Bonfiglio: Harmonica Virtuoso
January 16, 2010
Robert Bonfiglio, Harmonica

PROGRAM NOTES

ARMAS JÄRNEFELT
Praeludium for orchestra

Armas Järnefelt was born in Viipuri, Finland (now Vyborg, Russia), on August 14, 1869, and died in Stockholm on June 23, 1958. He composed his Praeludium in 1907. The score calls for flute, oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, triangle, and strings. Duration is about 3 minutes.

Like Sibelius, who became his brother-in-law through marrying his sister, Armas Järnefelt was born in a part of Finland that was culturally Swedish (and later became part of Russia). He studied in Helsinki under Wegelius and Busoni from 1887 to 1890, then moved on to Berlin and Paris (where his teacher was Massenet in 1893-4). Though he composed a fair number of pieces, his main career was devoted to conducting. From 1898 on he held a series of posts of growing importance, first in Finland, then in Stockholm, where he conducted the Royal Opera from 1907. He took Swedish citizenship when he was named court conductor in 1910.

He was the first Finnish conductor to perform Wagner’s operas in Finland, and he introduced Mahler’s eighth symphony and Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder to Sweden. Not surprisingly, he was also a leading exponent of Sibelius.

His compositions, the Berceuse of 1904 and the Praeludium of 1907, are best known as two light, charming pieces of a romantic character. The latter is a lively, light march in character, playing games with quiet pizzicato string figures alternating with swelling, tuneful passages for the full ensemble.

This piece was performed as part of the RSO’s first concert on  May 23, 1934.

ANTONIO SALIERI
26 Variations on La Follia di Spagna

Antonio Salieri was born in Legnano, Italy, on August 18, 1750, and died in Vienna on May 7, 1825. He composed his orchestral variations on La Folia in December 1815. Details of the first performance are not known. The score calls for two flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, harp, timpani, percussion, and strings. Duration is about 23 minutes.

Antonio Salieri has long been the most maligned composer in the history of music. For nearly two centuries he has suffered under the completely fallacious charge of having poisoned Mozart out of jealousy. The legend has been passed on in a one-act play by the greatest of Russian writers, Alexander Pushkin (which was set to music by Rimsky-Korsakov), and in our own time it has been further popularized by Peter Schaffer’s play Amadeus and the later film based on it.

Salieri was so successful in his own time that it would have been foolish of him to react to Mozart with envy. When the Viennese composer Florian Gassmann met him in Venice while mounting one of his operas there, he was impressed enough with the talent of the 16-year-old boy that he took him back to Vienna for intensive musical training. In addition to his talent, Salieri had a diplomatic and engaging personality making it possible for him to develop close relations with the famous librettist Metastasio and the Emperor Joseph II. At 19 he had already composed his first opera, and thereafter the theater was his main field of operations, in Vienna, Italy, and even France.

In February 1788, Salieri received the title of Court Kapellmeister and he retained the position until his retirement in 1824 - the longest tenure in the history of the court’s musical establishment.  Fully aware of his debt to generous teachers and benefactors in his youth, Salieri gave lessons to many young musicians. After he retired from operatic composition, he trained many virtuoso singers, and he offered lessons in setting Italian texts to both the young Beethoven and the still younger Schubert.

It seems that the Variations on folia melody are Salieri’s last orchestral work. It is an unusual piece in at least two ways. First of all, he chooses - at the beginning of the romantic era, when so many aspects of older music had fallen out of fashion - to undertake a form that was popular a full century earlier. It is a set of variations on a traditional melody and harmonic pattern called La follia or La folia (“Madness”). It was a traditional melodic‑harmonic unit (much like the blues progression in the 20th century) that proved so adaptable that it continued serving composers for many years. The most famous set of such variations had been made by Corelli, and it created a model that many other composers felt called open to compete with and (if possible) to outdo.

For Salieri in 1815, though, the plan was clearly not to compete with Corelli’s brilliant writing for the solo violin (except incidentally). What makes this piece so unusual is that it sounds as if Salieri himself has been boning up on the latest musical developments and is trying them out on his own—perhaps for the first time! The Salieri works that have been performed or recorded in recent decades come from the years more or less contemporaneous with Mozart, and in that comparison, his operas, while melodious and attractive in the musical language of the 1780s, simply cannot compare with Mozart’s penetrating psychological understanding of the Corelli variations and his ability to project in ever-changing music.

In this last orchestral work, Salieri seems actually to be coming to grips with the music of the headstrong young German he had taught briefly twenty years earlier. The orchestral sonorities no longer reflect Mozart, but rather the weight and power of Beethoven.  To be sure, Salieri never quite manages to control those forces perfectly, but listening to the progression of variations that progress, one from another, in the course of the work, at least gives us a reason to respect his open-minded willingness to experiment with the sounds he heard around him in Vienna.

Most of all, perhaps, the opportunity to hear a serious attempt by this reasonably gifted composer gives us a chance to evaluate what might be regarded as Salieri’s misfortune (as far as his place in history is concerned):  to show up on the scene and overlap biographically with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert - any one of whom could hit a string of home runs to his singles and sacrifice flies. It’s bad enough to be in competition with one genius. But four of the very greatest is really unfair!

HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS
Harmonica Concerto
Heitor Villa-Lobos was born in Rio de Janeiro on March 5, 1887, and died there on November 17, 1959. He composed the Harmonica Concerto in 1955 for the virtuoso John Sebastian. The first performance seems to have been given in Israel by the Kol Israel Orchestra, George Singer conducting, on October 27, 1959, with Sebastian as the soloist. In addition to the solo harmonica, the score calls for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, two horns, trombone, percussion, harp, and strings. Duration is about 20 minutes.

Brazilian-born Heitor Villa‑Lobos was given cello lessons by his father, and later he attained a rare mastery of the guitar. But as a composer he was almost entirely self-taught. As a young man intended for the medical profession, he preferred to spend his days in the bohemian life of the street musician, developing the ability to improvise guitar accompaniments to the capricious modulations of the popular instrumental music known as the chôros. Between ages 18 and 25, he traveled extensively throughout the country studying the various types of Brazilian popular music, and noting its characteristic features.

At first his music was scorned in his own land for its novelty, but in the 1920s it was taken up enthusiastically in Paris, where Villa‑Lobos attracted wide interest in many circles of the avant-garde. Throughout his long life he continued to pour forth an unending stream of new works, almost all of them marked by a freshness of melodic line (including Brazilian popular styles), a rhythmic vitality, and imaginative instrumental color.  Some of his most popular works attempted to combine Brazilian folk material with the contrapuntal style of J.S. Bach, and to these works Villa-Lobos gave a generic title that might be translated “Brazilian Bach-like Pieces” (Bachianas brasileiras); some of them are for full orchestra, others for as few as two instruments. He even composed a stunning Broadway score, Magdalena, in 1948 with Robert Wright and George Forrest (who normally converted the music of older composers, like Grieg and Borodin, into Broadway tunes for Song of Norway and Kismet).

Perhaps because of the widespread interest in Villa-Lobos’s overtly Brazilian works, his many compositions in the more traditional genres have tended to be overlooked - often remaining unpublished and unrecorded for decades after the composer’s death. These include a dozen symphonies and many concertos, including five for piano, two for cello, one each for harp, guitar and harmonica.

The Harmonica Concerto is the last of these works, composed in 1955-56, when the composer was in his late sixties. Naturally no composer will write a work for such an unusual concert instrument as the harmonica unless there is someone who can play it. This work was one of many commissioned by the remarkable harmonica player John Sebastian (1914-1980), who created a substantial repertory of concert works for his instrument by commissioning leading composers. Sebastian’s widow, Nadia, wrote to Villa-Lobos scholar Lisa Peppercorn to describe the colorful scene in which Villa-Lobos was completing the work, in consultation with John Sebastian, in 1956: “It was one of my joys to work with John and Villa-Lobos during the writing of the Concerto. The composer sat at the huge semi-circular desk with a pot of black thick coffee, several cigars and ashtrays all around working on several compositions at once, while watching a TV at intervals. All the time wearing a hat...”

Villa-Lobos’s Harmonica Concerto is laid out in the typical fast-slow-fast arrangement of movements, but beyond that basic plan, the composer goes pretty much his own way, working intuitively with his lush sonorities and his rhapsodic approach to structure. He scores the work attentively so that the harmonica may always take its place as the principal figure. This is music that can carry the listener along on its tunes, its harmonic warmth, and its personality, offering warm-hearted romantic sounds and lively energy for the close.

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Symphony No. 8 in D minor

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born on October 12, 1872, at Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, England, and died in London on August 26, 1958.  He composed his Symphony No. 8 in D minor from 1953 to 1955. The first performance was given by the Hallé Orchestra under the direction of Sir John Barbirolli on 1956. The score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, three bassoons (3rd optional), two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, 5 percussionists (glockenspiel, xylophone, vibraphone, cymbals, bass drum, snare drum, chimes, triangle, three tuned gongs, 2 harps, celesta, and strings. The second movement is for winds only, the third for strings only. Duration is about 30 minutes.

The nine symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams were composed over the span of a half century. They are remarkably varied. Some of them were hailed quickly as masterpieces, while others took many years to attain a high standing (and some may perhaps be said to be reaching for it still). In roughly the first half of his symphonic career, Vaughan Williams was regarded by many as the most  important of English composers, yet toward the end, the politics of musical modernism was such as to label him completely out of fashion. Gradually, though, the late works are finding a place in our concert life among audiences who are open-minded enough to find their originality, even in a musical language that started its development in the Victorian era.

The three earliest symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams were programmatic in character and bore titles. The first, known as the Sea Symphony (1903‑9), was in fact a choral work that had grown from the composer’s intention to compose some settings of Walt Whitman as hearty “songs of the sea.” The next two, though purely instrumental, remained essentially program pieces: the London Symphony (1912‑13) and the Pastoral Symphony (1921). At that point, Vaughan Williams turned, for his next three symphonies—after a lapse of ten years—to the purely abstract instrumental genre, identified only by key and number. Yet critics could not be prevented from attempting to read programmatic ideas into these works, no matter how vehemently the composer insisted that they were intended to make their statements purely as music.

His last two symphonies were again abstract works in the traditional four movements, yet they were quite new in terms of harmony and orchestral color (though not “new” enough to avoid being damned by critics who felt that there was nothing worth saying any longer if it was not said in the serial language derived from Schoenberg and carried forward by a series of “avant-garde” composers of the mid-20th century.

Perhaps it was the severity of the preceding symphonies (the Sixth, with its tragic emptiness suggesting a world devastated by the atomic bomb, or the Seventh, with a relentless spiritual quest) that caused the Eighth to be undervalued at first. Much of the work is actually cheerful in character, with a renewed feeling for a human touch, and this led many to regard it as “unserious” at a time when “important” music simply did not allow itself the hint of a grin or a welcoming embrace.

Vaughan Williams had always found colorful ways to use his orchestra. Here he does it again with an essentially traditional ensemble (he refers to it as “the ‘Schubert’ orchestra with the addition of a harp” but also with a much enlarged percussion section “including all the ’phones and ’spiels known to the composer.” Actually these relatively unusual instruments had already appeared in the previous symphony, though there they had been “normal” because of the special effects suggesting the icy wastes of the Antarctic. In the Eighth symphony, they were simply part of the musical expression—and unusual for that reason.

Vaughan Williams labels the opening movement—perhaps with a twinkle in his eye—Fantasia (Variazioni senza tema) (“Fantasy—Variations without a Theme”). The opening gesture—four notes in the solo trumpet— is the core of the thematic material for the movement, extended in a flute solo and strongly contrasted in a broad descending theme in the strings. These materials are deployed in seven variations—but the variations themselves hint at a traditional sonata-form layout, because variations two and three are reflected later on by variations six and seven (as in a recapitulation), and the second of each of these pairs is of a relatively “feminine,” lyrical character normally thought of as the secondary theme of the sonata form.

The second movement is a Scherzo in the style of a march, for winds only. Though it is in a minor key, there is a sardonic playfulness. The contrasting section, in 6/8 time, begins in the low winds with an air of self-importance, though the flutes and upper wind give it a very lyrical turn before the gloriously raucous close.

The strings have the third movement—Cavatina—to themselves. Some of Vaughan Williams’s most original pieces—such as the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis—are for string orchestra, so in one sense this movement feels more typical of the earlier Vaughan Williams. Yet his flexible and wide-ranging treatment of tonality brings it into his late style. Without ever becoming modernistic, in the manner of the mid-20th century, he nonetheless keeps the effect fresh with a tonal restlessness that finds it way in the end to a serene conclusion in E major after the quiet tensions that have preceded it.

The final movement, Toccata, is where Vaughan Williams lets go with all of his extra percussion instruments. The symphony as a whole is listed as being in D minor, and the only hint of D major came at the climax of the first movement. The main theme of the finale suggests D major at the very outset, but the theme quickly becomes a continuing wrestling match between major and minor. The composer himself referred to the main theme as “a rather sinister exordium.” But the movement unfolds as a quest for the close in the major mode through a sturdy conflict of keys and powerful sonorities. The major key close is richly and honestly achieved, the earlier tensions have been absorbed, and the symphony comes to a triumphant close, the first Vaughan Williams had written in a decade, and a powerful contribution, one that might have been expected to be his last, though in fact he was to write one final symphony - as an octogenarian.
 
© Steven Ledbetter