jwilzewske: holidays

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

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!

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Chadwick: An Ideology-Free U.S. Thanksgiving

During a career that spanned over 50 years, George Whitefield Chadwick was prominent among American composers from the 1880s until the 1930s. He composed in nearly every genre, including operas (7), orchestral music (17 works), songs (100+), and many choral and chamber works. During his life, Chadwick’s reputation was secured by frequent performances of his music—particularly by the Boston Symphony Orchestra—but his music is now seldom performed. His obscurity in the past 60 years is likely due to the modesty of scale of much of his work as much as to the nostalgic imagery, which seems out-of-sync with contemporary sensibilities.

Chadwick’s piano works and string quartets, for example, are on a small scale like Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words or Grieg’s Lyric Pieces—they are nineteenth century romantic minatures. Chadwick’s chamber music is written in the style of the ‘Character Piece.’ Each is a brief sketch of one particular mood or image. We have representational essays, like The Frogs, In the Canoe, and The Rill. This may not be important music, but it’s characteristic americana. And, on a nostalgic day of celebration like Thanksgiving in the U.S., these pieces are suitable—nostalgic in a way, but expressing a sort of nostalgia and romanticism that still has its eyes wide open.

This brand of romanticism resembles Edward MacDowell’s—and others in the generation before Charles Ives. Chadwick’s writing has been associated with the Realist movement in painting and the graphic arts, characterized by a down-to-earth portrayal of ordinary occurrences in people’s lives. To me, his miniatures hark back to a time when the American scene was not overrun with hubris. These modest pieces evoke romantic images, yes, but images undistorted by rose-colored glasses. They propound specific ideas but without insisting upon a particular ideology or a desultory rhetorical stance—something for which we can be thankful and to which we can still reasonably aspire.

[Chadwick began at the New England Conservatory in Boston as a ‘special’ student in 1872. ‘Special’ meant he could study with NEC faculty members—Carlyle Petersilea (piano) and Stephen Emery (music theory and composition)—without meeting Concervatory entrance requirements and without committing to completing a degree. In 1876, Chadwick was appointed to a faculty position within the music program at Olivet College. While on faculty at Olivet, Chadwick was affiliated with the Music Teachers National Association, founded by Theodore Presser and more than 60 other men and women who met in Delaware, Ohio, on December 26, 1876. Later, Chadwick studied in Leipzig at the Royal Conservatory of Music under Carl Reinecke (1824-1910) and Salomon Jadassohn (1830-1902). Two of his string quartets were written during his years in Germany. In 1897, Chadwick returned to Boston and became Director of the New England Conservatory of Music.]