AMERICANA: GERSHWIN AND BERNSTEIN

Grazioso
Andantino – Vivace e leggiero

Leonard Bernstein wrote his Clarinet Sonata on a holiday spent at Key West, Florida, in the summer of 1941, just after finishing his conducting studies with Fritz Reiner at the Curtis Institute. It was first performed in Boston on 21 April 1942 by the clarinettist David Glazer, with Bernstein at the piano. But it was another clarinettist – David Oppenheim – to whom the work was dedicated, and who gave the first New York performance, and made the first recording, both in 1943. Aaron Copland, Bernstein’s mentor, had expressed reservations about Clarinet Sonata being played in public as he thought it too heavily influenced by Hindemith, Bartók, Milhaud and Copland himself. After the Boston premiere Bernstein wrote to him: ‘Your weren’t supposed to know that the Clarinet Sonata was being done! Direct defiance of your orders. But, hell, I’ve got to hear it.’ A year later, Bernstein put it on the programme of the concert he gave with David Oppenheim at the League of Composers in New York and confessed to Copland: ‘I betrayed you by playing the Clarinet Sonata today … I felt the need to present my first League composition as a piece with a slightly larger form … and the Sonata does approach, at least, a big form. Besides … it provided a lovely excuse for having David Oppenheim come down. So you will forgive me, won’t you?’ Published the same year, Bernstein’s Clarinet Sonata, with its pastoral, rather Hindemith-like first movement and its ebullient 5/8 finale – unmistakably Bernstein – was one of the first pieces to establish his reputation.

Nigel Simeone 2014

Haydn’s trumpet concerto is the only significant monument to half a century of experiments in trumpet technology. It was written for an instrument that never really caught on (and today is largely unknown even among period-instrument specialists), and for that reason lay neglected for more than century.

Haydn responded to the capability of the instrument like a gleeful child with a new toy. At the outset he indulges in a little teasing, letting the trumpet join the orchestra in the opening tutti for a few notes, all of them playable on the natural trumpet. Only with the first solo entrance does he break new ground, with the trumpet running up the scale from its written middle C, playing notes not possible on the natural trumpet. From then on the trumpet sings, slides around chromatically, skips and jumps, and every now and then plays a fanfare figure, as if Haydn wants to remind us that this new-fangled thing really is a trumpet.

Only the middle movement, a song that would be at home in any of Haydn’s operas, is entirely free of trumpet clichés. Haydn occasionally gives the solo trumpet what seems a minor accompaniment part, but they are parts that involve notes that could not previously have been played on a trumpet, and would therefore have had a very different meaning in 1800, jumping out at listeners who knew they were hearing the impossible. The sheer wonder of it is lost on modern listeners who have heard “Flight of the Bumblebee” on a trumpet.

For a number of reasons, the keyed trumpet never became an orchestral instrument, though a similar instrument was, for a short time, a mainstay of military bands, and a bass key-bugle, the ophicleide, was introduced into the orchestra in the 1820s and lasted until mid-century. Instruments with valves were invented a few years after Haydn’s death in 1809, but did not start to make headway into orchestras for nearly a generation, by which time they had already replaced key-bugles in bands. Valve trumpets did not become standard in orchestras until about 1840. Thus there was a gap of decades between the composition of Haydn’s Concerto and a time when someone other than Weidinger could play it, and in that interval the whole idea of a trumpet concerto, so common in the Baroque era, was now beyond the pale. The Haydn Concerto lay forgotten until the 20th century, gaining a place in the concert repertory only in the 1930s.

Quiet City, from 1939, was incidental music for a failed play by Irwin Shaw; its main character was a lonely Jewish boy who attempted to drive away his torment by playing the trumpet. The original was scored for a small ensemble of clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, and piano; the version we hear tonight was scored in 1940 for trumpet, English horn, and strings. The English horn participates in a dialogue with the trumpet, both instruments speaking a secret language — part “blues,” part temple cantor; the strings, at first serving as accompanists, invoke a dream-like sense of aloneness. Ultimately, they all join together (reluctantly?) in the climax of the work, portraying the anxiety, as well as the isolation, of the city.

Dave Kopplin

Amy Beach’s Romance for Violin and Piano came relatively early in her career. It was composed in 1893 and dedicated to the then famous American violinist Maud Powell. Beach and Powell premiered the work in the year that it was composed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It is in three sections with the melodies shared by both players.

This charming instrumental cue for a small ensemble of musicians was written by George Gershwin for his and Ira’s first movie score for RKO to accompany a humorous shipboard pantomime sequence for Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and their respective dogs. According to Oscar Levant, George intended this work to be “a private commentary on the plushy, overstuffed scoring favored by most Hollywood orchestrators.” Ira had the piece published in piano solo form as Promenade in 1960, but it is most frequently heard in a number of re-orchestrations for larger forces and has become quite popular with audiences.

When he was 11, Gershwin taught himself to play his first song on the piano by watching the keys on a player piano. It seems appropriate then, that four years later the teenaged Gershwin dropped out of school and started earning a living making piano rolls for player pianos. He also gigged in New York clubs and worked as a “plugger” – playing songs for potential sheet-music customers at the Jerome Remick music publishing company. The work improved the young composer’s improvisation skills, as well as his playing facility, and at age 17 Gershwin published his first song and his first solo piano composition. By the time he wrote the Three Preludes in 1926, he was an international sensation, having premiered the wildly successful Rhapsody in Blue two years prior.

Gershwin’s style, which combined ragtime, blues, jazz, and classical music, now sounds quintessentially “American” but in his own time, the chords and scales he used were nothing short of bizarre. The first prelude, a short, jazzy exclamation, opens with piano brightly and straightforwardly stating a bluesy phrase. The violin answers in a sly drawl, as if giving a wink. The piano retorts with a low, loud ostinato. The violin joins the party with pizzicato, elaborating on the five-note intro. The Latin feel of the music comes from the Brazilian baião rhythms in the piano.

The second prelude is “a sort of blues lullaby” according to Gershwin. Beginning with a pensive, solitary piano, violin then adds a sliding, bluesy melody, continuing the melancholy mood in a higher register. The piano moves up in register, playing alongside violin. A short middle section brings brighter material in, then falls back to the pensive piano ostinato and ends quiet and unassuming.

The third prelude, Agitato, jumps in immediately with a short introduction before beginning question-and-answer melodic phrases. The instruments weave and hop back and forth around each other and the texture is thick with flourishes. The restatement of the theme at the end of the movement is ostentatious, with the tempo and rhythm bringing the violin to an enormous slide up to a sky-scraping height.

Jascha Heifetz transcribed the Three Preludes (originally written for solo piano) for violin and piano in 1942. That version showcases both instruments, and the music shines with the violin’s new sonorities. The Three Preludes are the only concert work for solo piano to be published during Gershwin’s lifetime. They were premiered by the composer at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York City on December 4, 1926. The music was also performed at the Hollywood Bowl on September 8, 1937 in a tribute to Gershwin after his death in July of that year.

It is interesting to note that the final three works we hear tonight were all written in the same four years during which Ravel wrote his Sonata – between 1923-1927. Of course, each composer wrote from a different place, and each had his individual training, experience and style, but these pieces reflect the time period in which they were written, exhibiting the artistic diversity of the 1920s; much like composers today, Ravel, Ysaÿe, and Gershwin incorporated myriad influences, each creating his own – often groundbreaking – musical stamp.

Jessie Rothwell