Benedetti: Program Notes

(Benedetti/Grynyuk) Notes on the Program

By Aaron Grad JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Born in Eisenach, March 21, 1685 Died in Leipzig, July 28, 1750 CHACONNE, FROM VIOLIN PARTITA NO. 2 IN D MINOR, BWV 1004 Composed between 1717 and 1720; 14 minutes In 1720, while working a secular job for a music-loving prince in Cöthen, Bach completed a monumental set of six violin solos. He had likely started them more than a decade earlier in Weimar, when he was rapidly absorbing the latest Italian and French styles that were just permeating Germany. By the time he assembled the Sonatas and Partitas, Bach was in the midst of an extraordinarily productive period for instrumental music, during which he also finalized the “Brandenburg” Concertos, the suites for solo cello, the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and many other works intended for public and private entertainment.

The distinction between Sonatas and Partitas has to do with the structure of the movements, the former being modeled on Italian “church” sonatas, and the latter patterned after French dance suites. In the Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor (BWV 1004), the first four movements conform to the genteel dance traditions of Louis XIV’s France. The final Chaconne, though, is a magnificent anomaly, with its continuous variations amassed into a towering structure that remains, now and forever, the spiritual zenith of the violin repertoire. The recurring pattern at the heart of the Chaconne first emerges in the lowest voice, starting on D, then traveling from D to C-sharp, D to B-flat, and finally G to A, at which point the cycle begins anew. This simple material fuels some fourteen minutes of ceaseless development, including a rapturous shift to the major mode.

SERGEI PROKOFIEV Born in Sontsovka, Russian Empire, April 23, 1891 Died in Moscow, March 5, 1953 SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO NO. 2 IN D MAJOR, OP. 94a Arranged for violin in 1943; 25 minutes Prokofiev settled in Moscow in 1936, nearly 20 years after he left Russia in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917. As an expatriate in Europe, he had found himself increasingly at odds with modernist tastemakers; meanwhile, Soviet audiences and authorities proved receptive to the composer’s “new simplicity,” as he dubbed his developing style. A string of successful film score and ballet commissions finally enticed Prokofiev back to his homeland on a permanent basis, and he entered the stream of Soviet music firmly established as a star.

Prokofiev was among the artists evacuated from urban centers for protection during World War II. He spent part of 1943 in Perm, in the Ural Mountains, where he composed the Flute Sonata in D Major

(Opus 94). At the request of the violinist David Oistrakh, Prokofiev arranged an alternate version for violin.

The Second Violin Sonata begins without fanfare, the violin entering on the downbeat and delivering a stately theme ruffled with bursts of faster motion. Contrasting motives employ the long-short snap of dotted rhythms, a gesture that evokes music of the 17th and 18th centuries. Sudden mood changes and surprising transitions ensure that these antique touches come off as playful and a bit irreverent, rather than stiff or formal.

The frisky scherzo that comes next is in a class with Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, two of Prokofiev’s ballet scores from the same era which likewise play with musical conventions from the past. The Andante movement draws out long, chromatic lines and slippery cadences, while a contrasting section adds a new figure that is downright bluesy, perhaps a remnant of Prokofiev’s time in New York and Paris during the Roaring 20s. The Allegro con brio finale returns to a mode of fun-loving neoclassicism, counterbalancing its thumping main theme with a mock-heroic figure that seems to parody a pedagogical exercise in broken thirds, the kind of drill forced on every student pianist.

WYNTON MARSALIS Born in New Orleans, October 18, 1961 FIDDLE DANCE SUITE FOR SOLO VIOLIN Composed in 2017; 25 minutes Wynton Marsalis provided the following program notes about the five movements in his Fiddle Dance Suite: 1. Sidestep Reel: In 19th century America, the Afro-Celtic fiddle style was the centerpiece of many a dance. Reels and hornpipes were very popular forms. Their repetitive, even-metered rhythms were easy and fun to dance to, and their infectious singable melodies stayed in the mind and on the tongue.

Adventurous fiddlers were given to syncopating on these forms by accenting off beats and by embellishing melodies with odd-metered note groupings. Syncopation is a fundamental rhythmic attitude of jazz and this movement is a celebration of that art. The melodic language is a home-grown concoction of commonality between traditional reels and hornpipes and the Baroque, ragtime and quartal concepts of modern jazz.

2. As the Wind Goes: Imagine the wistful late-night song of a lullabye, a campfire song, a ballad, a spiritual—sung as if on the wind, full of a yearning to experience again that which will only live as memory.

3. Jones’ Jig: The Irish Jig, the African 6/8 bell pattern, the shuffle rhythm of jazz and the drum style of Elvin Jones all play around with the relationship of 3 in the time-space of 2. The juxtaposition, negotiation and reconciliation of these opposing rhythmic perspectives create interesting musical relationships all over the globe.

4. Nicola’s Strathspey: In the traditional Strathspey, improvised embellishments, syncopated dotted rhythms and the use of space between notes create expectation, momentum and surprise. These same elements and their effect on the listener are the same in the blues. It seems like a natural marriage.

5. Bye Bye Breakdown: This is good ole’, Saturday night barn dance, hoedown fiddling. It revels in the whining cry of open double stops, in all types of musical onomatopoeia from train sounds to animal calls to country whistling, and in the steady 2/4 rhythm that is as basic as walking. The harmonic framework of several popular fiddle and folk tunes provide a practical grid for the cutting of challenging melodic and rhythmic figures. It is designed to tire both fiddler and dancers. Then we stomp our way home in varying states of delight and disrepair.

RICHARD STRAUSS Born in Munich, June 11, 1864 Died in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany, September 8, 1949 SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO IN E-FLAT MAJOR, OP. 18 Composed in 1887-88; 30 minutes Richard Strauss’ first musical idol was his father, Franz Strauss, the principal horn player in the Munich court orchestra and the conductor of his own amateur orchestra. Franz was a staunch traditionalist who revered Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, and so Richard’s first compositions embraced that Classical aesthetic. One of those early scores won over a most influential champion, the conductor Hans von Bülow, who offered the 20-year-old Strauss a coveted job as assistant conductor for the court orchestra in Meiningen.

Owing to the close friendship between Bülow and Brahms, Meiningen was a hotspot for Brahms’ music, which added a new thread of influence in Strauss’ musical outlook, seen most clearly in a piano quartet from 1884 and the Violin Sonata in E-flat Major from 1887. After those sterling examples of chamber music in traditional forms, he never attempted another; by then he had become obsessed with Liszt’s tone poems and Wagner’s operas, setting Strauss on a course to continue their quest toward “the music of the future,” to use Wagner’s coinage.

The first movement of the Violin Sonata shows off Strauss’ dexterity in moving through the traditional sonata-allegro form, with themes that evolve organically and offsetting rhythmic layers that generate extra propulsion. After that focused exercise in abstract musical construction, the second movement, labeled “Improvisation,” is spacious and tuneful, with a singing quality in the violin part that might have had something to do with Strauss’ new infatuation with the soprano who would later become his wife.

Following the piano’s moody introduction, the finale whips up the kind of heroic and extroverted frenzy that Strauss was just then bringing to his earliest tone poems.