles, and not to Clara Wleck (whom he
would later marry). This is probably indicative of the tense relationship
between the couple and Clara’s father.
In F minor,
the work was first published with only three of its original five movements,
which had first included two scherzos and a different finale. Schumann revised
the sonata in 1853, including the second of the two scherzos and revising the
first movement. Due to its length and complexity it earned, presumably at the
instigation of its publisher Haslinger, the subtitle Concert sans orchestre.
The sonata was given its first public performance six years after Schumann’s
death by Brahms, while no listing of the sonata is found in any of the
programmes of Clara’s own concerts. It is performed today by Vladimir Horowitz.
Over the course of a forty-five-year career Ton Koopman has established
himself as a leader in the “authentic” movement. He trained in Amsterdam, where
he studied organ, harpsichord and musicology and was awarded the Prix
d'Excellence for both instruments.
From the beginning of his musical studies he was
fascinated by authentic instruments and a performance style based on sound
scholarship and in 1969, at the age of 25, he created his first Baroque
orchestra. In 1979 he founded the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra followed by the
Amsterdam Baroque Choir in 1992.
As an organist he has performed on the most
prestigious historical instruments of Europe, and as a harpsichord player and
conductor of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir he has been a regular
guest at prestigious venues in Vienna, London, Berlin, Brussels, Madrid, Rome,
Salzburg, Tokyo and Osaka.
Koopman's extensive and impressive activities as
a soloist, accompanist and conductor have been recorded on a large number of
LPs and CDs for labels like Erato, Teldec, Sony, Philips and DG, besides his
own record label “Antoine Marchand”, distributed by Challenge Records. According to his discography,
he has recorded either complete or significant portions of the entire J.
S. Bach organ catalog for his own label and for others. It turns out
that Koopman was very unfortunate with his attempts at producing a series of
recordings of all Bach's organ works. Two series (for Deutsche Grammophon and
Novalis) were broken off before their completion, and the successful third
attempt (for Teldec) disappeared quickly from the market before it had time to
establish itself.
Today’s offering from my personal collection of
vinyl records features Koopman on the restored Rudolf Garrels Organ of the
Grote Kerk, Maassluis, Netherlands in the early 1980’s and is from the
ill-fated DG project, issued under Archiv Produktion, a label begun in 1947,
devoted mainly to early and Baroque music, which has evolved as the premier
label for period or authentic performance.
Rudolf Garrels built the organ in the great
church of Maassluis in the years 1730-1732. It was a gift of Govert van Wijn, a
rich citizen of Maassluis, ship owner and former treasurer of the fishery
committee. The organ was first used on the 4th of December 1732, the day on
which Govert van Wijn turned 90. This makes it an instrument of Bach’s era.
However, in the course of time the organ of Maassluis could not be spared from
changing musical tastes of several organ builders and organists. Jacobus
Robbers (1772-1773), Andries Wolffers (1789-1801), Abraham Meere (1805),
Jonathan Bätz (1840), Michael Maarschalkerweerd (1881) and two generations of
Van Leeuwen (1938-1965) restored the organ according to their own view. A first
restoration, intended to go back to the original situation of 1732, took place
in the years 1956 until 1965. It soon appeared that the organ required a more
radical revision. In 1975 the former churchwardens took the decision to begin a
solid restoration and to restore the Garrels-organ into its original splendour
so that it could be preserved for the posterity.
Johann Sebastian BACH (1685-1750) Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565 Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major BWV 564 Toccata and Fugue in F Major, BWV 540 Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 538 »Dorisch«
Ton Koopman, Organ Recorded in Maassluis, Grote Kerk, 1983. Organ
built 1730-1732 by Rudolf Garrels. Label: Archiv Produktion – 410 999-1 Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
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