VIOLIN CONCERTOS TCHAIKOVSKY STRAVINSKY BERG. Arthur Grumiaux Bogo Leskovic Ernest Bour Igor Markevitch

Transcription

1 Eloq uence VIOLIN CONCERTOS TCHAIKOVSKY STRAVINSKY BERG Arthur Grumiaux Bogo Leskovic Ernest Bour Igor Markevitch

2 PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY ( ) Violin Concerto in D major, Op I Allegro moderato II Canzonetta: Andante III Allegro vivacissimo 9 35 Wiener Symphoniker Bogo Leskovic IGOR STRAVINSKY ( ) Violin Concerto in D major 4 I Toccata II Aria I III Aria II IV Capriccio 5 47 Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam Ernest Bour ALBAN BERG ( ) Violin Concerto To the Memory of an Angel 8 I Andante Allegro II Allegro Adagio Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam Igor Markevitch Total timing: 78 55

3 Tchaikovsky s sole violin concerto was composed during a particularly unsettled period in his life. His brief and ill-advised marriage to Antonina Milyukova had ended in disaster, and partly as therapy, partly to avoid adding to the rumours concerning their separation, Tchaikovsky s brother Anatoly took him out of the country. Eventually the brothers reached the Swiss town of Clarens, on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was here that Tchaikovsky soon was joined by Iosif Kotek, who recently had studied composition with Tchaikovsky at the Moscow Conservatory, and who currently had been honing his skills as a violinist in Berlin with Joseph Joachim. Early in March 1878, Kotek arrived in Clarens with a stack of musical scores Lalo s Symphonie espagnole among them and as the two men, one in his young twenties and the other nearing forty, played through them together, Tchaikovsky was moved to put aside the piano sonata that he was composing and write a violin concerto instead. Taking advantage of Kotek s presence, he made rapid progress indeed, the second movement was sketched in a single day and within a month, the concerto was complete. Astonishingly, given the work s popularity, more than three years elapsed before the concerto received its premiere. Tchaikovsky dedicated the score to another violinist, Leopold Auer, but Auer dragged his feet, supposedly because he had reservations about the work s quality particularly concerning the solo writing, which he deemed unsuited to the character of the violin. Tchaikovsky then presented the score to Adolph Brodsky, who played it for the first time in Vienna in 1881 and received the composer s revised dedication. On this occasion, the very conservative music critic Eduard Hanslick was present, and his comment that this was music that stinks to the ear has gone down in the annals of music journalism as one of the least perceptive statements ever made by a critic. In time, Auer did take up the concerto, but only after he had rewritten parts of it and excised others. Auer had many famous pupils, including Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein. One somewhat less-known pupil was Polish-born violinist Samuel Dushkin. Late in 1930, Willy Strecker of Schott Music, Stravinsky s publisher, introduced Stravinsky to the violinist, and the two of them quickly hit it off. A day later, Stravinsky was sketching a violin concerto for Dushkin although contract negotiations were not far behind! As the work took shape, the two musicians remained in frequent contact, as Stravinsky was not a string player, and never had written a solo work for a string instrument before. At an early stage, Stravinsky asked Dushkin if it was possible to play a particular three-note chord on the violin. Off the top of his head, Dushkin said no, but upon returning home, he found that it was indeed possible, and immediately notified Stravinsky. That chord, in various forms, begins each of the concerto s four movements. Stravinsky called it a passport to his concerto. As work on the concerto continued throughout the first part of 1931, Dushkin continued to offer his suggestions about what would be effective. Stravinsky was a perfectionist, and there was no such thing as a small change. Dushkin wrote, He behaved like an architect who if asked to change a room on the third floor had to go down to the foundations to keep the proportions of his whole structure. The composer was making renovations in his personal life as well. He was in almost constant motion, travelling around Italy and France with his mistress Vera de Bosset, whom he eventually married in Stravinsky finally settled down in a chateau in the little French town of Voreppe. By September, the concerto was finished, among half unpacked trunks and boxes and the coming and going of removalists, upholsterers, electricians and plumbers. (Quotes above and below are taken from Stephen Walsh s 1999 biography of the composer.) The unusual movement titles were not added until the concerto was completed. Stravinsky s concerto was premiered in Berlin that October with Dushkin as soloist, of course, and with Stravinsky conducting. The concerto was generally admired and compared with works in the same genre by Bach, although one critic, anticipating international conflicts to come, perhaps, called it a desecration of Bach and muttered about the composer and the savagery of half-asiatic instincts. Stravinsky himself admitted that he was very fond of Bach s Concerto for Two Violins, and that its influence could be heard in his own concerto s last movement. Stravinsky s successful collaboration with Dushkin led to the composition of several important works for violin and piano. And outside of the concert hall, the concerto took on a second life: choreographer George Balanchine created not one but two ballets once in 1941 and again in 1972 using the Violin Concerto s music. Early in 1935, violinist Louis Krasner approached Alban Berg with a commission for a violin concerto. Berg had been hard at work on Lulu, his second opera, but was won over by Krasner s appreciation for twelve-tone music Berg s in particular and also by the prospect of preparing a major new work that would be

4 premiered in front of an American audience. Berg had not initially considered giving the concerto any extra-musical associations. However, in April, he was saddened to learn of the death, from polio, of Manon Gropius, the eighteen-yearold daughter of architect Walter Gropius and Alma Schindler better known (from her previous marriage) as Alma Mahler. In memory of Manon, the concerto was subsequently dedicated not just to Krasner but also to the Memory of an Angel. Manon s death spurred Berg on, and by summer s end, the concerto was complete. It appears that Berg had not planned to incorporate the melody of a Bach chorale into the concerto s second movement until the work was close to completion. In June, he requested the scores of several of Bach s sacred works, and soon noticed that the opening of Bach s chorale Es ist genug ( It is enough : a reflection on the spiritual liberation afforded by death) corresponded to the first four notes of the tonerow upon which he had based the concerto from the start. (To give credit where credit is due, the chorale melody did not originate with Bach, but with composer Johann Rudolf Ahle, who predated Bach by two generations.) Berg s biographer Karen Monson reflects on the role that Manon Gropius s death at such a young age played in the gestation of the Violin Concerto. That tragic event, she writes, gave the work its emotional wealth, beginning with Berg s desire that the first half of the piece picture the young girl in life, and that the second half represent her [Straussian!] death and transfiguration. Unfortunately, time was about to run out for Berg himself. Almost immediately after finishing the concerto, and as he was returning to the still-unfinished Lulu, he was pained by an abscess on his lower back, possibly resulting from an insect sting. Perhaps because of his precarious financial situation at that time, he treated himself with aspirin and home remedies. The abscess did not heal, however, and he developed others on the bottoms of his feet. By the end of the year, Berg had developed what appears to have been a full-blown staphylococcal infection of the blood. He finally sought out medical treatment, but it was too late, and his heart failed around midnight before Christmas Eve Alma Schindler made the death mask. In other words, the Violin Concerto, as Berg s last completed composition, became as much of a requiem for himself as it had been for Manon Gropius. Krasner premiered the concerto the following March; Hermann Scherchen was the conductor. Raymond Tuttle Producers / Engineers: Us van der Meulen (Tchaikovsky); Volker Strauss, Co Witteveen (Stravinsky, Berg) Recording locations: Vienna, Austria, November 1956 (Tchaikovsky); Concertgebouw: Grote Zaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, December 1966 (Stravinsky), January 1967 (Berg) Eloquence series manager: Cyrus Meher-Homji Cover photograph: Arthur Grumiaux (photo: Decca) Art direction: Chilu Tong Booklet editor: Bruce Raggatt

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