CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Ensemble ACJW
The Academy—a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute

Zankel Hall
Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 7:30 PM

Ensemble ACJW
Andrew Manze, Conductor

BACH (arr. Harrison Birtwistle) Bach Measures Nos. 1-5 (NY Premiere)
BACH "Brandenburg" Concerto No. 3
BACH JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (arr. Harrison Birtwistle) Bach Measures Nos. 6-8 (NY Premiere)
BACH "Brandenburg" Concerto No. 4 in G Major, BWV 1049
PURCELL Suite from Theatrical and Instrumental Music
·· March from Funeral Music for Queen Mary
·· Fantasia: Three parts on a Ground, (arr. Peter Maxwell Davies)
·· Canzona from Funeral Music for Queen Mary
·· In nomine a 7
·· Two Pavans (arr. Maxwell Davies)
·· March from Funeral Music for Queen Mary (arr. Andrew Manze)
IBERT Divertissement

The Academy—a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education—is made possible by a leadership gift from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Major funding has also been provided by Mercedes and Sid Bass, The Irving Harris Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Kovner Foundation, Martha and Bob Lipp, Mr. and Mrs. Lester S. Morse Jr., Judith and Burton Resnick, Susan and Elihu Rose, and The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, with additional support from Mr. and Mrs. Nicola Bulgari, Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Susan and Ed Forst, The William Petschek Family, and Suki Sandler.

Program Notes:

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750)
Bach Measures, arr. Harrison Birtwistle

Both born in 1934, Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies were fellow students at England’s Royal Manchester College of Music in the early 1950s. Their names were subsequently linked as cofounders of the trendsetting music theater ensemble Pierrot Players. In recent decades, however, these two prolific composers have gone separate ways, a divergence that is mirrored in their attitudes toward early music: While Davies has produced a series of freewheeling arrangements of music by composers such as Taverner, Dunstable, Gesualdo, Buxtehude, and Bach, Birtwistle has taken a more cerebral approach in his exploration of pre-Classical compositional forms and procedures.

Birtwistle’s longstanding interest in the music of Bach and his forebears is combined with a skepticism bordering on disdain toward historical performance orthodoxy, and the emphasis on early instruments and performing styles. He argues that “only through bringing something of the present century to it can we bring this music alive.” In this, he is a true descendant of 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared that “the really historical performance would talk to ghosts”; and of the 20th-century writer Theodor Adorno, who accused Bach’s devotees of turning him into “a composer for organ festivals in well-preserved Baroque towns.”

For Adorno, the only valid approach to early music was that represented by Webern’s orchestral arrangement of the six-part ricercar from Bach’s Musical Offering. Webern essentially translated Bach’s work into his own spare, pointillistic musical language. Birtwistle hasn’t gone that far; indeed, the arrangements of five of Bach’s organ chorale preludes that he made for the ensemble Matrix in 1975 are more or less literal transcriptions (though scored for an anachronistic ensemble of soprano, clarinet, basset horn, and bass clarinet). In 1996 he returned to Bach, this time in response to a commission from the London Sinfonietta to accompany a new work by the choreographer Richard Alston. Although the dance proved ephemeral, Bach Measures has secured a place in the repertory as one of Birtwistle’s most accessible pieces.

Scored for a chamber orchestra of thirteen or more players, this beguiling suite projects eight preludes from Bach’s Orgelbüchlein through the lens of Birtwistle’s modernist sensibility. His arrangements of the first and last preludes, “Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland” and “Durch Adam’s Fall ist ganz verderbt” are the most extreme in their dislocation of the original chorale melodies, structures, and sounds. (In the latter, the surreal cooing of the vibraphone is a particularly nice touch.) In the other six preludes, Birtwistle seems primarily concerned with sonority, bedecking Bach’s simple, four-square tunes in a dazzling array of instrumental filigree, while parceling the melodic line out, “hocket” style, among the various players.


JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
“Brandenburg” Concerto No. 3 in G Major, BWV 1048; “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 4 in G Major, BWV 1049

The six concertos that Bach dedicated to the Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg in 1721 range widely in both style and instrumentation. On the title page of the presentation copy, the composer identified them (in French) as “six concerts avec plusieurs instruments,” or “six concertos for several instruments.” Scholars have long debated whether he was referring to the varied instrumentation of the collection as a whole (each work calls for a differently constituted ensemble) or indicating that the concertos should be performed with one player to a part. Even today, when reduced forces are the norm, it is not uncommon to hear the “Brandenburgs” played by a larger orchestra. The basic requirement is that the opposition between soloists and full ensemble be clearly maintained.

The two concertos on tonight’s program illustrate Bach’s different solutions to this problem. In the third “Brandenburg,” scored for strings and continuo, the trios of violins, violas, and cellos are treated as three separate choirs. Bach ingeniously mixes and matches these solo groups to produce an amazing variety of textures and sonorities. In the fourth concerto, by contrast, the solisti comprise one violin and two alto recorders (or flutes); their parts, often highly virtuosic, are set against a four-part string orchestra supported by a harpsichord continuo. In short, “Brandenburg” No. 4 sounds more like a concerto (in the modern sense of the word) than No. 3 and was probably composed several years later. Although little can be said with certainty about the dating of the “Brandenburgs,” the consensus is that they were written between 1711 and 1720, with the third concerto falling near the beginning of that period and the fourth concerto near the end.

Both concertos are laid out in the conventional three movements, fast-slow-fast, but the fourth is significantly more expansive (the opening Allegro alone runs 427 bars) and features a brilliant solo violin part tailored for Joseph Spiess, the concertmaster of the small court orchestra at Cöthen during Bach’s tenure as Kapellmeister (1717–1723). The slow movement of the third “Brandenburg” is a puzzle: In Bach’s manuscript the Adagio consists in its entirety of two unadorned chords. Some musicologists contend that Bach intended another slow movement to be inserted here; others interpret the chords as an invitation to some sort of collective improvisation. Fortunately, the two surrounding fast movements, with their exhilarating motor rhythms and captivating twists and turns of harmony, provide more than enough interest to stand on their own.


HENRY PURCELL (1659–1695)
Suite from Theatrical and Instrumental Music, arr. Peter Maxwell Davies

This ersatz suite intersperses three of Purcell’s exquisitely crafted instrumental pieces with an equal number of cheerfully irreverent takeoffs by Peter Maxwell Davies. “I have long been fascinated by Purcell’s music,” Davies has said, “but utterly bored by well-meaning ‘authentic’ performances, which possibly get every double-dotted rhythm right but convey no sense of Purcell’s intensity of feeling, sense of fun or sheer outrageousness. I feel the profoundest respect for the ‘great’ composers of the past, but have no feeling of slavish reverence towards them whatever … Musical purity in these matters is about as interesting as moral purity. I am sure that many people will consider my Purcell realizations wholly immoral.”

That Davies chooses to call his parodies “realizations” suggests that in his eyes they are more “real”—for modern audiences, at least—than the originals. This may have been true in 1968, when he composed the Fantasia and Two Pavans after Henry Purcell for the Pierrot Players, but naturally we know better today. Or do we? Some would say that the revival of early music takes us only so far, for none of us can hear Purcell’s music with 17th-century ears. Perhaps that is the explanation of the cryptic Latin text (a vocal solo marked “optional” in the score) that Davies inserts at the end of the second pavan: “Faith is a virtue whereby that which we cannot see can be believed. Our concern is what it signifies, not whether it is true.”

Davies’s arrangements make lively foils for the solemn strains of the March and Canzona that Purcell composed for the funeral of Queen Mary in 1695, and with the densely woven counterpoint of his seven-voice In nomine. In the Purcell-Davies Fantasia, a marimba and harpsichord play the underlying sequence of chords, or ground bass, while piccolo, clarinet, violin, and cello imitate the 18th-century chamber organ that the composer once kept in his cottage in Devon. More outrageous still, Davies transforms Purcell‘s stately pavans into saucy foxtrots, complete with out-of-tune piano and, in the second dance, an optional railway guard’s whistle and football rattle.


JACQUES IBERT (1890–1962)
Divertissement

The six movements of Ibert’s whimsical Divertissement run the gamut from mock-solemnity to rollicking farce. The American composer-critic Virgil Thomson belittled Ibert as an uninspired pedant whose music demonstrated “the ultimate futility of knowledge as a point of departure toward style.” This is patently unfair. Ibert was undeniably a member of France’s musical establishment, serving as director of the Académie de France in Rome and, briefly, as administrator of the two leading Parisian opera houses. But his output is much too diverse, in both genre and style, to be dismissively stereotyped as “academic.”

More to the point is the unconventional and strikingly imaginative musical language that Ibert displays in Divertissement. With its restlessly shifting meters and tonal centers, the score is fluid and unpredictable, yet bursting with humor and good old-fashioned tunes. Cortège, for example, opens in a muted, Debussyan sound-world that soon metamorphoses—by way of a fleeting snippet of Mendelssohn’s famous “Wedding March”—into something approximating a disorderly circus parade. After a brief excursion in the Nocturne to the penumbral regions of atonality, the orchestra launches into a brilliantly eccentric waltz of the sort Johann Strauss might have written for a vaudeville show.

Ibert composed dozens of theater, ballet, and film scores. Divertissement, in fact, is a concert suite drawn from his incidental music for Eugène Labiche’s Un chapeau de paille d’Italie. (The same play inspired Nino Rota’s “farcical opera” The Italian Straw Hat.) The quirky theatricality of Ibert’s score is one of its most endearing qualities.

—Harry Haskell
A former music critic and editor, Harry Haskell is the author of The Early Music Revival:
A History, The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism, and Boss-Busters
and Sin Hounds: Kansas City and Its “Star.”

© 2009 The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Ensemble ACJW
Andrew Manze, Conductor
Ensemble ACJW is the performing arm of The Academy—a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education. Ensemble ACJW performs at Carnegie Hall and The Juilliard School in addition to bringing performances and educational events to the Saratoga Springs community through a partnership with Skidmore College. The Ensemble comes together in different sizes and configurations, having the opportunity to play intimate chamber music as well as larger conducted chamber orchestra works.

The Academy is a two-year fellowship that provides the finest post-graduate musicians with performance opportunities, advanced musical training, intensive teaching instruction and experience, and the skills and values necessary for careers that combine musical excellence with education, community engagement, and advocacy. The program reflects the belief that the artist of tomorrow will require both the ability to perform at the highest level and the capacity to give back to the community, inspiring the next generation of musicians and music lovers.

The Academy was launched in January 2007. The fellows in the program were selected because of their extraordinary level of musicianship, deep commitment to education and community engagement, and leadership qualities. Fellows are graduates of leading music schools, including The Curtis Institute of Music, Eastman School of Music, The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, Mannes College The New School for Music, New England Conservatory, San Francisco Conservatory, Stony Brook University, and Yale School of Music. Please visit acjw.org for more information about the program.