Program Notes: Classical guitarist Sharon Isbin plays Rodrigo
Featuring Grammy award-winning artist Sharon Isbin, guitar
October 15 & 17, 2004
This program is permeated with a decidedly Hispanic flavor. Two of the composers were indeed born in Spain, a third in Brazil, and the Vivaldi work, though written for the lute, has come to be best known in its performances on that most quintessentially Spanish of instruments, the guitar.
Kenneth Amis: Fanfare for Boston Classical Orchestra
After composing almost three-quarters of this commission, I was asked to provide program notes for the work in preparation for its premiere by the Boston Classical Orchestra. This is often a difficult task for the composer who, unless the work is a programmatic work, has struggled to maintain a deep, intimate connection with the music that supercedes verbal description. In an effort to write a program note that was consistent in style, length and level of technical jargon with the program notes of the other pieces on the program, I visited the Boston Classical Orchestras web site where all season information can be found. After reading the notes for the other pieces on the concert program and thinking about what I had already written I did something I very rarely do: I took a piece three-quarters complete, placed it in a file cabinet and started over. I did this not because I was displeased with its quality or potential, but it simply didn’t feel right. What developed next was something totally different, quite surprising and wholly unexpected for this commission.
Vivaldi: Concerto for Guitar in D, RV 93
Vivaldi never wrote a concerto for the guitar. This now famous work actually began as a Trio Sonata, not a Concerto, and was originally scored for lute, 2 violins, and continuo. It was a relatively easy matter to transpose the lute part to guitar and expand the violin parts to a full string orchestra and thus add to the guitarist’s repertoire a new concerto. When this work was rediscovered in the 1920s, there were no prominent lutenists active, because after its heyday in the Renaissance the lute gradually fell into disuse. By the 20th century, much of the vast repertoire for lute lay unperformed, and when the occasional lute piece did surface, one of the Bach Suites, for example, it would almost always be played on the guitar. It is only in recent decades, with the renewed interest in period instruments, that lute specialists have begun to flourish again. Even in Vivaldi’s day the lute was beginning to be considered old-fashioned, and he wrote this sonata, along with two others (RV 82 & 85), at the specific behest of one Count Johann Joseph Wrtby (or Vrtba), royal governor of Bohemia, who may have played the instrument himself. We know that Vivaldi was visiting Bohemia at the time, so we can confidently date this work to around 1730. Of the three movements, it is the second in particular, a Largo, that has become extremely well known (on the guitar!) in our time.
Arriaga: Symphony in D major
The death of Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga just ten days before his twentieth birthday may well have deprived the world of one of its greatest composers. Alas, we have but a single opera, a mass, three string quartets, a handful of other works, and this symphony by which to speculate. Arriaga is known as the Spanish Mozart, and not only because of his brilliance as a musical child prodigy and his early death. He actually shares a birthday with Mozart (January 27) as well as the older master’s given names: Mozart was christened Johannes (=Juan) Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus (which later, of course, became Amadeus). Arriaga was born in 1806 in Bilbao and wrote his opera Los esclavos felices at the age of 15. He went to the Paris Conservatory in 1821 and was by 1824 a teaching fellow in harmony and counterpoint there. It was in that year that his quartets were published, and it was in the remaining two years of his life that he composed his mass, a Stabat Mater, the Nonetto-Overture, some songs and cantatas, and the fine symphony before us. He died of tuberculosis in 1826. There is nothing particularly Spanish about the symphony: it reflects the language of the cosmopolitan Europe of the day, with echoes of Rossini, Beethoven, and Schubert. The slow introduction (Adagio) to the first movement begins in D major and is unusually lengthy-the following Allegro Vivace moves to the minor. The Andante’s main theme might almost have come from Schubert’s pen, while the Minuetto has more of the flavor of Beethoven. The finale, Allegro con moto, is again in D minor and again has a Schubertian feel about it, with a second subject in the major that recalls Weber. Here is a graceful and rewarding symphony that deserves to be better known.
Villa-Lobos: Bachianas Brasileiras No. 9 (1945)
Throughout his life, Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) infused his music with the milieu of his homeland, incorporating the traditions and rhythms of the indigenous and Iberian peoples into many of his works. One particularly interesting series of hybrids introduced yet another element: the spirit of Bach. This series of pieces, which he wrote over the years 1930-1945, he called Bachianas Brasileiras, and in them he straddled the New World and the Old, making use of Baroque contrapuntal techniques in the handling of the typically Brazilian materials. The last piece in the series, no.9, is in the form of a Prelude and Fugue and is thus an especially pointed homage to Bach. It was written in New York in 1945 and dedicated to Aaron Copland. Originally, the piece was scored for wordless chorus a cappella in six parts, but later Villa-Lobos made this arrangement for strings. Certainly the music sounds right at home in this medium.
Rodrigo: Concierto de Aranjuez
Joaquin Rodrigo was nearly a centenarian when he passed away in 1999. He had been born in 1901 in Sagunto in Valencia. Like the composers Benjamin Britten and Gunther Schuller, he was born on November 22nd, St. Cecilia’s Day (the patron saint of music). Rodrigo went blind at age 3 as the result of a diphtheria epidemic, but showed an early interest in music and literature and by the early 1920s was a gifted pianist and student of composition. In 1927 he went to study in Paris with Paul Dukas (the composer of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice). Rodrigo met many important figures in Paris, including Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and his own future wife, the pianist Victoria Kamhi, whom he married in 1933. She gave up her career thereafter so as devote herself to him. They were married for 64 years, until her death in 1997. The Concierto de Aranjuez was composed in 1939 for the guitarist Regino Sainz de la Maza. It established Rodrigo’s reputation and remains, along with his Fantasía para un gentilhombre, also for guitar and orchestra, his most renowned score. Rodrigo composed many works in concerto form over the years, all with descriptive titles such as Concierto Madrigal and Concierto Andaluz. The present work gets its name from the royal palace of Aranjuez, which lies south of Madrid. Though built in the 14th century, its current façade dates from the 18th. Of course, Rodrigo can never have seen it, but he would have been told of its baroque splendor and airy brightness, which translates into the pellucid textures of the score. Rodrigo said of the concerto, “It should sound like the hidden breeze that stirs the treetops.”
