This piece, for narrator, viola soloist, and orchestra (3.3.3.2 – 4.3.3.1 – tp+2 – hp – pno – str) is a retelling of the Cinderella fairytale set in a music conservatory. It’s written for large orchestra and gets around to introducing every one of the instruments, with a special emphasis on the oft-neglected viola. It lasts just a little over 30 minutes.
The solo viola part really needs to be played by a young woman in order to make the show work dramatically. Ideally the flute and oboe soloists should also be young women. All of the featured performers need to be able to poke a little fun at their instruments’ particular foibles. There are many dramatic possibilities for the performance of this piece, largely dependent upon how game/creative the performers are.
(An option if you don’t have an all female “cast”: use images projected over the orchestra to convey the story element visually. Have the orchestra, including all the soloists, dress in black and play with stand lights.)
I’m offering this for what I consider to be the very reasonable rental and royalty package $150, with an additional royalty of $50 per performance.
Since the trumpet is the major feature of this week’s concert, which features the brilliant playing of CSO principal trumpeter Christopher Martin, I thought we might take a further look at the history of the instrument and why there are so very few trumpet concertos in the repertoire.
Ancient Trumpets
Trumpet were in use at least 3,500 years ago, and from there earliest days, they had a regal association. How do we know? Well, two of the earliest trumpets that we have come from the tomb of King Tut. They were played on a special broadcast by the BBC in the 1930’s:
Notice that each of those trumpets sounds about three or four notes. This is an inherent physical property of the trumpet – and of any vibrating body, really – that without recourse to keys or valves, it is limited to the notes of the harmonic series. So for an awfully long time, trumpets – even of the European variety – were limited to sounding about five notes with any consistency. Hence the very familiar sound of the trumpet fanfare.
Clarino Playing
Around the time of Bach, however, some very diligent players developed a technique known as “clarino” playing. This takes advantage of the fact that the higher up you play on the trumpet, the more notes become available. The ascent in pitch is a perilous one though: the higher the note, the easier it is to crack, slip, or outright miss. The practice of clarino playing lasted from perhaps the High Renaissance to the High Baroque, and it is a fortuitous fact of history that it coincided with the lifespan of one Johann Sebastian Bach.
Because of this, we are left with such gems as the second Brandenburg Concerto (check out the third movement which starts at about 3:40):
Nota bene, the group playing above is called the Freiberger Barockorchester, a so-called “period instrument” ensemble. However, there’s a dead give-away that the trumpeter here is playing on a modern recreation of a trumpet from Bach’s time rather than an original instrument. Do you notice little holes that the trumpeter covers with his fingers while he plays? Those little finger holes are a modern improvement that allow the trumpeter to play the high notes more in tune, and they are not an original feature of the trumpets of Bach’s time.
Now, make no mistake – the bearded gentleman above is a complete virtuoso, and he is in fact using the very same clarino technique that was used by the players of Bach’s time. This little enhancement simply makes the notes sound more mellifluous to the ears of the Auto-Tune Generation.
[Full disclosure: There is significant debate about just what sort of instrument Bach composed this part for. Some people think it was a written for a more horn like instrument. Toscanini, for some reason, had it played on a piccolo clarinet.]
The Keyed Trumpet
The first step towards the modern valve trumpet was an endeavor called the “keyed trumpet”, invented by (or perhaps, for) the great Anton Weidinger, trumpeter of the court orchestra of Esterházy family, who also happened to employ one Franz Joseph Haydn. So it’s no surprise that Haydn himself wrote the first major piece for this new instrument, his Trumpet Concerto in E-flat Major. Incidentally, this is also the first major concertate piece for the trumpet that is still played today (excepting Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto).
[Like all esoteric brass instruments, the keyed trumpet has a major following in Britain. This web site is sort of amazing – whoever wrote the text of the front page did everything in his or her power to make you follow the link to the rest of the site.]
The keyed trumpet never gained traction, despite the concertos written for Weidinger by Haydn and his successor at the Esterházy court, Johann Nepomuk Hummel. The instrument was said to have sounded like a “demented oboe”. The English trumpeter Crispian Steele-Perkins, one of the few contemporary champions of the instrument, does at least as well as that in his recording of the Haydn Concerto:
The Cornet
The modern trumpet is really an amalgamation of the old trumpet and the piston cornet. The cornet is a slightly obsolete instrument now – most listeners can not distinguish its sound from that of the modern trumpet. Earlier in the past century though, before trumpets were regularly made with valves, the cornet was a highly prized virtuoso instrument. Hence the dazzling solo that Igor Stravinsky wrote for it in his 1911 ballet Petrushka:
This blog hasn’t had a game in a while, so it’s time for everybody’s favorite: Is it Schnittke OR Sondheim?
See, Stephen Sondheim was born in 1930 and became the USA’s greatest composer. Alfred Schnittke was born in 1934 and became the USSR’s greatest composer. They both lived and worked in the 1970’s. It was during that decade that they both rocked the exact same, shoulder-length straight hair cut:
Osvaldo Golijov is the composer of such blockbuster classical hits as The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind and the toe-tapping Pasión según San Marco:
Mr. Golijov’s pieces often have more the flavor of an ethnomusicological exploration, which makes a certain amount of sense for a composer of Argentinian birth who grew up on klezmer and tango and who has also lived in Israel and the U.S. [Although, is it really ethnomusicological if it’s actually your ethnicity? Discuss.]
Anyone who attended Thursday’s lecture was privy to insights from the work’s dedicatee, Mr. Henry Fogel. Boosey & Hawkes has provided an equally enlightening interview with the composer about the genesis of the work. You can listen to the work online in a performance conducted by Mei-Ann Chen (who gave the première in October 2010 in Memphis) with the New England Conservatory Philharmonia. Also of note is Mr. Golijov’s growing filmography since becoming the go-to composer of Francis Ford Coppola.
Lest there be any confusion, the title of Mr. Golijov’s latest work, Sidereus, is in no way meant to sound like an hilarious mispronunciation of the next composer on the program.
Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957) Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47 (1903, rev. 1905)
Sibelius’ violin concerto is far and above my favorite work in the genre, and one of my favorite works by the composer. In fact, it’s one of the first pieces that got me into classical music. You can view an introduction to the work here by the violinist Ida Haendel, who actually received a letter of appreciation from Sibelius after he had heard her performance of the work, and whose Wikipedia entry actually says the following:
She has the reputation of being as accomplished and brilliant a violinist as Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern; but has said that had she been more photogenic, she would have been as famous.
Ida Haendel
Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern, two violinists who Ida Haendel was not as attractive as
People sometimes said the same thing about Sibelius himself, but never to his face (see above).
But seriously folks, if you’re really into the Sibelius concerto, it’s worth your 10 bucks to invest in Leonidas Kavakos’ recording of the 1903 and 1905 versions of the work. He is still the only artist to record the 1903 version, due to the Sibelius family’s wishes, which is pretty impressive. He is also way, way hotter than Ida Haendel.
You’ll get to hear the intricate, Bach-like second cadenza that Sibelius later cut from the first movement of his concerto:
amongst many other interesting tidbits.
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 – 1975) Suite from Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
OK, first of all, if you’re anything like me, you’ve always wondered just where IS the Mtsensk District. It’s here:
Shostakovich’s troubles with the government began in the year 1936, at which point Joseph Stalin, eager to send a message to the artistic community, denounced Shostakovitch’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District as immoral and anti-soviet. Let’s watch a bit of the opera and see if we can spot anything that Stalin may have found objectionable. Remember to look very closely now:
At first glance, it looks pretty tame, but that Stalin always had a fine eye for detail. Anyhoo, that led to this very famous headline from the Soviet newspaper Pravda:
which roughly translates to “Muddle instead of Musicâ€, and which began a nightmarish 20 year period of heavy government repression and scare tactics aimed at keeping Shostakovitch in line.
I’d like to recommend two more valuable resources pertaining to Shostakovich’s music and life:
The first is the audio guide to chapter 7 of Alex Ross’s phenomenal book, The Rest is Noise. Even if you haven’t read the book or don’t have a copy handy, the audio guide gives you a nice synopsis of the chapter on music in the 1930′s and 40′s USSR.
The second is an article by everybody’s favorite Slovenian Marxist-Lacanian-psychoanalytic philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, entitled “Shostakovich in Casablanca“. In this article, Žižek compares Soviet repression of classical music to the Hollywood Hays code, in terms of what the censors expected and how an artist was meant both to abide by the code and simultaneously to circumvent it. He posits that Shostakovich found whatever success he could with the Soviet regime because he understood this Janus-faced censorship, whereas Prokofiev just couldn’t figure it out.
Osvaldo Golijov (1960 – )
