The Palladium Chamber Players have been rehearsing this week directly above my office and I’ve been enjoying the Bach, Schubert and Tornia (I’m new to his music) they’ve been practicing. I keep my door open and slip upstairs whenever I have a break.
So I can tell you, our kickoff concert of the 2018-19 Palladium Chamber season is going to be very special. We’ve also set a new record for season subscriptions. Tonight’s concert just topped the 300 ticket mark. And Westminster Communities of Florida have joined us as our season supporter. That’s all great news.
If you haven’t gotten your tickets, you can visit our box office anytime within three hours of the 7:30 p.m. concert or follow this link for on-line tickets. There will be tickets available at the door. And subscription packages are also still available.
Kurt Loft, Tampa Bay’s best classical music writer, has prepared program notes for all five concerts. They are included in the program, but I’m sharing his notes on tonight’s concert below.
Enjoy and I’ll see you at the concert!
Program 1, Dec. 12, 2018
By Kurt Loft
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Sonata No. 3 in E Major for Violin and Keyboard, BWV 1016
Ask a classically trained musician to name a composer they always return to, and the answer will often be Bach. Yes, he’s been dead and buried for 270 years, but his creations resonate, in the words of the Bach scholar Christoph Wolff, as “true ideals and imperishable models of art.’’
From the breathtaking spirit of his Masses, Passions and cantatas to the contrapuntal puzzles of his fantasies and fugues, Bach achieved a level of consistency that defies lumping his life’s work into early, middle, and late periods. A seriousness of purpose underlines everything he composed – he lived for the “glory of God and refreshment of the soul’’ – spanning the grandiose creations for chorus and orchestra to the simplest utterance for a single instrument.
Listeners need only peek into the library that makes up his solo and chamber pieces to hear vivid evidence of an aesthetic and analytical mind. This is certainly true of his six Sonatas for Violin and Keyboard (usually played on the piano today) which immerse us in the workings of an ever-curious thinker. Their expressiveness led Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in 1774 to call them “among the best works of my dear departed father. They still sound excellent and give me much joy, although they date back more than 50 years.’’
These works were among the first music Bach wrote to be widely distributed and copied during his lifetime. He composed them for two instruments in trio sonata form, which means upper melodies by the violin and keyboard arc over a bass line by the keyboard, creating a three-part texture. Many performances, such as what you will hear tonight, add a cello to augment the keyboard duties and lend more color to the whole.
The 16-minute Sonata No. 3 opens pensively, the violin tune both sweet and sad, almost like a lament trying to find a smile. Things pick up in the following movement, a three-part invention with instruments repeating each other as if playing tag with the melody. The third movement introduces a passacaglia ─ a Baroque form in triple time with variations over the bass part ─ the highlight of the entire work. The final section sounds like it was torn from the score of a romantic violin concerto, its pulsating melody and rapid-fire 16th notes setting up the musicians in a race to the finish line.
Joaquín Turina (1882-1949)
Piano Trio No. 2 in B Minor, Op. 76
How refreshing to hear the music of Turina in concert, especially in such an intimate setting as the Palladium, where the evocative sounds and colors of the composer’s Andalusian homeland feel close enough to touch. And what sounds they are. Although Turina wears the perfume of French impressionism, his music is Spanish in its rhythm and grain and undoubtedly influenced by the canvases of an artistic father.
For a composer of such likable music, it’s odd that Turina receives so little play today, especially from orchestras. His Danzas Fantasticas, Sinfonia Sevillana and the marvelous procession from Del Rocio are delights for the ear, and must be lots of fun to play on stage. These pieces are full of sweat equity, as it took years for Turina to rise above the labor of cranking out zarzuelas, which today would be akin to local musical theater. Nor did they offer him the respect he craved. So, he packed his bags and headed for Paris, and had the good fortune to meet and study under Vincent d’Indy, famed for his Symphony on a French Mountain Air.
As Turina’s confidence grew with more challenging forms, he embraced the transparency of chamber music, and the Spanish master Isaac Albeniz just happened to be in the house during the premiere of Turina’s String Quintet. Over a round of drinks afterward, Albeniz encouraged the younger man to pursue a serious path, and from that moment Turina decided that his music “should be an art, not a diversion for the frivolity’’ of people looking for after-dinner entertainment. A series of chamber works began making the rounds, as well as luminous orchestral pieces, and by the onset of the First World War, he was a recognized figure in the music of Spain.
The Piano Trio No. 2 is a fluid, buoyant work that never lags over its brief 15 minutes. It hints of folk songs, not so much obvious as they are “softer and deeper,’’ according to the Spanish scholar Federico Sopena. The searing intensity of the opening lento gives way to a poised molto-vivace that ends in a whisper. Echoes of a church chorale flirt under thunderous piano chords in the closing movement, where Turina disguises the thematic complexities over seven linked sections.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat Major, Op. 100
Schubert could easily win the Most Productive Composer award for the sheer number of pieces he created in his short life. Others wrote more, such as Telemann, but over a long career fueled by patron support. Schubert was alone and often lonely, strapped for cash, and frequently sick. Still, he managed to write 600 songs (nearly three times as many as the Beatles, crafting eight in a single day); 40 liturgical pieces; 20 piano sonatas; 15 string quartets; nine symphonies; and music for the stage. When asked about his work ethic, Schubert simply replied “I finish one piece and begin the next.’’
He was among the most natural artists of any age, his melodies organic, and when set against a backdrop of melancholy, his music becomes human theater. Some works, like his Unfinished Symphony, are so profound they seem to have been forged in a great furnace deep within the earth, and the C Major String Quintet, which the Palladium Chamber Players perform at the end of this season, has few equals. His childhood friend Franz Eckel said Schubert lived in a world “of inner, spiritual thought, seldom expressed in words but almost entirely in music.’’
Only one public concert devoted to Schubert’s music was staged during his lifetime, and the Piano Trio No. 2 in E-Flat Major ─ his 100th published work ─ served as its centerpiece. The composer and critic Robert Schumann viewed it as a farewell: “A Trio by Schubert passed across the face of the musical world like some angry comet in the sky. It was his 100th opus, and shortly afterward, he died.’’
By chamber music standards, the Trio is large, stretching nearly the length of his Ninth Symphony. With such a vast canvas, he had plenty of room to develop the six themes that percolate through the opening movement. A pensive second movement, with its march-like piano chords and lament on the cello, was used in the movie Barry Lyndon, and introduces a second major theme when the violin appears. Schubert casts his third section as a canon (remember Row, Row, Row Your Boat?) with the three instruments echoing each other at one-measure intervals. The work concludes on a grand scale, with diverse episodes appearing, intermingling and disappearing.
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