HUNGARIAN DANCES

Poco allegretto 
Andantino ed innocentemente 
Finale. Presto assai 
 

In 1797, the London publisher Longman & Broderip published a set of ‘Three Sonatas for the piano-forte with an accompaniment for the violin & violoncello … dedicated to Mrs. Bartolozzi.’ The dedicatee was Therese Jansen (1770–1843), born in Aachen, who was a pupil of the pianist and composer Muzio Clementi and who met Haydn during his first London visit. In 1795 she married the art dealer Gaetano Bartolozzi and Haydn – on his second English visit – was one of the witnesses at their wedding. In 1797, Therese gave birth to a daughter who went on to have an important career as a singer and theatre manager: Lucia Elizabeth became better known as Madame Vestris, singing in the first English performances of many Rossini operas and in the world premiere of Weber’s Oberon. The same year as giving birth, Therese Jansen was the dedicatee of three of Haydn’s finest piano trios: the E flat Trio is the last in the set. 

The first movement moves with the steady tread of a delicate march, but with all sorts of rhythmic and harmonic subtleties that continually surprise, not least near the end where Haydn moves into some unexpected keys before an assertive close. The slow movement, in the completely unexpected key of B major, opens with a lilting, lyrical theme on the piano which is then taken up by the violin. With brilliant sleight-of-hand, Haydn shifts back to the home key of E flat major, ending on a dominant pedal to lead directly into the finale. This is a dazzling German dance, sometimes folkish in character, and full of Haydn’s irrepressible inventiveness. 

© Nigel Simeone

The idea of arranging dances based on Hungarian gypsy themes probably came after Brahms heard his friend Joseph Joachim’s Violin Concerto, “in the Hungarian style”, published in 1861 and dedicated to Brahms. Though this was a style Brahms already knew well from his earliest concert tours as a pianist with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi in the early 1850s. Although later arranged for various combinations of instruments (including full orchestra), Brahms originally wrote these short pieces for piano four hands. The first two books (Nos.1–10) were finished in Autumn 1868, and the third and fourth books (Nos.11–21) in March 1880. The first performances were all given at private concerts, first in Oldenburg on 1 November 1868 (Nos.1–10) and then in the Bonn suburb of Mehlem on 3 May 1880 (Nos.11–21). On both occasions the players were the dream-worthy piano duet partnership of Clara Schumann and Brahms himself. 

Nigel Simeone © 2012 

Allegro con spirito 
Rubato, lamentoso 
Cantabile, molto legato 
Vivace. Energico 
Adagio. Mesto – Allegro maestoso (Béla Bartók in Memoriam) 
Vivace. Capriccioso 
 

During the war, most of Ligeti’s immediate family perished in Nazi concentration camps, but he was able study at the Budapest Conservatoire, where his teachers included Zoltán Kodály. In 1951–3 Ligeti wrote a set of piano pieces called Musica ricercata from which he selected six to arrange for woodwind quintet. The influence of Bartók, especially of piano pieces like Mikrokosmos, is apparent throughout – and the fifth movement is explicitly written as a tribute to the composer whose music most inspired the young Ligeti when he was growing up in a repressive regime. The other composer whose music comes strongly to mind in the fourth and sixth of the Bagatelles is Stravinsky. Ligeti’s style was to change rapidly within a few years, after he moved to the more liberal cultural climate of Vienna. But the Bagatelles give an enjoyable indication of how skilful a composer he was at the start of his career.  

Nigel Simeone © 2014 

Roxanna Panufnik initially composed Hora Bessarabia as a violin solo for the Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition in 2016, writing that she had ‘drawn inspiration from Yehudi Menuhin’s love of Eastern European Gypsy music – using Romanian melodies and fiendish-but-fun Bulgarian Gypsy rhythms.’ The contest finalist Ariel Horowitz asked Panufnik to make an arrangement for her and the double-bass player Sebastian Zinca. The result is a piece in the form of a dance alternating slow and fast sections, the bass part adding a conversational element to what had been a solo piece. The slow passages resemble a Romanian ‘Doina’, improvisatory in feel with both instruments occasionally imitating the sound of a cimbalom, while the faster ‘Hora’ sections become increasingly animated, leading to the thrilling rhythmic charge of the closing bars. 

© Nigel Simeone