Programme — Suite, d’après des thèmes, fragments et morceaux de Giambatista Pergolesi, Introductione …

Suite

d’après des thèmes, fragments et morceaux de Giambatista Pergolesi

for violin and piano (1921-25)

Introductione

Serenata

Tarantella

Gavotta

Minuetto e Finale

When Diaghilev suggested to Stravinsky that he might like to arrange a ballet score out of music by the 18th-century Neapolitan composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, he thought the director of the Ballets Russes “must be deranged.” Had he known where the Pulcinella project would lead, however, he would not have hesitated. His several months of concentrated work on Pergolesi in 1919 and 1920 was, he said, “my discovery of the past” and was to have a profound influence on the development of his music up to The Rake’s Progress and even beyond. There there were valuable spin-offs too - the ballet suite Pulcinella, which became one of Stravinsky’s most popular orchestral works, and no fewer than three duo items, including two Suites italiennes as well as the snappily titled Suite d’après des thèmes, fragments et morceaux de Giambatista Pergolesi.

Unlike the two Suite italiennes - one of which was arranged for cello and piano in collaboration with Gregor Piatigorsky in 1932, the other for violin and piano in collaboration with Samuel Dushkin a year or so later - the present Suite Pergolesi was scored entirely by Stravinsky himself. Written for the violinist Paul Kochanski between 1921, when he made a start on the Gavotta, and 1925, when he did most of the work, it was the first to be completed and, even though no two suites are made up of exactly the same numbers, a model for the others.

Common to all of them (its title misspelt as Introductione in two of them) is a version of the ballet overture which, with its extensive double-stopping, is more adventurously written for the violin in the Kochanski suite than in the Suite italienne. Also common to all of them are the Serenata, a charming Neapolitan serenade (from Pergolesi’s opera Il Flaminio), and the Tarantella, a frantic study in moto perpetuo and a challenge to the virtuosity of whatever string instrumentalist, cellist or violinist, is involved alongside the hard-pressed pianist. The Gavotta, with its two variations, is omitted from the cello suite but is featured in both violin suites, again with more challenging, more colourful violin writing in this version. All the suites end, with the Minuetto e Finale, as does the ballet, where the broadly melodious minuet is inflated to such a size, in terms of dynamics and texture, that it eventually explodes with so much energy as to sustain a brilliantly conclusive (and strangely Spanish-coloured) Molto vivace.

Leos Janácek (1854-1928)

Violin Sonata (1914-1921)

Con moto

Balada: con moto

Allegretto - meno mosso - allegretto

Adagio - poco mosso - maestoso - adagio

Janácek had long wanted to write a violin sonata. He had made two efforts as a student, both in 1880, but he seems to have discarded them as unsatisfactory. Certainly, both of them are lost. What inspired him to start on the work now know as the Violin Sonata was the beginning of the First World War and the fervent hope that the Russian army, which was about to enter Hungary at the time, would at last liberate Czechoslovakia from Austrian domination. He was encouraged too by a Balada for violin and piano he had written some time earlier and which seemed worthy of a place in a larger work.

However, although he succeeded in incorporating the Balada in a four-movement sonata in 1914 it wasn’t until seven years later, after several revisions, that the work found its final form. Even then he did not seem particularly pleased with it: “I don’t consider it to be an exceptional work,” he said, “but there is some truth in the second and third movements.” More enigmatic than untruthful, the first movement begins with a violin improvisation, accompanied by cimbalom-like tremolandos on the piano, which is then reshaped into the extended lyricism of the main theme and the dramatic collage of trills, ostinatos and melodic fragments associated with the second subject.

The construction of the Balada is unusual for Janácek. Although the first and second sections are related, the third, with an extended melody in octaves on violin and piano, seems to have nothing more than its accompanying ostinato in common with them until - at the point where the emotional and structural issues are simultaneously resolved - he merges the first and third sections into each other. The Allegretto, a kind of scherzo with outer sections based on a Moravian dance tune not unlike the troika theme in Katya Kabanova, is more characteristic.

It could be that the violin’s vehement trumpet calls, punctuating the piano’s first quiet announcement of a chorale theme at the start of the last movement, were inspired by the hope of liberation by way of Russian military intervention. There is certainly a direct reflection of Janácek’s thinking in this respect at the maestoso climax representing, as he explained, the Russian army entering Hungary - which was not entirely good news for the Hungarians, as they soon found out. Janácek’s concluding comment is as enigmatic as his opening remarks.

Eugéne Ysaÿe (1858-1931)

Au Rouet Op.14 (c1900)

Of the virtuoso violinists who also flourished as composers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - Joachim, Sarasate, Ysaÿe, Kreisler, Enescu… Ysaÿe and Enescu wrote the best music. If Ysaÿe couldn’t compete with Enescu outside the string repertoire, he out-composed all his colleagues by producing the greatest unaccompanied violin sonatas since those of J.S. Bach. In Au Rouet, the second of his Poèmes for violin and orchestra, he faced a less formidable challenge than comparison with Bach, but he was none the less successful in completing a score worthy to set alongside other classics of the spinning-wheel genre like Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade, Saint-Saëns’s Le Rouet d’Omphale, and Dvorák’s Golden Spinning Wheel.

In Ysaye’s own duo version of Au Rouet the motion of the spinning wheel is clearly perceptible in the piano part in the opening bars, just before the first entry of the violin with the lyrical main theme. If the contours of this melody suggest an allegiance with Gabriel Fauré, which a piano counterpoint seems to confirm, the rest of the work undeviatingly follows Ysaÿe’s own entirely spontaneous, even wilful impulse. Far from the ordered thinking of a Fauré, Au Rouet is a rhapsodic improvisation on that main theme. It first transforms itself into a fantastic scherzo brilliantly illuminated by violin pyrotechnics. Then, as the spinning wheel comes to a stop, it extends itself in an expressive central slow section poetically coloured by speculative harmonies and leading into a massively passionate piano cadenza. Without repeating anything literally, the last third of the piece resumes the scherzo delirium and, in a passage of particularly fanciful virtuoso-violin figuration, sets the the spinning wheel in motion again before the whole thing evaporates into Mendelssohnian thin air.

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Violin Sonata in E flat major Op.18 (1887-8)

Allegro ma non troppo

Andante cantabile (Improvisation)

Andante - allegro

Chamber music is not the first thing you associate with Richard Strauss. Indeed - apart from the Capriccio sextet which, as part of an opera, doesn’t really qualify - he wrote no chamber music during the last six decades of his life. The String Quartet Op.2, the Cello Sonata Op.6, the Piano Quartet Op.13, the Violin Sonata Op.18 were all written before he reached the age of 25, after which orchestral music, opera and song were his almost exclusive interests.

The last of the chamber works is also the most impressive. Completed five years after the scarcely less interesting Cello Sonata in F, the Violin Sonata in E flat displays a structural accomplishment and an idiomatic individuality well in advance of anything in the earlier chamber music. The first movement is particularly well integrated in spite of its expansive proportions. The most significant thematic factor is the very first bar, which is not just a dramatic opening gesture but - in its initial leap up the piano keyboard from a percussive E flat in the left hand a triplet figure high in the right - the source of much that is to follow. The violin takes an immediate interest in the triplet figure which it treats as a source of lyrical expression, going so far as to incorporate it in the upward aspiring second subject when, eventually, it comes to introduce the new theme. So, extensive and wide-ranging though it is, the development section is kept under control by innumerable allusions to the two opening motifs, the triplet figure in particular. They are still there, though now magnified in stature, in the sonorously scored coda.

The Andante cantabile is sometimes performed independently of the rest of the work under the title Improvisation, which is a fair indication of the spontaneous nature of the piece. Basically an intimately expressive song without words, it includes a middle section that magically transforms its stormy onset into a filigree of tender piano figuration that first echoes Chopin and then pre-echoes the Strauss of Der Rosenkavalier. The piano figuration is retained throughout the recall of the opening theme.

Beginning with an anticipatory slow introduction, the last movement is based for the most part on the muscular, briskly striving theme initiated by the piano as the tempo changes to Allegro. There is other thematic material, including a little scherzando motif, of which much is heard later, and a broadly heroic (almost Elgarian) melody, of which surprisingly little is heard later. The main source of interest, as in the first movement, is the opening theme, its first bar in particular. After a development that makes much contrapuntal play with the scherzando motif, the recapitulation takes little notice of the heroic melody and, like the liberated coda, makes the most of the energy invested in the main theme.