CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin

Zankel Hall
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin

VIVALDI Concerto for Strings and Continuo in G Minor, RV 152
MARCELLO Oboe Concerto in D Minor (with ornaments by J. S. Bach)
GRAUN Concerto for Viola da Gamba, Strings, and Basso Continuo in A Minor
P. H. ERLEBACH Overture No. 5 in F Major
BACH Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra in D Minor, BWV 1052

Encores:
KAEMPFERT "Strangers in the Night" (arranged by Carsten Gerlitz)
P. H. ERLEBACH Bourree from Overture No. 5 in F Major

This concert and the Baroque Unlimited series are made possible, in part, by a grant from the E. Nakamichi Foundation.

Program Notes:

By Robert Mealy

ANTONIO VIVALDI Concerto for Strings and Continuo in G Minor, RV 156
Born March 4, 1678, in Venice; died July 28, 1741, in Vienna.

The superstar violinist Antonio Vivaldi is best known today for his many concertos that showcase one or a few instruments; tonight we will hear another kind of concerto, written for orchestra alone. The term “concerto” has always had a mixed history; it can have the sense of two forces “contending” with each other (the modern sense of the concerto, in which a single instrument matches wits and strength with the orchestra) but it can also be seen as a work in which the forces “strive together.” This second meaning might be more apposite for Vivaldi’s concertos for orchestra, in which the orchestra itself becomes its own soloist. The line between concerto and sinfonia in these works is very slim, and indeed many of these works are labeled interchangeably. They are also very similar to many opera overtures by Vivaldi and his contemporaries. These are, in fact, the first seeds of independent orchestral music, a genre in which the orchestra is serving neither as dance band, nor concerto band, nor opera orchestra—it simply celebrates itself. Much later in the century, the seeds planted in these short three-movement orchestral concertos would blossom into the classical symphony.

Vivaldi’s Concerto in G Minor is one of over 50 orchestral works he wrote in this style, all of which make their points with brevity and wit, with much exchange of motifs between the two violin parts. Its first movement is constructed around a repeating figure in the bass, a chromatic descent full of charged energy. The Adagio that follows is dominated by a slow-moving Corellian bass-line, over which the upper strings hold aching suspensions. The concerto is closed with a fiery Allegro, with urgent 16th-note motion and bravura upward flourishes.


ALESSANDRO MARCELLO Oboe Concerto in D Minor (with ornaments by J. S. Bach)
Born August 24, 1669, in Venice; died there June 19, 1747.

One of Vivaldi’s musical contemporaries in Venice was the distinguished nobleman Alessandro Marcello, a noble dilettante like his younger (and better-known) brother, Benedetto. A member of the governing Maggior Consiglio of Venice, Marcello’s career was dominated by his work with his city’s judiciary. But he also found time to paint (providing works for his family palaces) and to write poetry; his eight books of couplets, published in 1719, were well known in Paris.

Marcello was also a keen musician and composer. Of his many cantatas and concertos (including one for seven recorders), his Oboe Concerto in D Minor is by far his most famous work today. Ironically, it is frequently ascribed to his brother Benedetto, with whom he was engaged in a long-running and highly acrimonious feud about the family opera boxes at the Teatro S Angelo at the time when this concerto was published in 1717.

The modern popularity of Marcello’s elegant oboe concerto is thanks to a curious twist of music history. One of J. S. Bach’s first employers was the teenage Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar, who had returned from his studies in the Netherlands in 1713 with a large collection of Italian concertos, mostly by Venetian composers. The Prince himself tried his hand at this exciting new form of the concerto, and Bach honored his patron’s enthusiasm with a series of transcriptions for both harpsichord and organ of works from the Prince’s collection. Among these ingenious arrangements was one of Marcello’s Oboe Concerto (BWV 974), presumably from a manuscript source. For the slow movements of this concerto, Bach provided a good deal of written-out ornamentation, in imitation of what would be expected of any soloist; tonight’s performance takes advantage of Bach’s suggestions.


JOHANN GOTTLIEB GRAUN Concerto for Viola da Gamba, Strings, and Basso Continuo in A Minor
Born ca. 1702–1703 in Wahrenbrück; died October 27, 1771, in Berlin.

Although today he is a virtually unknown figure, J. G. Graun was one of the most important composers of the mid-18th century. He came from a musical family; his older brother, Carl Heinrich, became Kapellmeister to Frederick the Great, and provided a steady diet of operas for the Berlin court. Johann Gottlieb was a distinguished violinist, a student first of Pisendel (the concertmaster in Dresden, and himself a student of Vivaldi’s) and then of the great master Tartini in Padua. Graun’s first prominent position was as Konzertdirektor in Merseburg. His fame as a violinist was enough that Bach sent his oldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, to study violin with Graun there. In 1732, Graun joined the musical establishment of Frederick the Great, and eight years later became concertmaster of the Berlin Opera.

By 1766, J. A. Hiller commented that “the concertmaster’s great strength on the violin and his excellence in composition are universally known. The compositions of Mr. Graun consist of unusually fiery concertos for one and two violins; of double concertos for other instruments; of concertos for violoncello, viola da gamba, etc.; of very many magnificent symphonies; and of several overtures.”

That Graun composed for the viola da gamba at this late date might be surprising; it is an instrument generally associated with 17th-century France and England, not Berlin in the mid-18th century. But Graun had met a remarkable virtuoso, Johann Christian Hertel, during his years in Merseburg, and became fascinated by the musical possibilities of this instrument. Later in Berlin, he had as a colleague one of the most impressive viol players of the time, Christian Ludwig Hesse. Hiller remarked that “the technical accomplishment, the exactness, and the fire in performance that Mr. Hesse possesses to such a high degree make him in our times indisputably the greatest violist da gamba in Europe.” Graun clearly thought enough of his colleague to write 22 large-scale works for the viola da gamba, including eight concertos. Tonight’s work is one of the fruits of this association.

Graun’s musical language is very much that of Frederick’s Berlin. This is the style known by contemporaries as galant—a word which means as much, and as little, as “fashionable” or “cool.” In music, it is a language of elegant gestures, of sighing motifs, of melody-dominated textures. Within this highly stylized language, Graun creates a compelling musical discourse, one that (especially in the outer movements) is indeed “unusually fiery.”


PHILIPP HEINRICH ERLEBACH Overture V in F Major, from Six Overtures accompanied by the Appropriate Airs in the French Style

Baptized July 25, 1657, in Esens, East Friesland; died April 17, 1714, in Rudolstadt, Thuringia.

Just as the music of the 1750s is very different from what we think of as the “High Baroque,” so too is German music at the end of the 17th century. With Erlebach, we move to a time when various national musical styles are beginning to intermingle: we have a composer who spent his entire career in central Germany writing utterly French suites using the traditional French scoring of five parts, including three viola parts as the inner voices. Erlebach’s preface to his collection of overtures even remarks that “since the style of these French pieces is so well-known, there is no need to explain how to play them.”

Phillip Heinrich Erlebach spent more than 30 years as the Kapellmeister to the Thuringian court of Count Albert Anton von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, one of the many small princedoms that made up the patchwork of 17th-century Germany. Here Erlebach composed a huge variety of operas, instrumental works, and sacred pieces. Those that survive attest to a very high level of imagination and craftsmanship. Alas, a catastrophic fire at the Rudolstadt court in 1735 meant that many of his larger works have vanished. Of his operas, we know only the arias that he published in two large collections. From his more than 120 instrumental works, only six trio sonatas, a march, and six overtures survive. Tonight’s overture is taken from his 1693 publication of Six Overtures Accompanied by the Appropriate Airs in the French Style.

The Baroque orchestral overture is a bit of a misnomer: it is really a suite, introduced by a large-scale French overture, and followed by a series of dances. (Bach’s orchestral suites are perhaps the best-known example of these today.) Erlebach’s Overture in F Major begins joyously with the characteristic sharply dotted rhythm that was enshrined by Lully as the pattern for French overtures. Its faster section makes only a gesture toward fugal writing before settling into a festive jig-like movement; it is closed with another Lentement, full of energetic rushing tirades from the violins.

The Entrée that follows is reminiscent of many dramatic moments from Hell scenes in Lully’s operas, full of fiery 16th-note motion. A triple-time Air is in the form of a rondeau, as is the trio that follows; the rondeau is then repeated. Erlebach produces a very elegant Courante next, with that dance’s trademark vacillation between two units of three and three units of two, followed by a brisk Bourée. The Marche is another dance in the form of a rondeau, with a returning theme, while the Rondeau itself is really a sarabande in disguise. The whole suite is closed with an epic Chaconne, whose impressive dimensions make one wonder whether this work might not have served as the closing celebration for one of Erlebach’s lost operas.


JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra in D Minor, BWV 1052
Born March 21, 1685, in Eisenach, Germany; died July 28, 1750, in Leipzig, Germany.

J. S. Bach’s musical career in Leipzig is mostly associated today with his attempts to establish “well-regulated church music” at his various churches with a remarkable series of church cantatas. Around 1730, six years into his Leipzig tenure, Bach seems to have wanted a change; in one unusually personal letter to a friend, he reveals that “the [church] authorities are odd and little interested in music, so that I must live among continual vexation, envy, and persecution.” It is not perhaps surprising that around this time he began to be involved in a very different kind of civic music-making. In March 1729, Bach became director of one of the two Leipzig concert organizations, the Collegium Musicum that met at Zimmermann’s coffee-house. A contemporary account explains that “the participants in these musical concerts are chiefly students here, and there are always good musicians among them, so that sometimes they become famous virtuosos.” Visiting performers from Dresden or Berlin were always welcome; closer to home, these concerts served as an opportunity for Bach’s own sons to show off their talents on the keyboard.

Bach directed this Collegium from 1729 to 1737, and then again from 1739 to 1741. Some time in the two-year hiatus between these two periods, he prepared a manuscript of seven solo harpsichord concertos, the only collection of concertos that survive from his Leipzig era. Many of these concertos are ingenious adaptations of earlier works; the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto, for example, makes a surprising reappearance as a harpsichord concerto with obbligato recorders. The first concerto in the collection, the magisterial Concerto in D Minor, has no surviving model, but scholars have wondered whether it might well have originally been a violin concerto, given the amount of figuration that would fit well around the open strings of the violin. Bach also used the same material (in slightly different ways) as sinfonias for two cantatas from around 1728.

BWV 1052 opens with an arresting theme, played in stark unison by the orchestra. Bach picked up this device from Italian concerto-writers (note, for example, the unison opening of the Marcello oboe concerto) but transforms it into something much richer. After the explosive entrance of the harpsichord soloist, the orchestra begins to introduce fragments of this theme as the main accompaniment figure throughout the movement. The solo part is full of brilliant passagework throughout, including a sweeping cadenza halfway through and a virtuosic final episode over a much-extended D pedal point. The slow movement, in the subdominant key of G minor, also opens with a severe theme in unison, but then softens into a rhapsodic solo from the harpsichord, with the theme continually recollected in the bass line of the orchestra. The concerto ends with another high-energy Vivaldian movement, this one full of witty exchanges between soloist and orchestra.

Violinist Robert Mealy frequently contributes program notes to Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall in Boston, and other musical organizations.

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin
Established in 1982 as East Germany’s answer to the then growing trend of historical performance practice in Baroque and early Classical music, the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin today enjoys the recognition of being one of Europe’s leading chamber orchestras specializing in this field. Next to its active role in Berlin’s cultural scene, the orchestra appears regularly in Europe’s major concert houses and has also toured Asia, the Middle East, and North and South America.

Recording exclusively for Harmonia Mundi, the Akademie has received numerous international awards for its work, including the British Grammophone Award, the French Diapasion d’Or, the Cannes Festival Award, the Dutch Edison Award, and the Telemann Prize, as well as a Grammy Award nomination in the US. In May 2005 the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin made its debut in the US, performing to sold-out audiences in Chicago, Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC.

Back at home, the orchestra has a regular concert series at the Berlin Konzerthaus as well as in the newly opened Radialsystem V, the “new space for the arts in Berlin.” Here, the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin frequently works together with the modern dance group Sasha Waltz & Guests, a partnership formed after the huge success of the choreographed version of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Praised as “the acquisition of rich, new artistic terrain,” the opera marked a new direction for the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, breaking the mold to extend the ensemble beyond traditional forms of performance. In its newest choreographed production of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the members of the Akademie, together with a dancer from Sasha Waltz & Guests, play dual roles as both musicians and actors in a performance that the Cologne press described as “magical, and musically first-class.” With this, the orchestra has taken charge of the 21st century, once again displaying its musical sovereignty on stage.