T he ensemble, conducted by Damon Gupton, opened its program with a shimmering, lovingly-shaped reading of Sibelius’s ‘Andante Festivo’. All the hallmarks of a first-rate string ensemble were in place: its tone was warm and varied, it moved with unity and fluidity, and its textures were appealingly transparent.” — Allan Kozinn, New York Times, 06-OCT-2010.
S phinx was founded in 1996 by Aaron Dworkin, a violinist, and is based in Detroit. It is dedicated to developing young black and Hispanic classical musicians and composers, providing instruments, scholarships, and support. The SCO is a 20-piece chamber orchestra, widely acclaimed for its precise and passionate playing, conducted by Damon Gupton (previously Assistant Conductor of Kansas City Symphony and winner of the 2007 Eduardo Mata International Conducting Competition, the Robert J. Harth Conducting Prize, and other awards). The Harlem Quartet is comprised of Sphinx alumni Ilmar Gavilán (violin), Melissa White (violin), Juan-Miguel Hernandez (viola), and Paul Wiancko (cello).
Jean Sibelius – Andante festivo (1922)
Sergei Prokofiev – Allegro con brio (from Sonata for 2 violins, Op. 56, 1932) [Elena Urioste and Melissa White]
Gabriela Lena Frank – Coquetos (2001) [from ‘Leyendas’]
George Walker – Lyric for Strings (1946)
Joaquin Turina – La oración del torero, Op. 34 (1925) [Harlem Quartet]
Frederick Tillis – ‘Wade in the Water’ (from Spiritual Fantasy No. 12, 1988) [Harlem Quartet]
Felix Mendelssohn – Sinfonia No. 7 in D minor (1822)
T he White Recital Hall at UMKC was nearly filled to capacity on this mild, sunny Sunday afternoon—more than 500 people attended. Such a crowd is evidence of the effectiveness that alliance between classical musical presenters and university-based conservatories can achieve, aided by appropriate pre-concert notice in the media. Masterclasses and educational sessions conducted by SCO in collaboration with the UMKC Conservatory Academy’s ‘Musical Bridges’ outreach program before and after the concert included programs at Eisenhower Middle School, Ruskin High School, Paseo Academy, and the Youth Symphony of Kansas City, with members of SCO coaching the students. In all, many hundreds of young music students participated.
P rograms like this help to insure that the Arts are available, not just to a few, but to everyone.” — Peter Witte, Dean, UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance.
T he entire concert was exceptionally good and received an enthusiastic standing ovation at its conclusion. It’s not my habit in this blog to do ‘reviews’ per se, but I particularly loved the Prokofiev violin duo and can’t help but say a few words about that.
T his fourth movement, the Allegro con brio, is a fast rondo with athletic, angular, in-your-face themes for the two violins. Urioste and White were a tour de force, spirited and incisive. I had previously heard Urioste perform in 2007 when she was completing her studies at Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. I’d previously heard White when she was at New England Conservatory in Boston. It was a delight to hear these two perform together; to recalibrate my recollections and impressions from several years ago; and to experience their pyrotechnical interactions with each other in this challenging, aggressive piece.
P rokofiev left his homeland for the West six months after the 1917 Russian Revolution and did not see it again until 1927, when he returned for a concert tour. A second tour followed in 1929, and a third, in 1932, marked the beginning of his gradual—and entirely voluntary—repatriation, which was completed by 1936. Just before that 1932 visit he composed his ‘Sonata for Two Violins’ during a holiday at Ste. Maxime (near St. Tropez) for performance in the concerts of the Paris chamber music group called Triton. The four brief movements, which Svyatoslav Prokofiev, the composer’s son, characterized as being ‘lyrical, playful, fantastical, and violent in turn,’ are filled with striking themes. The highly effective sequence apparently reflects the format of the old ‘sonata da chiesa’, and the content gives a fairly clear indication of the warmer style Prokofiev would adopt after his wanderings in the West, increasingly more ‘embracing’ rather than ‘biting’ or confrontational...” — Richard Freed, Program Note, Kennedy Center, 2004.
I n this mid-term election season in the U.S. that is nothing if not biting or confrontational, Urioste and White provided a welcome antidote. Their playing embodied a politically active, assertive, insightful tone. Embracing, never bellicose or grizzly bear-like. Their playing conveyed a sense of optimism that fair compromise can be achieved, with shared resolve to forge that compromise right away. “Here is how we do it! Here! Listen!”
T heir performance was redemptive—enough to inspire hope for this country’s future, in dimensions far beyond Sphinx, far beyond serious music.
I n conclusion, congratulations to SCO and Harlem Quartet on their tour, and on their luminous performance in Kansas City yesterday. Heartfelt thanks to SCO and Harlem Quartet for their leadership, and for their generous outreach activities that help so many young students. Bravo!
B asically, everything I’ve learned about Art has been from ‘finding my way inside’. [searching and growing through relationships with other artists, with history, and with the Spirit of all humankind].” — Yo-Yo Ma, Gramophone, 2005.
I f your cello feels like dancing, by all means go! Take it out for a night on the town. Bounce your bow on its strings. Hug it. Cradle its neck tenderly. Praise it in the presence of others, when it can hear you. Fondle its tuning pegs as though they were earlobes, as Yo-Yo Ma did during the superb performance last night in the Harriman-Jewell Series in Kansas City.
Y our instrument has rights, and you have duties—toward your instrument as well as your co-performers.
Y o-Yo Ma shrugs his shoulders after performing—not after each and every piece, but after many of them—as if he were surprised that the result was so felicitous as it turned out to be, and as if he and the pianist Kathryn Stott were not wholly ‘in-charge’. It is not an ‘apologetic’ shrug, just one of genuine modesty and self-effacement. Gee. Aw, shucks.
I n these collaborations, too, Ma sometimes plays as though he were accompanist to pianist Stott: another aspect of Ma’s well-known modesty, incongruous with his stature and fame.
Franz Schubert: Sonata in A minor, D. 821
Dmitri Shostakovich: Sonata in D minor, Op. 40
Astor Piazzolla: Le Grand Tango
Egberto Gismonti: Bodas de Prata & Quatro Canto
Cèsar Franck: Sonata in A Major
M a’s main performance instrument is the 1733 Montagnana called ‘Petunia’. (The instrument was named this by a young girl after she asked Ma whether it had a name and Ma replied that it did not.) Another of Ma’s cellos, the 1712 Davidov Stradivarius, was previously owned by Jacqueline du Pré and by the Vuitton Foundation.
J acqueline du Pré’s unbridled dark qualities went ‘against’ the Davidov [conflicted with the Strad’s personality]. The more you ‘attack’ it, the less it returns.” — Yo-Yo Ma.
L ate in her life, du Pré confided her frustration with the ‘unpredictability’ of this cello. Ma, however, has opined that the variability and her resulting frustration with the instrument came, not from the instrument, but instead from du Pré’s impassioned and autocratic style of playing. He has been famously quoted as saying that this Strad cannot be ‘dictated-to’ but instead must be ‘coaxed’ by its player. He speaks of his ‘rehabilitating’ the instrument after he had received it from du Pré—in much the same manner as a physical therapist or a rehab physician or nurse might speak of the journey helping a human patient recover some function that had been lost—after, say, a stroke.
T here is a mysterious relationship between performer and instrument. Since 1983, this cello’s sound has been ‘growing’—growing constantly during the years I have had it—becoming richer, deeper, and fuller. Partly, this can be attributed to now-constant playing that it receives, which causes it now to vibrate more fully than it did when it first came into my possession ... I had to learn not to be seduced by the sheer beauty of the sound in my mind before trying to ‘coax’ it from this cello. Many instruments sound beautiful in an intimate setting but may lose their quality of sound in the vastness of a concert hall. The Stradivarius does not. The integrity of its sound-picture, the warmth, the clarity and overtone structure—these are, I think, maintained through space much like a laser beam.” — Yo-Yo Ma, Foreword from the book, Antonio Stradivari: The Cremona Exhibition of 1987, by Charles Beare.
If your aging cello develops some kind of ‘Cello Alzheimer’s’, Ma is the kind of gerontologist you would want to look after it—one who could and would bring out the best of its strengths and minimize vulnerability associated with its limitations. He would take it to gatherings where familiar subjects will be discussed by familiar people and not too fast. He would not sedate it or park it, mute, alone in a chair in an atrium.”
I n other words, according to Yo-Yo Ma, your instrument is not ‘instrumental’ in a superficial, ‘ends-justify-the-means’, deterministic, teleological, human-centric, master-slave way. Instead, it has its own spirit: its own personality; its own capacity for belief and intention; its own ‘free will’; its own inalienable dignity and moral standing, in much the way that a pet has these things.
W e often say ‘Take care!’ off-handedly—as routinely or thoughtlessly as a quick ‘Goodbye!’ or some abbreviated, perfunctory expression, devoid of emotion and, really, devoid of attention, except for our attention to habitual protocol.
B ut even then it does convey some sense of connectedness. When said with feeling and forethought, it means something like ‘Take care of yourself, because I care about you.’ I thought about this as I watched Yo-Yo and Kathy on-stage, during the works that they performed after the intermission.
T ake care!’ is something that one can (should!) say to a companion animal—or to a musical instrument; it is not something that must be restricted, to say only to human beings. Yo-Yo Ma’s interaction with his companion instrument—his empathetic attacks with the bow; his jocular brushing of its shoulders; his playful querying of its tuning with the fingers of his left hand; etc.—are gestures of a loved-one/lover toward a belovèd person, not the gestures of a ‘craftsman’ toward a mere ‘tool’. Watching Ma handle and play his belovèd cello, I wonder whether, later in the evening, he will wish it ‘Good night’ and settle it in [its] bed. The cello is a ‘subject’, not an ‘object’. The generosity and dignity that continually flow from Ma make this fantasy entirely plausible.
T he same generosity and moral standing are bestowed upon each composition as well—reflecting the person-like regard in which Ma holds it. Some of the pieces afford more opportunities to detect and assess this; others (esp. Baroque ones) somewhat less. Take, for example, Piazzolla’s ‘Le Grand Tango’, composed in 1981, originally for Mstislav Rostropovich. Ma and Stott animate the strange, tango-ish blend of tenderness and vigorous resolve/conviction that inhere in the score--they do this in a generous way that no one else does.
A nd, in various passages, Ma takes a back-seat and ‘accompanies’ Stott’s piano’s robust expressions—robustness that is implied and authentic, consistent with Piazzolla’s score and the spirit of tango as an intimate-yet-public lovers’ dance—a ‘duet’ of equals. To hear Kathy and Yo-Yo play together is to gain new understandings of the possibilities—and of the depth and breadth of truly ‘collaborative’ musicianship.
A nd when Kathy Stott played ‘Tres minutos con la reálidad,’ people whispered, ‘She must be Argentinian!’ ” — Horacio Malvecino, liner notes, ‘Soul of the Tango’ CD.
T hrough their playing and their treatment of each other and through their rapport with their companion instruments, we learn something—or are vividly reminded—about being fully human, and about the joys of behaving well, virtuously even, despite challenges and provocations and injustices that we face: an experience far more fulfilling than witnessing admirable technical achievements or finding delight in a [musical] story well-told.
F uturists at MIT and elsewhere talk as though advances in robotics and A.I. and cloud-computing and so on will change our relationships to technical devices and systems in new and unprecedented ways (see links below). I doubt this—at least the ‘new-and-unprecedented’ part. Thoughtful, empathetic musicians like Ma and Stott have, for a long time, been in full-fledged symbiotic ‘relationships’ with their [companion] instruments, and with compositions, and [within limits of ‘partial personhood’ and philosophy of Mind] vice versa. To recognize or appreciate this, you have only to look and listen.
[50-sec clip, Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott, Astor Piazzolla, ‘Le Grand Tango’, 1.6MB MP3]
I can tell if someone else has touched my Quenoil bass, [even touched it] ‘by accident’. The instrument takes on a ‘different’ energy from my own—a different quality that I can detect and that persists for a considerable time after the other person’s touching it has ended.” — François Rabbath, in Barry Green: Mastery of Music, p. 129.
A prodigy who played for President Kennedy at age 7, Ma is no snob, performing Bach to pop to tangos… If Yo-Yo Ma didn’t exist, no novelist in the world would have dared invent him. The combination of virtues—musical, intellectual, personal—is simply too implausible.” — Joshua Kosman, Smithsonian Magazine, NOV-2005.
W hat I most like about being a composer is… the cash compensation. No, heh, what I like most is that you can be anybody… you can be anything at all, anything you want—through the music. No constraints, total freedom. It’s tremendously liberating.” — Kelly-Marie Murphy, introductory remarks, Ottawa Chamber Music Society concert, 07-MAR-2010.
T here is an apocalyptic ‘inclusiveness’ to this piece, a fellowship that all those affected by violence and loss (can) participate in.
O ur society is reluctant to speak about personal catastrophe—individual demolished lives and the struggles to pick up the pieces. Yet it is possible for music to speak about this—and persuasively, too.
T his piece, the second of six string quartets thus far composed by Murphy, was commissioned by CBC Radio for the International ‘Strings of the Future’ Festival and premiered at the Festival in 1999 by the Alcan String Quartet. The title derives from the old Ragovoy-Berns song of the same name, recorded by Janis Joplin in 1968.
S o far as I can tell, Murphy’s string quartet does not quote any melodies or harmonies from that song. But you can readily perceive parallels, in terms of the ethos and the gender-centric aspects of the string quartet and its popular-music namesake.
T he four-movement 15-min work begins with a slow, ethereal dialogue between the four performers, with unisons panning from left (Vn1) to right (Vc and Vla) and back again. The second movement is dominated by anxious staccato exchanges, mm ~ 120. The third movement is cinematic in its running, fleeing, desperate dash to safety. The fourth movement, mm ~ 56, begins with a solo viola statement—despondent, marooned—answered sympathetically by the cello and viola. Pianissimo high harmonics of the first violin part enter, adding a sense that the marooning will be permanent.
T he program notes by Craig Pedersen aver that, while composing this quartet was underway, Murphy was puzzled and impressed over how the heart, “a simple muscle, is taken as the seat of emotions.” Or, implicitly, puzzled and impressed over how much of our emotional state and its trajectory are muscular… physiologic… endocrinologic… beyond our capacity to predict or control.
M aybe the out-of-controlness and muscularity of fear and anger are easiest for us to comprehend.
B ut the other emotions are muscular/reflexive as well. What I mean is: if we manage somehow to cope with the injury and are not completely destroyed, then our recovery—and our preparedness to forgive and our feeling able to let go and move on—these feelings are surprising, emergent—astonishing even to the one who feels them. There is a genuine sense of discovery that is revealed in each of this piece’s movements—an emergence of ideas and emotions that maybe surprised even Murphy as she went about composing it.
T he calm that emerges by the end of the fourth movement is not one of wary acceptance or unstable endurance or any other precariousness. It is a satisfying conclusion, opening onto a spacious, open plain. The heart has miraculously survived its ordeal, with its dignity and integrity intact—surprising even its muscular self—still desiring [Life], still pumping. A new joint venture?—of both women and men?—working anew on constructive solutions together if they wish?—enabling each now to live fulfilling lives? In performance, the Cecilias fully inhabit the work, with gestures and insight that endow it with credibility, riveting the listeners’ interest. Murphy’s music tells vivid stories that empower and inspire men and women alike.
S cores and parts for Murphy’s compositions are available from the composer and from the Canadian Music Centre, 20 St. Joseph St., Toronto, ON, Canada M4Y 1J9 (info@musiccentre.ca).
K elly-Marie Murphy began her studies in composition at the University of Calgary and received her Ph.D. in composition from the University of Leeds. Murphy has subsequently held residencies at the Snowbird Institute for the Arts, Utah; Tapestry Music Theatre/Canadian Opera Company, Toronto; rESOund Festival of Contemporary Music, Edmonton; Strings of the Future International String Quartet Festival, Ottawa; Soundstreams/Encounters, Toronto; and at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Most recently, Murphy received Honorable Mention in the 2008 Barlow Prize competition.
M urphy has received numerous commissions—notably from the CBC and the Canada Council for the Arts—and has written for some of Canada’s leading performers and ensembles such as the Winnipeg, Toronto, and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras, Shauna Rolston, James Campbell, the Gryphon Trio, Borealis String Quartet, Rivka Golani, Judy Loman, and James Sommerville.
M y impressions from Sunday’s concert are that Kelly-Marie Murphy composes the kinds of music that she herself wants to listen to, pieces that are inspired by events or concepts that are deeply meaningful to her—ones that are emblematic of freedom, breaking free of constraints.
A nd, as evidenced by the energy bestowed on Murphy’s ‘Another Little Piece of My Heart’ (1999) by the members of Cecilia String Quartet in performance, Murphy’s compositions are also the kinds of music that thoughtful artists who champion new music want to play. Bravo! It was an exciting concert, one richly symbolic of this day, International Women’s Day.
T he Cecilias will next be performing Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A major, Op.81 No.2, with Menahem Pressler at Pollack Hall at Schulich School of Music, McGill University, in Montréal on 17-MAR.
V iolinist Stefan Jackiw and pianist Max Levinson performed last night at Kansas City’s Folly Theater, as part of the Harriman-Jewell 45th season.
Beethoven: Sonata No. 1 in D major
Copland: Sonata for Violin and Piano
Lutosławski: Subito
Brahms: Sonata No. 3 in D minor, Op. 108
F or me, the highlight of the evening was the performance of Witold Lutosławski’s ‘Subito’ for violin and piano. Lutosławski was noted for his striving to achieve a unity of effect and expression through a 'system' of composing, for his love of drama, and for his penchant for high-saturation coloristic effects. Jackiw’s tendencies align perfectly with Lutosławski’s.
M akes me wonder what Jackiw would do with Debussy’s violin and piano Sonata, L.140... Color for color’s sake.
E mphasis on small-scale, phrase-length features... anticipating the very next interval, the current ‘arc’. ‘Operatic’ sense of drama and discovery!
C all it ‘animated canon’—reverential, recursively referential to what has gone before, sentiment upon sentiment, until you are airborne.
M ore than this, Jackiw’s violinistic ‘voice’ is both liminal and abject in its submissiveness to the atmospherics as they unfold. The fascination with boundaries and liminality is sometimes forceful, as in the presto agitato of the Brahms, and at other times delicate in the andante semplice and lento of the Copland. Delicate, delicate vibrationless decrescendos, vanishing into thin air.
N ot surprisingly, as an encore Jackiw frequently performs ‘Méditation’ from Jules Massenet’s opera ‘Thaïs’, a wonderful vehicle for Jackiw’s interpretive sense of where the ‘earth’ ends and the ‘sky’ begins.
E lizabeth Lorenzo (UCLA) has argued that Massenet intentionally imbues his female characters with aggression and overt sexuality, so much as to place them well beyond the realm of acceptable feminine conduct, exulting in their defiant refusals to be contained—rhetorically anticipating French feminism. In the instance of Thaïs, Massenet’s opera with a libretto by Gallet based on the novel by Anatole France, set in Egypt under Greek occupation, we have a Cenobite monk, Athanaël, who tries to convert Thaïs, an Alexandrian courtesan and devotée of Venus, to Christianity. Eventually Athanaël acknowledges that his obsession with Thaïs is really only lust... the licentious courtesan, pure of heart, opposite the outwardly abstemious religious man who is carnal and deluded through and through... an object lesson in religious eroticism vs. erotic spirituality?
S o Thaïs is afraid of dying; she knows beauty is only skin deep; a violin is only a mortal box with strings. After a bumpy struggle in her soul through the night she hooks up with Athanaël in the morning, to go with him to the desert. Later Thaïs is almost dead with fatigue—really bad case of the flu? we’re not sure what. Athanaël plunks her at the oasis—more boundaries and liminality—in the care of Albine and the nuns, and then returns to the desert. But he can’t get the beautiful woman he has “saved” out of his mind. He sees her in his dreams; he hears voices telling him she is dying. He goes and finds Thaïs on her death-bed/boundary. He tries to revive her, exhorting her with sweet carnal nothings, so inappropriate we can hardly believe it. But visions of heaven already occupy her mind, and she dies:“I see God” are her last words.
Y es, well. Massenet was fascinated by the conflict between the secular and the sacred. And a courtesan who turns from the God of Love toward the Love of God is sentimental Massenet in spades.
B ut for Jackiw such a piece is an exploration, not so much of an eternal tension/conflict between the divine and the carnal, but of pure emotion itself. Jackiw embodies not a revivified sentimental, dramatic Massenet or Copland or Lutoslawski but instead a fresh incarnation of the muse that makes a composer create these things in the first place.
W hich is actually a far more valuable and inspiring trick! Bravo!
J ackiw has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the orchestras of Baltimore, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Nashville, Oregon, Rochester, San Francisco, Seattle, and St. Luke’s, among others. Born in 1985, Mr. Jackiw began playing violin at the age of 4. His teachers have included Zinaida Gilels, Michèle Auclair, and Donald Weilerstein. Mr. Jackiw holds a B.A. from Harvard University, as well as an Artist Diploma from the New England Conservatory. In 2002, he was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. These days, Mr. Jackiw makes his home in New York City.
L utosławski sent the work to Rostropovich as it progressed, with explanations couched largely in terms of the work’s dramatic scenario, in which the cellist and the orchestra confront each other as adversaries. This concept appealed strongly to Rostropovich, and he developed a deep identification with the dramatic persona represented in the solo part.” — Steven Stucky, Lutosławski and His Music, p. 92.
G arborg’s novels are profound and gripping while his essays are clear and insightful. He was never inclined to steer clear of controversy. His work tackled the issues of the day, including the relevance of religion in modern times, the conflicts between national and European identity, and the ability of the common people to actually participate in political processes and decisions. Although he was to become known as an author, it was as a newspaperman that he got his start. In 1872 he established the newspaper Tvedestrandsposten, and in 1877 the Fedraheimen, where he served as managing editor until 1892. In the 1880s he was also a journalist for the Dagbladet in Oslo.”
I f you are about to perform a ‘miniature’—or any piece, really—it’s good to first take a moment and re-tell yourself a story that, to you, the piece embodies. “Write it down and clip it onto the sheet music,” my piano teacher told me when I was 8. “If the composer didn’t say what story the music is telling, then you need to make up a story. Or else how are you going to know what you’re going to say, or how you’re going to say it?” Five decades later, I continue to think that that’s a great idea. If a story wasn’t supplied by the composer, then you need to make one up. Make one up, write it down, remind yourself of it each time, right before you begin playing the piece.
[50-sec clip, Tor Espe Aspaas & Per Kristian Skalstad, Johan Halvorsen, ‘Suite Mosaique, No. 4: Chant de Veslemøy’, 1.6MB MP3]
[50-sec clip, Tor Espe Aspaas & Per Kristian Skalstad, Johan Halvorsen, ‘Suite Mosaique, No. 4: Chant de Veslemøy’, 1.6MB MP3]
T or Aspaas and Per Skalstad are very good at telling stories. They must’ve had music teachers like Ruth Mapson of my own childhood.
V eslemøy—in morose, poignant, fateful F-sharp minor. Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata is in F-sharp minor... Also, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1... Scriabin’s Piano Concerto and his Piano Sonata No. 3, too. Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and Vieuxtemps’s Violin Concerto No. 2... Second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23... Reger’s and Tippett’s second string quartets; Shostakovich’s string quartet No. 7... Two of Chopin’s mazurkas, plus a nocturne... Last but not least, two preludes and fugues in J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier are in F-sharp minor. F-sharp minor carries a lot of ‘attitude’.
F -sharp minor, although it leads to great distress, nevertheless is more languid and ‘love-sick’ than lethal. Moreover, it has something abandoned, singular, and misanthropic about it.” — Johann Mattheson, 1713.
B ut what about Veslemøy? What do we know about ‘Veslemøy’?
I n Norwegian, it nominally means “little girl” ... a compound of ‘vesle’ = “little” and ‘møy’ = “girl”. But it’s way more than that. This name was used by Norwegian author Arne Garborg for the main character in his epic poem ‘Haugtussa’ [The Mountain; literally ‘heap of rocks’] (1895). Almost certainly this popular Neo-Romantic Garborg poem was the inspiration for Halvorsen when he wrote this Suite in 1898. But the idiomatic compound ‘veslemøy’ was a commonplace way before Garborg even. It connotes ‘fairy’ or ‘sylph’—mysterious; charming and beautiful but creepy; other-worldly.
T he poem is propelled by Garborg’s rural culture and infused with its values and lore. A number of supernatural beings—like the Draug, the Hulderpeople, and other characters from Norse mythology inhabit the epic. A ‘haugtussa’ is originally a female subterrestrial (a woman troglodyte of the Hulder race). But here the main character, beautiful young above-ground Veslemøy, is revealed to be a Hulder and a haugtussa. The 219-page poem is dark and foreboding; it is not for no reason that its sequel, published in 1900, was ‘I Helheim’ (In Hell). More than a stereotypical, ever-cheerful Norsk outlook :Ѣ Garborg was rendering Dante-like divina commedia, a long oblique rant against the church and what he felt were deleterious social effects of church dogma and pious blind eyes turned away from real problems in the world—poverty, starvation, indignity, suffering.
V eslemøy (also called Gislaug) is the youngest of three sisters, and lives with her elderly mother near Jæren in rural Norway, south of Boknafjorden and northwest of Dalane in the county of Rogaland. The oldest sister has died, we are not sure how, maybe from tuberculosis, and her other sister has fled some time ago from the countryside to the big city—by implication, that sister has become a prostitute, wild and estranged from her family. So Veslemoy and her old mother are alone.
T hey are dirt-poor and live as tenants on a farm; like characters in a fantastical Haldor Laxness novel, they are harassed to their wits’ end by the local land-owner.
V eslemøy has a precocious natural insight into people and situations. She is savant-like in her surprising confabulations, each story containing enough kernels of truth to have a devastating verisimilitude. Other kids (and adults, too) gather around her to hear her tell stories, or to pose riddles—a famous winter fireside pastime for us fun-loving Norwegians.
V eslemøy habitually makes up stories, stories upon stories. One night, her dead sister visits Veslemoy and tells her that she is endowed with the capacity for ‘second sight’, to be psychic, and to foretell what will happen. Veslemøy’s stories are not entirely her ‘own’, and Veslemøy’s compulsion to tell them is not necessarily hers to control. The sister’s revelation is a great burden to Veslemøy, but she has no choice but to accept it.
G arborg’s point seems to be that it is better to be a ‘seer’—better to be spiritually ‘awake’ in a Zen sort of way or the state of Bodhi awake-ness attained by the Indian spiritual teacher Gautama Buddha and his disciples—than to be stultified/mortified by the oppression of routine day-to-day life and the paternalistic rule of priests. From this point forward, visions haunt Veslemøy, and the netherworld spirits pursue her. She is narrowly avoids being abducted underground by the Hulders. She has also the ability to see what symbolic animal spirit each person around her has behind him or her.
V eslemøy experiences the problems of tweens in any age: crazy first love, almost gets engaged to the kid on the farm down the road. Instead, the foolish boy finagles marrying a rich girl, and the experience of being dumped unhinges Veslemøy. Veslemøy has to fight even harder with her inner demons, who abduct her into the mountains. There, she meets trolls—some who are decent souls and others of ill repute. She commiserates with them about their crappy fate as outcasts, and how they have been deprived of a life worth living. The Haugkall (mountain king) proposes to marry her, despite the outrageous difference in their ages. She tells him No, Hell No [Well, actually she collapses because she sees that he has the mouth of a rat.] and is brought home sick and delirious. At the end of the poem, the dead sister consoles her again, and admonishes her to buck up and to get ready descend into Hell, accompanied by a volve/voluspa/goddess/wizard/witch/wolfwoman who will teach her “through horror, the work which will become your honor”.
H er ser du Visdoms Volve staa. Ho vil deg gjeva djupt aa sjaa og store Røynslur herde. Ho bèr deg gjennom Helheims Gov; der skal du skimte Livsens Lov og gjennom Rædsle lære det Verk, som vert di Ære.
[Here before you Wisdom—Volve—stands. She gives you depth of seeing and lets you hear what big Røynslur hears. She compels you to go to Hell where you can’t help but glimpse the Law of All Life and from Horrors-more-than-Faith learn that work which must be(come) your Fate-Honor.] — Arne Garborg, ‘Haugtussa’, 1895.
S o Halvorsen didn’t need to write any story or provide program notes or annotations to his music; the notions above would’ve been familiar (from Garborg’s Haugtussa 1895 poem, or from Grieg’s Haugtussa lieder from the same year) to any Scandinavian who would’ve heard Halvorsen’s violin-piano duo in 1898 or the years shortly after.
B ut we need to write the story down and remember it, to make these few notes mean something. For us, Halvorsen’s chamber music—much of it, except, say, for the Passacaglia and Sarabande Duos for violin and viola—might seem sentimental or dated, hence, dismissible, if we don’t bother to find out about what motivated the composer to write it. We need to invest a little energy to find out why it mattered at the time—what the social context was, who the performers and early audiences for the works were, and what they cared about—in order to accurately value the works. In the case of Halvorsen, Aspaas and Skalstad do a wonderful job of reanimating these pieces, entering into them, and reminding us of the characters’ stories—and how being ‘awake’ and engaged matters in present-day society. Fear and absurd suffering as the ‘juice’ for creating meaning and redeeming humankind; theodicy; the eternal return; Neo/TheOne; an 1895 feminist ‘Matrix’, sort of.
S o Halvorsen’s violin-piano duos are nothing like Stravinsky, Elgar, Elliot Carter—any of the works that fill the 110 pages of ‘violin-piano’ repertoire in Hinson’s book. We have wonderful violin double-stopped consonance flavored by piano dissonance. We have haunting, brooding, poignant, elegant, serious recital behavior, not encore bon bons. We have exalting, transcendent phrasing if you are careful and listen for it. The pieces are short. If you blink, you’ll miss it.
B rahms tries to make the violin and piano co-equals; Schumann instead often pitches the violin as a virtuosic protagonist against the piano. But those are ‘big’ works. The small scope and small timescale of miniatures like Halvorsen’s don’t allow for that kind of dramatic development. Instead, we have these mystical, Neo-Romantic microfictions.
T he uneven weight between the bowed and hammered strings does not have time to sink-in or become problematical. The piano roams free in the middle and treble registers, just as a microfiction character would. Listeners’/readers’ minds are obliged to interpolate, to read between the lines. Microfiction will not support any expectation of explicit storytelling. It is all between the lines. It must be so. There are too few lines for it to be otherwise. So, with microfiction (i.e., miniatures like Halvorsen’s), we understand its ground-rules before we begin, and we relish the extra interpretive responsibility that the author/composer places on us.
Y ou might think that miniatures would be ideal for our time—an era of short attention-spans and a taste for sound-bites and web-surfing. But no. The small size actually requires patience and effort.
T he replication 8-8 | 8-8 in this 32-bar piece provides a natural suggestion of reconsideration. Not ‘repetition’ but something more like... like... like Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’ where different chapters are told from the point of view of different characters, whose personalities change as the story proceeds. Veslemøy above ground starts with a downbow, with the mute on (piano-violin duo, with the mute on!), and the Veslemøy underground, bowing inverted now begins with upbow. The violin before, and the violin after. Piano, trans-substantiated; shape-shifting piano. The repetition/reconsideration/return (with the upbow/downbow inversion effects and with properly calibrated subterranean piano pedaling) provides us a chance to get inside each character’s mind and discover each character’s uncertainties—about what is real and what is illusion; about who one is and who one was/will be. Fiction? Hardly!
W e find that each character is receptive to all types of detail. Poetics are found in merely taking a drink of water; magic is found in merely talking to the wolf. Don’t ignore the wolf or pretend like it’s not there. You’d better talk to it.
I f this stuff interests you, please have a look at Kristin Rygg’s nice chapter in Ulla-Britta Lagerroth and Erik Hedling’s book (link below). Clairvoyance, mystical duties, the obligation to give voice to songs not yet born, the symbolic meanings of upbow and downbow.
T or Aspaas was born in 1971 in Røros. Aspaas received his Diploma in Piano Performance in 1996, studying with Liv Glaser and Jens Harald Bratlie. Since 2007 he has served as professor of piano on the faculty of the Academy in Oslo. He is particularly active and sought after as a chamber musician; ensemble performance and accompaniment are also his specialties at the Academy. Besides his concertizing and teaching activities, Aspaas has served as artistic director for the chamber music festival Vinterfestspill in Bergstaden on Røros since 1999.
P er Skalstad was born in 1972. At age 12, he entered the Norwegian State Academy of Music (NSAM) in Oslo, pursuing both piano and violin. Skalstad got his Diploma of Violin Performance in 1995, studying with Stig Nilsson, Lars Anders Tomter and Camilla Wicks. In 2002, he completed his Diploma of Conducting, also at NSAM. In 1988 Skalstad joined the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. With the NCO, Skalstad plays the viola when needed. Per founded the Oslo String Quartet in 1991, with Geir Inge Lotsberg (viola), Åre Sandbakken and Øystein Sonstad (cello). Skalstad was assistant concertmaster in the Norwegian Opera Orchestra from 1993 to 2005, and he has performed as a soloist with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, the Bergen Philharmonic, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and the Risør Festival Strings. In the 2004 Halvorsen recording with Aspaas, Skalstad played on the Halvorsen`s 1705 Rogeri.
Johan Halvorsen Chamber Music
6 Stimmungsbilder for Violin and Piano (1890)
Suite in G Minor for Violin and Piano (1890)
Danses norvégiennes for Violin and Piano (1897)
Elegie for Violin and Piano (1897)
Passacaglia in G Minor on the Theme by Georg Friedrich Händel (from Harpsichord Suite in G minor, HWV 432) for Violin and Viola (1897)
Sarabande con Variazioni in G Minor on the Theme by Georg Friedrich Händel for Violin and Viola (1897)
Crépuscule for Violin and Piano (1898)
Suite Mosaïque for Violin and Piano (1898)
String Quartet in E, Op.10 (1901)
Little Dance Suite for Violin and Piano, Op.22 (1902)
Slåtter for Violin Solo (1903)
Miniatures, 5 Easy Pieces for 2 Violins and Piano, Op.29 (1910)
To serenader for Violin and Piano
Norske viser og danse for Violin and Piano
Concert Caprice on Norwegian Melodies for 2 Violins
J ust knowing the dream, just knowing the song, the tune will hold fast in your mem’ry— seductively beckoning the whole day long.” — Arne Garborg, ‘Haugtussa’, 1895.
T his fourth movement, the Allegro con brio, is a fast rondo with athletic, angular, in-your-face themes for the two violins. Urioste and White were a tour de force, spirited and incisive. I had previously heard Urioste perform in 2007 when she was completing her studies at Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. I’d previously heard White when she was at New England Conservatory in Boston. It was a delight to hear these two perform together; to recalibrate my recollections and impressions from several years ago; and to experience their pyrotechnical interactions with each other in this challenging, aggressive piece. 
