Maybe You Would Like Some (bwa-ha-ha!) Halloween Chamber Music

T   h E minor sonata... impressive for its impassioned and profoundly grave character. Its very first notes create room for dialog between rising arpeggiated octaves and sighing downward figures. This interplay combines a plebian ‘cantabile’ quality with dramatic outbursts and fermatas of great intensity... eerily piercing melody above nervously racing bass lines is an incomparably tender and profoundly human portrait hovering somewhere between hope, apprehension, and a scarcely definable longing.”
  —  Anselm Hartinger, liner notes for Viviane Chassot CD.

T   he pale F minor Adagio [of the F major sonata, Hob. XVI:23] sounds like an eccentric siciliano, with idiosyncratic bass phrasing and complicated rhythms undermining the movement’s simple, rocking motion... an unimposing but brilliant exploit. The abrupt toccata-like entry... is remarkable for its passionate quality, giving the lie to any good-natured, fatherly image one might have of Haydn.”
  — Anselm Hartinger, liner notes for Viviane Chassot CD.

E very year somebody I know asks me to suggest some scary music for them to play, for a Halloween party or other gathering of friends around this time. “Something exotic. Not Bach ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’ predictable.” Okay, so how about haunted accordion!


    [30-sec clip, Viviane Chassot, Joseph Haydn, Sonata in e minor, Hob. XVI:34, Presto; (track 11), 2009, 1.1MB MP3]

A h, the wistful, waning days of autumn, hours of daylight quickly shortening, your major-key moments vanquished by spooky darkness. How about a swooping, nimble waltz brought up crippled with rubatic, sesquipedalian and perhaps lethal injuries? Rapid sextuplets of flitting bats! Long fermata rests in the spooky wood; then continue on the dank path...

    [30-sec clip, Viviane Chassot, Joseph Haydn, Sonata in F major, Hob. XVI:23, Adagio; (track 5), 2009, 1.1MB MP3]

Y our languid puppy innocence cannot protect you from the danger here; it only signals your vulnerability and the juiciness of your jugular. These stretches of tranquil major are like a cinematic tight-shot, hiding the danger that’s nearby. Your lonely ambling treble can take no comfort from the lurker bass-voice. He does not escort you. Instead, he narrates your doom. Bwa-ha-ha!

T hese sonata movements become ‘character pieces’ by way of, shall we say, a “possessed” timbre and texture of which accordion is capable! E minor, the key of flight from reality and spiritual drunkenness. F minor, the key of self-torment; qualms of conscience; introversion; pensiveness; endless worry; self-reproach; wishing you’d never come. The e minor and f minor are perfect keys for Halloween, don’t you think? Far more subtle and sneaking than ... the undead d minor; the ominous g-sharp minor; the sepulchral c-sharp minor; the tragic c minor; the frenzied g minor, so obvious (see links below, esp. Steblin and Schubart).

B orn in Zürich, Chassot studied at the Hochschule der Künste in Bern with Teodoro Anzellotti. She is winner of the Kranichstein Music Prize in 2004 in Darmstadt. She is an energetic champion of new music, working with ensembles such as Contrechamps Geneva, Collegium Novum Zurich, Klangforum Wien und Ensemble modern Frankfurt. She also has in the past 10 years engaged in interdisciplinary projects with writers and dancers—for example, her 2007 collaboration with choreographer Luca Veggetti and the Cincinnati Ballet, with presentations at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Ms. Chassot presently lives as a freelance musician in Leipzig. She has collaborated with composers such as with Beat Furrer, Michael Pelzel, Toshio Hosokawa, Roland Moser, Henri Dutilleux, Jörg Widmann, Friedrich Cerha, Arman Gushchyan, and Bernhard Lang, and she has transcribed many Baroque and early music works for the accordion. Her interpretations combine historical musical performance practice with the unusual properties of free-reed, which inevitably makes the music appear in a new [and sometimes eerie] light!

• Viviane Chassot website [site design in black-with-blood-red palette!]
  
• Chassot V. Joseph Haydn: Sonatas. (Genuin, 2009.)
  
• Music and Emotion Bibliography, School of Music, Ohio State Univ. (graduate course Mus-829D)
  
• Juslin P, Sloboda J. Handbook of Music and Emotion. Oxford Univ, 2010.
  
• Li T, Ogihara M. Detecting emotion in music. Johns Hopkins Univ, 2003.
  
• Lindley M. A rudimentary approach to the history of the major and minor keys. Working Paper, 2010.
  
• Meyer L. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Univ Chicago, 1961.
  
• Schubart C. Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst. 1806.
  
• Steblin R. A History of Key Characteristics in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries. Univ Rochester, 2005.
  
• Zangwill N. Music, metaphor, and emotion. J. Aesthet Art Crit 2007;64:391-400.
  
• Haydn J. Piano sonata in E minor, No. 53, Hob. XVI:34, at IMSLP
  
• Haydn J. Piano sonata in F minor, No. 38, Hob. XVI:23, at IMSLP

Trio Hantaï and Marin Marais: Intimate Character Pieces and Politics of Melancholy

M    arais’s third book of ‘Pièces de Viole’ (the source of this afternoon’s work) came out in 1711 [when Marais was 55 years old], two years after he withdrew from his operatic career after the failure of his fourth opera, ‘Sémélé’. The suite in C minor from this book begins with a deeply tragic Prélude, which is followed by a vigorous Fantaisie with a brilliant and virtuosic variation or double.”
  —  Robert Mealy, Program Notes, BEMF, 2009.

T    he suites [of Marais] are more loosely organized than those by Couperin. The policy of mixing the ‘difficult’ with the ‘easy’ is discreetly expressed by Marais in his ‘Avertissement’ to Pieces de Viol (I): ‘And because simple melodies meet the tast of a lot of people, I have composed some pieces with this in mind, where chords scarcely enter. One will find others where I have used them more, and several which are entirely filled with them for those who love harmony...’ Marais differs markedly from Couperin in that he made little conscious effort to achieve anything resembling goûts réunis [conforming to prevailing/popular taste]. This is not surprising, since the music itself is so wedded to the [viol] and so bound to the tradition of virtuoso solo performance... Some of Marais’s expressive and quasi-improvisatory preludes, especially those from Book (2), seem indebted to the lute repertory in particular. The same ornaments, the same melodic turns and the same rhythms are found.”
  —  James Anthony, French Baroque Music, p. 389.

T  he Trio Hantaï performance at BEMF yesterday was especially intimate—exerting a wide range of forces on our emotions. The Jordan Hall (New England Conservatory) venue was a bit large for the trio. But, on the other hand, the acoustics of the large hall only served to accentuate the intimacy of the Trio’s playing. It felt as though they were playing in a private home, so great was the person-to-person, player-to-audience expressiveness of each of the three Hantaï brothers.

T  he Marin Marais piece especially captured my imagination—the profound sadness of it. A number of us in the audience had damp eyes—signaling an affective resonance with what we were hearing. We thought of the trials that Marais had been experiencing 300 years ago—not about three Hantai ‘talking-heads’ discoursing about Marais, but instead projecting ourselves into Marais’s actual historical, political situation.We remained intensely ‘present’, not displaced to the margins of what was represented by the Hantaïs’ playing. The signs of this affective state—these tears—were real tears of mourning, just like the ones we cry for, say, Anna Karenina, or other fictive characters.

A    n affect is never a purely psychological thing, nor a purely somatic one.”
  —  Joyce McDougall, The Many Faces of Eros, p. 157.

I  n other words, it was French Baroque stage recreated in Boston, complete with ceremonies where our passions were called into being—by the sacrifices exacted by a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Marais evoked our own [post-modern] subjectivity, from the distance of the 17^th/early-18^th Century. In short, I loved it.

A  t age 20, Marin Marais married Catherine d’Amicourt (on 21-SEP-1676), and they had 19 children together [?!]. He studied composition with Jean-Baptiste Lully and bass viol/da gamba with Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe. Subsequently, he wrote his five remarkable books of ‘Pièces de viole’ (1686-1725), a life’s work that covers the gamut of court preferences and personal emotions. But not a great amount of historical detail or correspondence or other evidence has been preserved, through which we might know very much about Marais’s life. The Milliot – de la Gorce biography from about 20 years ago is good so far as it goes, but it is frustrating in that it is unable to go as far as one might wish. For example, were these ‘Pièces en ut mineur’ (Prélude — Fantaisie — Allemande — Sarabande grave — Gigue — Rondeau) a personal statement or instead an oblique commentary on political developments in France in about 1711?

D    uring the so-called ‘Age of Melancholy’, many writers invoked both traditional and new conceptualizations of the disease in order to account for various types of social turbulence, ranging from discontent and factionalism to civil war. Writing about melancholy became a way to explore both the causes and preventions of political disorder, on both specific and abstract levels. Thus, at one and the same moment, a writer could write about melancholy to discuss specific and ongoing political crises and to explore more generally the principles which generate political conflicts in the first place.”
  —  Adam Kitzes, Politics of Melancholy.

T  he other music by Leclair, Rameau, Couperin, and J. S. Bach was excellent, too; I don’t mean to diminish it by commenting only on the Marais. The wit, imagination, and virtuosity of the Hantaïs’ playing were superb throughout. Jérôme, still bowing to the audience’s applause, rises and sees that Pierre and Marc have already left the stage a few seconds earlier. He shrugs to the audience, gives a comical “Well, you two are at liberty to exit, then” gesture, dangling his viol out toward the gaping stage door through which they had passed. He smiles and good-naturedly exits himself. The Hantaï brothers are masters of absolutely every Baroque gesture that exists, and not only the musical gestures!

• Pierre Hantaï, harpsichord
  
• Jérôme Hantaï, viola da gamba
  
• Marc Hantaï, Baroque flute

• Marin Marais page at Wikipedia
  
• Mealy R. Program Notes. BEMF, 2009. [100KB pdf]
  
• 'Music and Emotion' bibliography at Ohio State Univ
  
• Intl Conf on Music and Emotion, 31-AUG - 03-SEP, Durham Univ, U.K.
  
• Max Planck Institut for Cognitive & Brain Sciences
  
• Anthony J. French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau. Amadeus, 2003.
  
• Bowles G. Thematic Catalog of the Works of Marin Marais. Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.
  
• Hsu J. Handbook of French Baroque Viol Technique. Liss, 1982.
  
• Kitzes A. The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton. Routledge, 2006.
  
• Koelsch S, et al. A cardiac signature of emotionality. Eur J Neurosci 2007; 26:3328-38.
  
• Li T, Ogihara M. Detecting emotion in music. ISMIR, 2003.
  
• McDougall J. The Many Faces of Eros. Norton, 1995.
  
• McDowell B. Marais & Forqueray: A Historical and Analytical Study of their Music for Solo Basse de Viole. PhD Dissertation, Columbia Univ, 1974.
  
• Milliot S, de la Gorce J. Marin Marais. Fayard, 1991.
  
• Petrides K, Niven L, Mouskounti T. Emotional intelligence of ballet dancers and musicians. Psicothema. 2006;18 Suppl:101-7.
  
• Radden J, ed. The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva. Oxford Univ, 2002.
  
• Sadie J. The Bass Viol in French Baroque Chamber Music. UMI, 1980.
  
• Sloboda J, Steinbeis N, Koelsch S. The role of harmonic expectancy violations in musical emotions: evidence from subjective, physiological, and neural responses. J Cogn Neurosci. 2006;18:1380-93.
  
• Teplow D. Performance Practice and Technique in Marin Marais’ ‘Pieces de Viole’. UMI, 1986.
  
• Thompson C. Marin Marais’s ‘Pieces de Viole’. Musical Quarterly 1960; 46:482-99.

Halloween: Spooky String Quartets, Scary Piety

T    he basic purpose of story-telling ... is not just to entertain but to illuminate life. It doesn’t matter if we deal in the symbolism of supernatural beings such as vampires, zombies, ghosts, werecreatures, and unknowable cosmic entities. If horror is done right—and we have only to look at the stories withstanding the test of time to identify which ones are done right—then it provides a psychological roadmap through the trials of life.”
  —  Matthew Warner, Horror Isn’t a 4-Letter Word, p. 14.

To many, Halloween is a perfect ‘holiday’, relatively free of the social stresses that burden other celebrations during the year. And, to celebrate Halloween, it’s always good to have some appropriate atmospheric music to mark the occasion. If you and your string quartet friends are looking for something new to put you and your Halloween audiences in the spirit, you can surely do no better than Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet No. 2, ‘Demons & Angels’.


    [50-sec clip, Stacy Garrop, String Quartet No. 2 ‘Demons & Angels’, Mvt. 3, ‘Inner Demons’, 1.2MB MP3]

Music in the Loft commissioned the first two movements of ‘Demons and Angels’ for performance by the Biava Quartet on its 2004/2005 concert series. The Loft subsequently commissioned the rest of the piece, premiered by the Biava Quartet at Yale University in November 2005. The 4-movment complete work received its premiere at Music in the Loft in October, 2006.

An assemblage of unrelenting demons, unreliable angels, and gothic humanity, String Quartet No. 2 tells the story of a devout man who confidently and self-righteously thought his actions were guided by God, only to discover that he was mistaken—he has in fact heinously murdered five people. The first two movements elucidate the deluded personality of this character. The first, ‘Demonic Spirits’, addresses the darkness that’s inherent in his pious self-deception. The movement begins with a jarring chord played five times, each one representing a murder. These chords return as violent interruptions throughout the piece. This movement has two main themes: the first theme is martial/militaristic; the second theme is sinister in its arrogant impishness. The second movement, ‘Song of the Angels’, contemplates the goodness in the protagonist before his personality is transformed by delusional piety. The cello has a long solo created by blending elements of the first movement’s themes, representing how evil is spawned from good intentions that are oblivious to reality.

The third movement, ‘Inner Demons’, is a vivid account of this character as he descends into psychosis. This movement contains four themes: a tarantella, a demented waltz, a scherzo, and the Kentucky pentecostal folk hymn ‘The Wayfaring Stranger.’ Finally, the eerie hymn asserts itself above all, and we hear the man commit the five murders that opened the first movement. The piece concludes with IV. ‘Broken Spirit.’ This movement explores his realization of what he has done. The man is caught and sentenced to life in prison. With a festinating four-note motive, the man paces in his cell while his mental state alternates between psychotic violence and spasms of remorseful hope that, through contrition, he can be saved by angels.

I    am a poor Wayfaring Stranger,
A-trav’lin’ [you betcha!] through this land of woe.
And there’s no sickness, toil or danger
In that bright world to which I go.
I know dark clouds will gather ‘round me;
I know my way is [darn] rough and steep.
But beauteous fields lie just beyond me [my friends],
Where souls redeemed their vigil keep.
I want to wear a crown of glory
When I get home to that bright land;
I want to shout Salvation’s story
In concert with that blood-washed band.”
  — Appalachian Folk Hymn.

Of course, a composer’s decision to write a string quartet is fateful in its own right, linking one to the great European tradition, including veneration of glorious, deceased masters. At the outset the composer always believes in her/his own mind that the quartet-writing enterprise is a just and righteous one. Mindful of the risk of self-deception, however, Garrop dissects her corpses carefully and finds her own funereal path. ‘Demons & Angels’ is a pestilential object lesson in terror—for listeners, performers, and maybe other composers. She discovers her quartetly ‘path’ both musically and theatrically, incorporating diverse elements and exploiting the dimly-lit concert environment in suspenseful bubonic ways. Musically, Garrop’s works are distinguished by the mordant quality of their realization. The Second Quartet embodies a well-(de)composed ‘working out’ of the implications of these various morbidly-contrasting motivic ideas and Ichabodleian gestures with a traditional arch form, galloping repeated psycho-rhythms, and a cadaveric approach to thematic development. ;)

Stacy Garrop has won several orchestra competitions resulting in performances by the Civic Orchestra, Omaha Symphony, New England Philharmonic, the Women’s Philharmonic, and readings by the Minnesota Orchestra and the American Composers Orchestra. She was also selected for the Dale Warland Singers 2000-2001 New Choral Music Program. She was a finalist for the 2001 Rome Prize, and received a 2001 Barlow Endowment commission, as well as a 2002 Artists Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council.

Her works have been recently performed by the Charleston Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Chamber Singers, EARPLAY. Other performances includes ones given by the National Repertory Orchestra and the new music ensembles Third Angle and SoundsNew.

She has held fellowships/residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Yaddo, and Wellesley Composers Conference.

Garrop completed her Doctorate in Music at Indiana University in 2000; she also holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago (1995) and a B.M. from University of Michigan (1992).

Stacy is currently an Assistant Professor in Composition at the Chicago College of the Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.

Other Halloween-ish pieces you might consider include these:

• B. Bartók - String Quartet No. 4
  
• L. Beethoven - String Quartet in C minor, Op. 18 No. 4
  
• V. Ho - String Quartet No. 1
  
• H. Purcell - Chacony in G minor (Z730)
  
• C. Saint-Saëns, Danse Macabre, Op. 40, arr. for string quartet by Matt Kingston
  
• D. Shostakovich - String Quartet No. 8 in C minor
  
• I. Xenakis - ST/10

Z   ig et zig et zag, la mort crie cadence
Frappant une tombe avec son talon,
La mort à minuit joue un air de danse,

Zig et zig et zag, sur son violon.
Le vent d'hiver souffle, et la nuit est sombre,
Des gémissements sortent des tilleuls ;
Les squelettes blancs vont à travers l'ombre
Courant et sautant sous leurs grands linceuls,

Zig et zig et zag, chacun se trémousse,
On entend claquer les os des danseurs,
Un couple lascif s'asseoit sur la mousse
Comme pour goûter d'anciennes douceurs.

Zig et zig et zag, la mort continue
De racler sans fin son aigre instrument.
Un voile est tombé ! La danseuse est nue!
Son danseur la serre amoureusement.
La dame est, dit-on, marquise ou baronne.
Et le vert galant un pauvre charron - Horreur!
Et voilà qu'elle s'abandonne
Comme si le rustre était un baron!

Zig et zig et zig, quelle sarabande!
Quels cercles de morts se donnant la main!

Zig et zig et zag, on voit dans la bande
Le roi gambader auprès du vilain!
Mais psit ! tout à coup on quitte la ronde,
On se pousse, on fuit, le coq a chanté
Oh! La belle nuit pour le pauvre monde!
Et vive la mort et l'égalité!

[Zig … zig … zag, Death in cadence
Striking a tomb with his heel,
Death on the stroke of midnight plays a dance-tune,

Zig … zig … zag, on his violin.
The winter wind blows, and the night is dark,
Groans are heard in the lindens;
Through the gloom, white skeletons pass,
Running and leaping in their shrouds.

Zig … zig … zag: each one is frisking,
The bones of the dancers are heard to crack—
A lustful couple sits on pillows
As if to relish a remembrance of softness that they knew in life.

Zig … zig … zag, Death continues
to scrape endlessly his sour instrument.
A shroud fell! The dancer is nude!
The dancers embrace, squeezing each other in withered love.
The lady was, says one, a marquise or baroness.
And the gallant lover was but a poor cartwright – Horror!
Look how wantonly she bonily abandons herself
As if the uncouth one was a baron!

Zig … zig … zig, which sarabande!
Circles of deaths giving each other the hand!

Zig … zig … zag, one sees in the band
The beauteous gambol with the ugly!
But psit! all of a sudden they quit the round ,
They push forward, they fly; the cock has crowed.
Oh! How exquisite is this night for the poor world!
And how lively Death and Equality!]
  —  Henri Cazalis (1840-1909), ‘Danse Macabre’.

The archetype for the Halloween spooky trope is no doubt the grotesque poem by Henri Cazalis that Saint-Saëns set for his ‘Danse Macabre’: ‘Zig et zig et zig, la Mort in cadence.’ Death, the violinist: summoning skeletons from their graves at midnight for a dance. Ghastly merriment, with interruptions. The poem’s two themes—one: osseous, clacking; the other: benighted, desolate.

If your quartet’s cellist is game, you might find Kaija Saariaho’s ‘Petals’ especially fitting as an addition to your play list. The tremendous abjection of it is deeply scary [click on the link to hear a YouTube clip of it]; very different from Danse Macabre.

It’s a challenge for composer and performers alike to achieve the grotesque without devolving into cheap pastiche. Garrop’s quartet orchestration is robust, balanced in a way that does not present excessive risks in performance. Kingston’s arrangement of the Saint-Saëns is vivid and serviceable. And Saariaho’s cello solo will leave everyone hesitant to shake the scary cellist’s hand after the performance. Bwwaah-ha-ha-ha-ha.

P   etals für Violoncello solo wurde in wenigen Tagen komponiert; eine lange, unbewußte Vorbereitung war diesem Stück jedoch vorangegangen. Das Material stammt direkt von meinem Stück Nymphea für Streichquartett und Elektronik. Der Name Petals (Blumenblätter) ist ebenfalls aus dieser Beziehung abgeleitet. Die gegensätzlichen Elemente darin sind sehr zerbrechlich, es sind farbenprächtige Passagen, die energischere Ereignisse mit klarem rhythmischen und melodischen Charakter hervorbringen. Diese scharf umrissenen Figuren werden verschiedenen Veränderungen unterworfen und versinken schließlich in einem dynamisch reduzierten, aber nicht weniger intensiven Filigranmuster. Mit der Kombination dieser beiden gegensätzlichen Ausdrucksarten wollte ich den Interpreten zu einer Ausweitung seiner körperlichen Sensibilität zwingen.
[‘Petals’ was composed in just a few days; a long, unconscious incubation preceded this, however. The material comes directly from my piece ‘Nymphea’ for string quartet and electronics. The name ‘Petals’ is derived also out of this relation—the Nymphs; the string/electronics orchestration. The moribund frailty of it all, of the petals! The opposing elements: passages that are very fragile with ambiguous character and rhythm oppose colorful passages evoking vigorous events with clear rhythmic and melodic character. These sharply outlined figures are subjected to different variations; they sink, and are dynamically reduced in the end to just one, but with still-intensive filigreed patterns. With the combination of opposing expression types, I wanted to force the performer to expand her/his sensitivity to the corporeal limits.”
  —  Kaija Saariaho.

• Stacy Garrop page at Theodore Presser Co.
  
• Stacy Garrop website
  
• Stacy Garrop page at Roosevelt University
  
• DSM. Spooky piano. CMT blog, 15-OCT-2006.
  
• DSM. Subterranean Venetian epidemiology and 16th-Century compositional creativity . CMT blog, 18-OCT-2007.
  
• Bice J. A 21st Century Rationalist in Medieval America: Essays on Religion, Science, Morality, and the Bush Administration. Chelydra Bay, 2007.
  
• Botting F. Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic. Manchester Univ, 2008.
  
• Daniel C. Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children's Literature. Routledge, 2006.
  
• Dennett D. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Penguin, 2007.
  
• Harris S. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. Norton, 2005.
  
• Kristeva J. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia Univ, 1982.
  
• Kriwaczek R. An Incomplete History of the Art of the Funerary Violin. Overlook, 2006.
  
• Leitch V. Living with Theory. Wiley, 2008.
  
• Magistrale A. The Moral Voyages of Stephen King. Borgo, 2008.
  
• Proulx K, ed. Fear to the World: Eleven Voices in a Chorus of Horror. Borgo, 1991.
  
• Warner M. Horror Isn't a 4-Letter Word. GuideDog, 2008.
  
• Composers in the Loft. (Cedille, 2007.) [scarier than bats in the belfry]
  
• Arnalds Ó. Eulogy for Evolution. (ErasedTapes, 2008.)
  
• Arnalds Ó. Variations of Static. (ErasedTapes, 2007.)
  
• Tyler B. Soundtrack - Frailty. (OCF, 2002.)

More Encores: Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1 in E Major

Fiercely energised yet superfine, [Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s] performances are not for those with comfortable ‘drawing-room’ notions of Debussy.”
  —  Gramophone Magazine, JUL-2008.

F rançois-Joel Thiollier’s soft-grained virtuosity taps into the music’s alluring sonorities and harmonic beauty, bringing out plenty of color with no more aid from the sustain pedal than necessary. As a technician, Thiollier doesn’t offer the bedrock security that typifies Pollini’s double notes, Uchida’s firmly-centered rhythms, or Gieseking’s utterly-even fingerings in ‘Pour Les Huits Doigts’. Yet while his timid chord-to-octave leaps in the daunting 12^th etude slow down when the going gets tough, Thiollier compensates with as sexy and curvaceous a middle section as you’ll ever hear. He also plays the three-against-two rhythm during the opening etude’s introduction as-written, rather than slightly rushing the right-hand triplet as nearly everyone else does... Thiollier’s gentle touch and keen ear for nuance also inform the sundry short works filling out this disc.”
  —  Jed Distler, Grammophone Magazine.

I’m not quite sure why the previous CMT post elicited a flurry of responses/requests, regarding ‘atmospheric’ miniatures. Anyhow, here is another favorite of mine, a solo piano one.


    [50-sec clip, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Debussy, ‘Arabesque No. 1’, 0.9MB MP3]

    [60-sec clip, François-Joel Thiollier, Debussy, ‘Arabesque No. 1’, 1.2MB MP3]

François-Joel Thiollier studied in France with Robert Casadesus and faculty of the Paris Conservatoire and with Sascha Gorodnitzki at the Juilliard School of Music. He won eight Grands Prix in international piano competitions. His recordings include the complete piano music of Debussy, the complete piano music of Ravel, and works by de Falla, d’Indy, and Franck. In 2003, Thiollier was named Officier des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet was a student of Pierre Sancan at the Paris Conservatoire, as well as Alexander Edelman and Dimitri Bashkirov. He has won Grans Prix in various international competitions, including the International Beethoven Competition in Cologne in 1986, the Honens International Piano Competition in Canada in 1992, and the Steven de Groote Chamber Music Prize at the Van Cliburn Competition. With a style that some critics have called ‘mercurial’, Bavouzet has performed with many international orchestras. In 2002 he performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Ingo Metzmacher, and in 2003 he appeared with the Berliner Sinfonie Orchester. He is presently with Orchestre de Paris and Professor in the Piano Department of the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold, Germany.

Juxtaposing these two clips gives a good idea of the performance possibilities. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s version averages a faster tempo, but with wider variations than Thiollier’s. And the texture Bavouzet creates in this delicate piece exhibits a more ‘restrained’ pianissimo control than Thiollier’s, but Bavouzet alternates between understatement and exuberant reverie, and the sense of Bavouzet’s account is more one of solitary reminiscence—compared to Thiollier’s recording, which comes across as more ‘story-telling-to-intimate-partner’ rather than ‘solitary-meditation-to-onesself’. Your possibilities for reasonable tempi, accents, dynamics, and balances are endless—as illustrated by these two masterful examples.

The balance of the ‘3-against-2’, RH vs. LH, is risky—heck, the entire piece is so delicate that it’s quite a ‘gauntlet’ to run, aesthetically.

Enjoy!

I am fascinated by Debussy’s ability to use tones and sounds to paint the colours of nature and convey its moods registering all its nuances of varying light, the elusiveness and boundlessness of it all.”
  —  Marie Bengtsson.

• Bavouzet at Harrison-Parrott Agency.
  
• Thiollier website
  
• Shirley H. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Pascal Rogé release the third volumes in their Debussy surveys. MusicalCriticism.com, 15-JUN-2008.
  
• Bavouzet J-E. Debussy: Complete Works for Piano, Vol. 3. (Chandos, 2008.)
  
• Thiollier F-J. Debussy Piano Works, Vol. 1. (Naxos, 1995.) [slow rubato, 5-min]
  
• Cherkassky S. Encores, Vol. 3. (Decca, 1993.) [much faster tempo, 3-min]
  
• Jack Horkheimer, Stargazer program on PBS (Debussy Arabesque No. 1 as theme music)

Nash Ensemble: Atmospherics and Encores

O  ur piano quintet is looking for new ideas for encore pieces. Any suggestions?”
  —  Anonymous.

The usual objective is a sparkling, novel, jewel-like ‘character piece’ that is shorter than 3 minutes in length and that is ‘approachable’ and does not make heavy demands of the listener. It should read like pungent microfiction. Additionally, you want something that conveys an intense presence—show-stopping emotionality.

One serious option is to treat the encore as a ‘tag’ or a synoptic ‘capstone’ for your program—melding with the other pieces. You choose for an encore a character piece that is light and simple, something composed about the same time as other pieces on the program and preferrably by someone whose style and compositional methods and worldview are coherent with the rest of the program. If it has those features, it can serve as a ‘tag’, and its tagness/epilogiality will be immediately evident to the listeners.

A whimsical option that aims at surprise is to choose something wholly unexpected (a polka or mazurka, if the rest of your program has been heavy going) or something that embodies a counterintuitive, dramatic contrast against the other pieces (much slower or faster tempo; different articulation or timbre)—possibly composed in a different period or by someone of disparate worldview and methods, yet arriving at a similar result or addressing a similar compositional challenge as the other pieces had done.

You can go for drop-dead flash virtuosity. You can tug on the audience members’ nostalgia. You can ‘plug’ your most recent recording or an up-coming performance with a short selection. You can capsulize your ensemble’s namesake [composer] if you’re one of those eponymously-named ensembles, provided your eponymic was thoughtful enough to write a short, sweet piece. And so on.

In any case, a good encore piece should be the musical equivalent of a bespoke chocolate truffle. [The foregoing was just a brain-dump for the anonymous question-asker (and for others who struggle with similar challenges), on ‘How We Search for Suitable Encore Pieces’.]

For sheer bon-bon-ness, you might try Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals VII, ‘The Aquarium’.

S  aint-Saëns] invents various kinds of musical masquerade and cross dressing. Furthermore, many aspects of the work suggest that it is a musical farce to be put on by the very people who are supposed to get [the jokes], evoking the spirit of carnival as described by Bakhtin... [The] musical depictions demand that the instrumentalists performing the piece impersonate themselves as ‘characters’ in the salon, just as the instruments they play represent particular animals. Essential to the work is this kind of performing ‘about’ performance, a notion that in effect literally materializes immaterial aspects of music such as melody and timbre and allows Saint-Saëns to subvert the Romantic surface-depth paradigm by taking up instrumental materiality as one possible ‘substance’ to be revealed within the context of late nineteenth century chamber music.”
  —  Erica Scheinberg.

Carnival of the Animals’ nominally is a set of orchestral character pieces, each of which is meant to describe a particular animal, usually by mimicking the sounds it makes or characterizing the way it moves or carries itself. But, as musicologist Erica Scheinberg has written, it contains many ‘inside jokes’ about composers and music. There are passages mocking Offenbach’s ‘Can-Can’, wry liberties taken with Berlioz’s ‘Dance of the Sylphs’, poking fun at Mendelssohn’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, mocking the turgidness of several Rossini arias, parodying then-current dance-hall tunes, and mocking Saint-Saens’s ‘Danse Macabre’.

It is extremely ‘meta’—today, just as it was during Saint-Saëns’s lifetime—and so is just waiting, ready to serve your own meta-purposes!

What’s more, ‘Carnival of the Animals’ has for many years been a prime vehicle for music outreach and education programs for kids (see, for example, this, from a kids’ program at Music Institute of Chicago). Consequently, performance of the piece triggers for many adults today intense and instantaneous memories of their musical childhood—of everything that has led them now to be sitting in their concert hall seats listening to you. This is a bonus that you cannot get with just any old encore selection—instant [Freudian] flashback and epiphany. To be honest, my own response to these pieces is like this—primitive and immediate, as though I were five years old once more. That alone is enough to make these Saint-Saëns movements good encore material—and it exemplifies some of the qualities that you might look for in other suitable material.

The 7^th movement, ‘The Aquarium’, is wonderfully atmospheric. For the image of water splashing (brighter, compared to deep rumbling of the sea in the cello part and the flutey undulations) we have the glass harmonica’s and two pianos’ (or glockenspiel, xylophone, celesta, or small cymbals) movements. A realistic evocation of moving water involves varying and controlling the dynamics on a short time-scale and the contrary-direction voice-leading in the different parts. Irregular intervals represent the erratic swimming of fish. Saint-Saëns creates florid kinesthetic/synaesthetic ‘visual-acoustic’ parallels.

Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces Op.16. No.3 (Faben) likewise convey ‘visual-acoustic’ parallels, and likewise mostly via short time-scale timbre changes. The Five Orchestral Pieces Op.16. No.3 (Faben) is sometimes translated to English as ‘Color Music’, ‘Morning on the Traunsee’ and ‘Summer Morning at a Lake’ by authors like Boretz and Cone. The musical progressions move in a slow and undulating manner throughout, which is similar to the ‘quivering reflection of the sun on a sheet of water’ (Dahlhaus, 1989). Schoenberg acoustically mimics the changing light on the waves by the changing timbre of instruments; the colors of the changing brightness lie in the differing timbres of the instruments. Saint-Saëns’s ‘Aquarium’ is like this, although the voice-leading in the Saint-Saëns’s string parts represents, I think, rays of light filtering down to the depths, from the point of view of the fish. The flute and pianos and glass harmonica manifest most of the surface watery features, including the sparkly play of light up top.

Insofar as ‘Aquarium’ has been used in many film soundtracks, it has the added advantage of being especially familiar to general audience members (compared with other of the ‘Carnival of the Animals’ movements). The Nash Ensemble has a particularly nice rendering of ‘Aquarium’.


    [50-sec clip, Nash Ensemble, Saint-Saëns, Carnival of the Animals VII, Aquarium, 1.5MB MP3]

The Nash’s octet version does include the flute and glass harmonica and two pianos as-scored by Saint-Saëns. But the glass harmonica is out of practical reach for most ensembles and, in any event, the instrument does not travel easily—delicate; risky. Most of the time, the orchestral incarnations of the piece have a celesta or glockenspiel or xylophone substituting for the exotic glass harmonica. And, anyhow, the anonymous emailer in the blockquote above said her/his ensemble are a piano quintet; you are not going to bring out a flute or other players to participate in an encore when the rest of your program was straight piano quintet. Right. So is there a published arrangement of this Saint-Saëns piece for piano quintet? No. So improvise one!

Here’s one way: take the string parts from the original octet score, and take the Lucien Garban reduction of ‘Aquarium’ for solo piano and put them together. Fine-sounding instant piano quintet!

Yes, some of the spectral qualities that the glass harmonica or celesta add go by the boards. If that disappoints you, then improvise some flourishes in the upper register of the piano. The Garban transcription is tough enough by itself, so your efforts to accessorize it into something even more virtuosic will be all the more dazzling. (N.B.—Whether you improvise or leave it as-is—the string parts and the solo piano reduction—the piano’s doubling of the strings does risk trampling on the string parts, so you’ll need to rehearse with care, to make sure you’re achieving a good balance.)

Yes, the first-piano part descending ‘ten-on-one’ and ‘eight-on-one’ ostinato, while the second-piano plays ‘six-on-one’, is lost in the Garban transduction to solo piano. (After all, not many human beings can totally decouple the right-hand rhythmically from the left-hand.) So some of you purists reading this blog post may object strongly to my idea of a piano quintet adaptation of ‘Aquarium’. That’s fine. If the sacrilege is too great, don’t do it. But if you try it and it ‘works’ for you, more power to you!

Tempi of various ensembles’ performances of ‘Aquarium’ vary widely, with performance times ranging from 1:50 to 2:40. In other words, your effect can be ethereal/dreamy or near-demonic, depending on your taste. You can be over-the-top lyrical; or conjuring and fantastical; or subdued and meditative; or ironical; or elegantly benign and charming—you choose! The insider jokeness and transgressiveness that were intended by Saint-Saëns provide you a very long interpretive ‘leash’ with this piece.

You may want to consider how such an atmospheric piece would ‘fit’ with other program elements from the piano quintet literature:

• Elfrida Andrée: Piano Quintet in E minor (1865)
  
• Anton Arensky: Piano Quintet in D major, Op. 51 (1900)
  
• Béla Bartók: Piano Quintet (1904)
  
• Arnold Bax: Piano Quintet in G minor (1915)
  
• Amy Beach: Piano Quintet
  
• Franz Berwald: Piano Quintets No. 1 in C minor and No. 2 in A major (1857)
  
• Ernest Bloch: Piano Quintets No. 1 (1923) and No. 2 (1957)
  
• Alexander Borodin: Piano Quintet in C minor (1862)
  
• Johannes Brahms: Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34 (1864)
  
• Frank Bridge: Piano Quintet in D minor (1905, revised 1912)
  
• Ernő Dohnányi: Piano Quintets No. 1, Op. 1 (1895) and No. 2, Op. 26 (1914)
  
• Antonín Dvořák: Piano Quintets No. 1, Op. 5 (1872) and No. 2, Op. 81 (1887)
  
• Edward Elgar: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84 (1918)
  
• George Enescu: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 29 (1940)
  
• Louise Farrenc: Piano Quintets No. 1, Op. 30, and No. 2, Op. 31 (both with double bass)
  
• Gabriel Fauré: Piano Quintet No. 1, Op. 89 (1905) and No. 2, Op. 115 (1921)
  
• Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet (1985)
  
• César Franck: Piano Quintet in F minor, M. 7 (1879)
  
• Wilhelm Furtwängler: Piano Quintet in C major (1935)
  
• Hermann Goetz: Piano Quintet in C minor, Op. 16 (with double bass; 1874)
  
• Otar Gordeli: Piano Quintet (1950)
  
• Sofia Gubaidulina: Piano Quintet (1957)
  
• Reynaldo Hahn: Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor (1921)
  
• Heinrich von Herzogenberg: Piano Quintet in C major, Op. 17 (1876)
  
• Johann Nepomuk Hummel: Piano Quintet in E-flat minor, Op. 87 (with double bass)
  
• Vincent d’Indy: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 81 (1924)
  
• Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Piano Quintet in E major, Op. 15 (1921)
  
• Bohuslav Martinů: Piano Quintets, H. 35 (1911), H. 229 (1933), H. 298 (1944)
  
• Nikolai Medtner: Piano Quintet in C major (1949)
  
• Krzysztof Meyer: Piano Quintet Op. 76 (1991)
  
• Leo Ornstein: Piano Quintet (1927)
  
• Joachim Raff: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 107 (1862)
  
• Alan Rawsthorne: Piano Quintet
  
• Max Reger: Piano Quintet Nos. 1 and 2 in C minor
  
• Carl Reinecke: Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 83 (1865)
  
• Anton Rubinstein: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 99 (1876)
  
• Camille Saint-Saëns: Piano Quintet in A minor, op. 14 (1855)
  
• Franz Schmidt: Piano Quintet in G major (1926)
  
• Florent Schmitt: Piano Quintet in B minor (1908)
  
• Alfred Schnittke: Piano Quintet (1976)
  
• Franz Schubert: Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 (Trout Quintet with double bass; 1819)
  
• Robert Schumann: Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 44 (1842)
  
• Giovanni Sgambati: Piano Quintets Nos. 1 and 2
  
• Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 (1940)
  
• Jean Sibelius: Piano Quintet in G minor (1890)
  
• Sergei Taneyev: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 30 (1911)
  
• Louis Vierne: Piano Quintet in C minor, Op. 42 (1917)
  
• Anton Webern: Piano Quintet (1907)
  
• Charles-Marie Widor: Piano Quintet No. 1, Op. 7 (1881)
  
• Yitzhak Yedid: Piano Quintet ‘Since My Soul Loved’ (2006)
  
• Ludwig Thuille: Two Piano Quintets (1885)

The Hinson and Roberts book (pp. 545-68) is the premier source of ideas as you explore your options.

It’s ideal for your encore piece to be familiar to the audience—this is a correlate of the requirement that an encore piece sparkle and divert the audience without placing large demands on them. But the competing requirement that the piece be ‘novel’ and ‘exciting’ means that your selection had best not be a familiar piece that receives excessive or clichéd airplay. I think this 7^th movement of the Saint-Saëns piece is nearly perfect from these perspectives.

Incidentally, only the movement ‘The Swan’ was published before Saint-Saëns’s death. (He was supposedly anxious that the pastiche qualities of these pieces would undermine his reputation. For 35 years (between 1886 and 1921), ‘Carnival’ was hardly even a ‘salon’ item, so cautious was Saint-Saëns about restricting its performance—obsessive, almost to the point of being paranoid about it.) After Saint-Saëns’s death ‘The Swan’ quickly became popular among cellists, and is one of Saint-Saëns’s most frequently-performed pieces. ‘The Aquarium’ is far less commonly performed live, despite its popularity as film-score material. Therefore it has an aspect of novelty that makes it a good choice for live encore presentations.

The Nash Ensemble next present a concert on 25-SEP, at Malvern Concert Club in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, with a program that includes the Mahler Piano Quartet; Mozart Piano Quartet in G minor K. 478; Dvořák Piano Quintet in A minor Op. 81. Then on 11-OCT their next concert is at Wigmore Hall in London.

A  fter 40 years and over 250 premières (140 commissions) the Nash Ensemble is still the best champion that any composer could hope to have. Its concerts are always meticulously polished, but what impressed about this heroically well-stuffed programme—two premières and four other chamber pieces, none more than four years old—was the illusion conjured by the players that they lived with this music for years, even if the ink was barely dry on the page. Perhaps it is precisely because the ensemble is not entirely dedicated to doing contemporary work, that it can radiate so persuasive a feeling of new pieces being assimilated into chamber-music heritage, stretching back two centuries or more.”
  —  The London Times.

• Scheinberg E. Performing Instrumental Transgression: Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals in the fin-de-siècle salon. Columbia Univ Music Scholarship Conference, 2004. (parody and inside jokes)
  
• Nash Ensemble London website
  
• Nash Ensemble Friends
  
• Nash Ensemble concert calendar
  
• Nash Ensemble. Dvorak/Saint-Saens. (Virgin, 1998.)
  
• Visions of Light (film that uses Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals as sountrack score)
  
• Glass harmonica page on Wikipedia
  
• G. Finkenbeiner, artisanal glass harmonicas
  
• Bloch T, et al. Glass Harmonica. (Naxos, 2001.)
  
• Dahlhaus C. Schoenberg and the New Music. Cambridge Univ, 1989.
  
• Hinson M, Roberts W. The Piano in Chamber Ensemble. 2e. Indiana Univ, 2006. (Pp. 545-68)
  
• Hoffman B, et al. Music for Glass Harmonica. (Vox, 1994.)
  
• James D. Cristal: Glass Music Through the Ages. (Sony, 2002.)
  
• Lyle W. Camille Saint-Saens: His Life and Art. Reprint Svc, 1990.
  
• Nichols R, ed. Saint-Saens: On Music and Musicians. Oxford Univ, 2008.
  
• Reed E. Ovations & Encores: The Musician's Guide to Getting the Best Response from Your Audience. Aspen Grove, 2000.
  
• Rees B. Camille Saint-Saens. Faber, 2008.
  
• Smallman B. The Piano Quartet and Quintet: Style, Structure, and Scoring. Oxford Univ, 1996.
  
• Teller-Ratner S. Camille Saint-Saens 1835-1921: A Thematic Catalogue of his Complete Works Volume I: The Instrumental Works. Oxford Univ, 2002.