The Catalan Christmas carol El cant dels ocells tells of birds singing with joy on hearing the news of the birth of Jesus. Pablo Casals made his cello arrangement after leaving Spain in protest at Franco’s dictatorship in 1939. He played it in almost all his concerts thereafter, including a memorable performance for President John F. Kennedy at the White House in 1961. The song became a musical emblem of Casals’s Catalan homeland, and his self-imposed exile. The great cellist himself made it clear that his reasons for making this arrangement were both musical and political, expressing the hope that ‘these sounds may be like a gentle echo of the nostalgia we feel for Catalonia. These sentiments must make us all work together, with the hope of a peaceful future, when Catalonia will once again be Catalonia.’  

Notes by Nigel Simeone, 2022 

‘On one stave, for a small instrument, Bach writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.’ This is how Johannes Brahms described Bach’s gigantic Chaconne to his friend Clara Schumann. It is the last movement of Bach’s D minor Partita, composed in about 1720. Probably the greatest single movement ever written for unaccompanied violin, it is an extended set of variations on a short, four-bar idea announced at the start. Bach uses all his ingenuity to create a structure in which unity (the basic theme) and diversity (the astonishingly imaginative variations) are held in perfect balance over a long (256-bar) span. The outer sections are in D minor, while Bach provides tonal variety by modulating to D major for the central section. As Brahms suggested, the result is quite simply one of the marvels of Baroque music.  

Nigel Simeone, 2022 

The Song of the Birds, played by Pablo Casals (1876-1973) in 1971, was based on a haunting and melancholy folk tune of his native Catalonia. Casals had experienced the horrors of both world wars, and this piece embodied the cello virtuoso’s prayers for peace. When performing it before the United Nations General Assembly toward the end of his life, he stood up and said, “Birds in Catalonia go singing: Peace, peace, peace.” I remember watching a video recording of this scene.

It might be more appropriate to call the piece this time a fantasia based on The Song of the Birds, rather than its arrangement. I wrote it freely, trying to capture the feelings and emotions of Casals, while imagining its performance by Japanese viola player Nobuko Imai. The original piece was written in A minor, but I chose C minor as its principal key to make the most of the viola’s open strings. Casals was one of the most important artists to Mr. Haruhiko Hagimoto; because I have dedicated this short piece to Mr. Hagimoto, and H.H. are his initials, the piece ends with a prolonged H note.

Akira Nishimura 

Allegro con spirito
Adagio
Menuetto. Allegro
Finale. Allegro, ma non troppo

This quartet was nicknamed the ‘Sunrise’ on account of its opening idea, an ascending theme on the first violin, heard over sustained chords. It was completed in 1797, and published as the fourth in what was to be Haydn’s last set of six quartets. A strongly contrasting idea in semiquavers is punctuated by short, rhythmic chords. Throughout the movement, Haydn cuts between these two sharply characterized themes, often returning to the ‘sunrise’ idea in ingenious ways. For instance, quite near the start, the theme is heard on the cello, beneath long chords in the upper strings, and this time it heads in a new direction – descending rather than ascending. The variety of texture in this movement is a constant source of delight – a composer at the height of his powers in a genre which he had not only pioneered but also developed to new expressive heights. The slow movement is reflective and unusually free in terms of structure: here the fantasia-like form seems to emerge as a natural consequence of the musical ideas. The Minuet comes as a charming contrast, until the rather austere Trio section where the violins present a serpentine tune, full of chromatic twists, over a drone in the lower strings. The finale is based on a theme that resembles a folk-song, and it has been suggested Haydn may have discovered this tune during his second visit to London in 1795. For the most part, the mood of this movement is jovial apart from a darker central section where the tune is presented in B flat minor. The work ends back in the major, closing with two unusually full double- and triple-stopped chords.

Nigel Simeone © 2015