CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The MET Chamber Ensemble

Zankel Hall
Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 5:00 PM

The MET Chamber Ensemble
James Levine, Artistic Director and Conductor

MOZART Serenade in B-flat Major, K. 361, "Gran Partita"
GUNTHER SCHULLER Grand Concerto for Percussion and Keyboards (NY Premiere)
MOZART Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525

Program Notes:

By David Hamilton

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Serenade in B-flat Major for Wind Instruments, “Gran Partita,” K. 361
Born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria; died December 5, 1791, in Vienna.

The Serenade in B-flat Major was probably composed in the early 1780s in Vienna, and probably first performed there, at a concert in late March 1784; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere on December 24, 1964, with Alexander Schneider conducting an unnamed chamber orchestra.

Scoring: 4 horns, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 clarinets, 2 basset horns, and double bass.

A 1732 musical dictionary defined a serenade as “an evening piece, because such works are usually performed on quiet and pleasant nights.” It was a genre favored in Salzburg in Mozart’s youth, and he returned to it on occasion in Vienna, probably for the last time in the Serenade in B-flat Major, the most expansive of his major works for wind ensemble, which at the same time could serve as a poster child for the elusiveness of historical facts. Fortunately, the survival of the autograph manuscript allows us to be certain of the musical text and of Mozart’s authorship. However, the date “1780” on the manuscript and the description “Gran Partita” (a term that in Mozart’s day indicated a large work in a number of movements) are additions by a hand other than Mozart’s, so further information must be inferred from external evidence. For example, according to Alan Tyson, the modern authority on such matters, the type of paper used in the manuscript is found in Mozart works dating from 1781–82—suggesting that the Serenade probably wasn’t written earlier than that, but not ruling out a somewhat later date. The absence of such a substantial work from the catalogue of his own works begun by Mozart in February 1784, may indicate that the Serenade was completed somewhat prior to that date. In any case, a plausible terminus post quem non is suggested by what appears likely to have been the first performance: a concert announced in the Wienerblättchen for March 23, 1784, presented for his own benefit by the clarinetist Anton Stadler, “at which will be given, among other well-chosen pieces, a great wind piece of a very special kind composed by Herr Mozart.”

This sketchy but plausible information is reinforced by a passage in the 1785 Literary Fragments of one Johann Friedrich Schink, a visitor to Vienna in the spring of 1784. Under the heading “Musical concert held by Stadler, Clarinet Virtuoso,” Schink praises the “brave virtuoso” and reports:

I heard music for wind instruments today, too, by Herr Mozart, in four movements—glorious and sublime! It consisted of thirteen instruments, viz. four corni, two oboi, two fagotti, two clarinetti, two basset-corni, a contre-violon [double bass], and at each instrument sat a master—oh, what an effect it made—glorious and grand, excellent and sublime!

That description—and especially the specifics of the instrumentation—points fairly firmly to K. 361, though the reference to “four movements” suggests that the performance was abridged (not unusual at the time, especially with serenades and divertimentos)—or did the work’s scale and splendor so bemuse Schink that he failed to keep track properly? Although older scholarship tended to associate the Serenade’s origin with Mozart’s Munich visit in 1780–81 for Idomeneo (in which he amply exploited the excellent wind players of the local orchestra), modern scholarly opinion, taking note of stylistic similarities to instrumental works of early 1784, tends to favor a date for K. 361 closer to the time of this sole documentable performance.

If that’s so, it probably postdates the other two wind serenades of Mozart’s early Vienna years: K. 375 in E-flat (October 1781), initially for pairs of clarinets, bassoons, and horns, to which the composer added two oboes in the following summer, when he also created K. 388 in C minor for the enlarged ensemble. These contained, respectively, five and four movements—the “extra” one in K. 375 being a second minuet. K. 361 goes further, adding both a second slow movement (“Romance”) and a theme-and-variations movement.

K. 361’s instrumentation is as lavish as its time span, extending the more usual wind octet by two additional horns, two basset horns (alto clarinets, familiar to operagoers from two arias in La Clemenza di Tito), and a double-bass. The additional horns give Mozart wider harmonic options, while the availability of six upper-range instruments allows him a variety of melodic timbres while still maintaining a fairly full texture. And with so much sonority above, Mozart felt the need for a solid foundation, an octave below the bassoons. Since contemporary contrabassoons were as yet imperfect, he specified the string bass, even calling for some pizzicato notes in the variation movement.

Aside from the Adagio and Romance, in E-flat major, all movements are in the home key of B-flat. The first, with a slow introduction, is lower in contrast and tension than would be usual in a symphonic context; its principal themes share the same head-motive. The bassoon enjoys the spotlight in the first minuet’s relative-minor second trio. In the Adagio, an almost unbroken accompaniment of palpitating sixteenth-notes (over even eighths in second bassoon and bass) forms a rich background for the upper winds as they exchange melodic phrases of operatic range and opulence. The first trio of the second minuet explores the parallel minor key. The Romance (in 3/4 meter) is more homophonic than the earlier slow movement, and its central section (in 2/4) highlights basset horns and the bass instruments. A theme with six variations follows, in which the fifth variation recalls the tempo and mood of the Adagio and the sixth is a minuet. The concluding movement is a straightforward rondo.


GUNTHER SCHULLER Grand Concerto for Percussion and Keyboards
Born November 22, 1925, in New York City.

Composed in 2005, Schuller’s Grand Concerto was first performed on August 6 of that year at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Massachusetts, with the composer conducting; it receives its New York premiere at this afternoon’s performance.

Scoring:
Player 1: small bass drum, 3 tom-toms, 4 congas, 2 nipple gongs, small tam-tam, field drum, xylophone, glockenspiel.
Player 2: 3 cowbells, sizzle cymbal, mark tree, bell tree, 2 log drums, triangle, 2 glass chimes, marimba.
Player 3: bass drum, 2 tom-toms, field drum, 2 snare drums, 2 log drums, 4 temple blocks, 2 guiros, flexatone, 2 bongos, large triangle, chimes.
Player 4: small tom-tom, 4 cymbals, small guiro, 2 nipple gongs, 2 claves, snare drum (jazz), triangle.
Player 5: 3 gongs, 4 cymbals, 2 maracas (shakers), ratchet, 2 tom-toms, snare drum (jazz), tambourine, lion’s roar.
Player 6: 4 cymbals, medium tam-tam, sizzle cymbal, 4 temple blocks, 2 wood blocks, 2 tom-toms, 2 log drums; pandeiro, medium triangle, slapstick, 2 maracas (shakers), shell chimes, 2 cowbells, wind machine, water gong.
Player 7: large tam-tam, 4 cymbals, 2 sleigh bells, medium triangle, thunder sheet, castanets, 2 Chinese gongs.
Player 8: 2 snare drums, hi-hat, tambourine (pandeiro), high cymbal, crotales, rotos, timpani.
Other scoring: celesta, harp, and piano.

Gunther Schuller has been a central figure in American music for so long that the breadth of his talents and enthusiasms is sometimes overlooked. He served successively as hornist with the New York Philharmonic (1942), principal horn in Cincinnati (where at age 19 he played his own Horn Concerto), and principal horn in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra (1945–59). If that were not enough for a career of lifetime distinction, he has been president of the New England Conservatory (1966–77), and today remains director of the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood.

The following note on the Grand Concerto is adapted from the composer's program note for the premiere:

Among my almost 180 compositions, there wasn’t a single work for percussion ensemble, small or large, for the simple reason that no one had ever asked me to write such a piece. So, when Frank Epstein at the New England Conservatory asked me in 2004 to write him such a work, I jumped at the chance, especially when he told me it would be for his large percussion ensemble at the New England Conservatory, with the added possibility of a premiere at Tanglewood.

The idea of writing for a lot of percussion, with their almost limitless sound and textural possibilities, really turned me on. And I can truly say, although I like to think I have occasionally (or even often) been inspired in some of my earlier works over the years, I don’t think I was ever so inspired and challenged as in the case of this Grand Concerto.

I wrote the piece in what amounted to about six full days (with numerous interruptions). It seemed as if such a work had been in me for some time, since I decided right away to write for eight percussionists with large setups, i.e., lots of different instruments to hit and bang on, or to coax beautiful soft sounds from. (Percussionists in the last sixty years have learned to play every percussion instrument in God's creation, from obvious things like timpani and snare drums—and dozens of other types of drum—and cymbals and gongs, to mallet instruments like the vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, and xylophone.) I also knew right away that, since so many percussion instruments are what we call “non-pitched” instruments, I would have some pitched instruments: thus the choice of what I have called collectively “three keyboards,” including a harp. I don't get along too easily as a composer without pitches, that is, without harmony and melody.

The work is in four movements, played without interruption, in a rather traditional Classical format:

I. Slow accelerating to fast
II. Slow
III. Fast, a Scherzo
IV. Introduction (cadenza-like)—Allegro (Perpetuum Mobile)

Perhaps the most interesting challenge in writing this work was what one might call “logistics,” which one never encounters in orchestral or chamber music. In writing for a large percussion group, with each player performing on anywhere from a dozen instruments to almost 30, the composer has to keep constant track of what instruments each of the eight players has been assigned, plus making sure that he or she can get to the next instrument (whatever it might be) in time—traveling time—and to have enough time to tune instruments that require tuning or, conversely, to damp instruments which require that.

Writing this piece was like enjoying a tremendous gourmet feast. Or to put it another way, I felt like a little four-year-old splashing wildly around in a big bathtub with dozens of plastic or rubber toys. (We all remember that, don’t we?) My imagination was constantly fired with the excitement of taking all those hundred-instrument sounds, like a chef’s ingredients, and mixing, collecting, combining—and/or featuring them—in a seemingly limitless, inexhaustible variety.


WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Serenade in G Major for strings, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” K. 525
The manuscript of the Serenade in G Major is dated August 10, 1787. The entry for the piece in Mozart’s catalogue of his works indicates that the first movement was to be followed by a minuet-and-trio that has not survived, though a draft of 16 bars for a slow movement does exist. No information about early performances is known. The Serenade received its Carnegie Hall premiere on November 16, 1906, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Vasily Safonov.

Scoring: 1st and 2nd violins, viola, cello, double bass.

Performance time: approximately 26 minutes.

By far the favorite among Mozart’s serenades–no doubt in part because its alternate generic title, “A Little Night Music” (which indicates a notturno, or short piece to be played in the evening) was catchier than the standard title “Serenade.” (The internal rhyme between the first two words of the German title probably didn’t hurt, either.)

Few works of comparable popularity have come down to us with so little background information as the Kleine Nachtmusik. Its initial purpose, and information about its presentation to the public, has vanished into one of history’s black holes, along with the reasons why the planned minuet-and-trio and slow movement were abandoned. The assiduous Otto Erich Deutsch, who compiled an exhaustive “documentary biography” of contemporary references to Mozart and his life and works, did not discover a single mention of the piece, nor have subsequent researchers had greater success. (More recently, the American Mozart biographer Maynard Solomon has hypothesized that the Nachtmusik may have been written for Mozart’s Viennese friends, Franziska and Gottfried von Jacquin.)

The manuscript is silent on the matter of single vs. multiple strings to a part; scholarly opinion inclines to favor solo strings, but larger forces can work in suitable spaces.

The movements follow the usual pattern of multi-movement Viennese Classical instrumental works, though more compactly, offering elements of grace, sentiment, wit, and brio, by turn.

I. Allegro (G major, 4/4). The initial fanfare-like gesture in octaves (perhaps more likely to awaken than lull a putative “serenadee”) recurs at significant formal junctures.

II. Romanze: Andante (C major, Alla breve). Repetitions of the opening melody frame contrasting material, most conspicuously a section in minor, where short notes run busily between three-note phrases in the outer registers, until calm is restored with a return of the principal material.

III. Menuetto: Allegretto (G major, 3/4). Scales dominate this dance movement: energetically voiced in the main section, more flowing in the more pastoral Trio.

IV. Rondo: Allegro (G major, Alla breve). Bustling eighth-notes dominate the final movement: often rocketing upwards, eventually leading into a sparkling coda.

Copyright © 2008 by David Hamilton