Page 226 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

Prelude No. 12, “Minstrels,” and, of course, in Prelude No. 6, “Général Lavine, eccentric.” But Debussy had used the rhythm here in 1889, also disproving claims that Debussy was copying anyone. Minstrel songs and pantomimes were popular in Paris at the time. Picasso was painting masks from Papua New Guinea, Gauguin was painting Tahiti, France was colonizing Africa, and music derived from foreign places “gave safe access to native cultures that
were seen as primitive, forbidden, and therefore infinitely enticing,” according to Catherine Kautsky in Debussy’s Paris: Piano Portraits of the Belle Époque.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913–1976) Sonata for Cello and Piano in C Major, Op. 65
This was the first of five works Britten wrote for the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, with whom David- Finckel studied. The sonata was tailored to Rostropovich’s particular strengths.
The first performance of this piece played by the composer and Rostropovich took place at Britten’s festival at Snape Maltings, whose roof angles and floating acoustics are incidentally incorporated into the Olivier Music Barn. The Olivier barn is smaller and thus more powerful, but you can hear a similar lucidity to the music at its premiere.
Like Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Eliot: “In my end is my beginning”: the first few notes present the theme on which the entire sonata is based. This is a conversation between friends: a pianist and a cellist, Britten and Slava. It is also a test of perseverance, maybe hinting at the longevity of an ideal friendship which, although neither artist knew
it, was to last for the rest of their lives and result in many collaborations.
The second movement references the Balinese gamelan tra- dition found in Debussy and Satie, later to become prevalent in the music of Philip Glass, John Cage, Charles Ives, Olivier Messiaen, Francis Poulenc, Edgard Varèse, Steve Reich, Lou Harrison, and Pierre Boulez. Gamelan orchestras use the untempered scale which comes from the natural harmonies found in bells and gongs, unlike the Western “well-tem- pered” scale which attempts to organize the discordances and microtones of natural metallic or wooden frequencies into a more pleasing, if artificial, system.
The Scherzo-Pizzicato is entirely plucked, rather than bowed.
The fifth movement is based on the notes DSCH (for Dmitri Shostakovich), which in musical notation becomes D, E-flat, C, and B. Britten had met Rostropovich for the first time when Slava played Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Slava’s fame allowed him to travel away from Stalin’s Russia,
and also to champion Shostakovich, which was one of
the alliances that saved the composer’s life. Mozart used this anagram in his String Quartet No. 19, Britten used it several other times, and Shostakovich himself used it in at least ten pieces.
The finale uses saltando, or bouncing bowing. The resultant momentum can seem like the bow is magically playing itself. This is a virtuoso romp, ending in the final C of redemption and reincarnation, as C is the key of childhood, the first key we learn.
226 The Music at Tippet Rise