Page 253 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

Both Bach and Vivaldi use bariolage, or the alternation of notes on adjacent strings, one of which is usually “open”— that is, played without any fingers on it. A static repeating note (usually on an open string) is surrounded by notes above and below it which create the melody. The 18th-century French bowing technique used is called ondulé in French or ondeggiando in Italian. This same technique is used by Bach (and Busoni) in the Chaconne (which is also in D minor).
Another technique used is perfidia (a pattern of fast notes repeated for long periods of time). These frenzied undula- tions of the bow or of the fingers build up to out-of-the-body crescendos in both the Bach concerto and in the Chaconne.
We are thrilled to have so many wonderful string players
to support Anne-Marie McDermott in our resonant hall, similar in size and sound to many of the palaces where Bach performed. Bach often played his concertos in his living room with his two elder sons. C.P.E. Bach was during his lifetime more renowned than his father, and seems to have been wittier. W.F. Bach became the organist at the great church in Dresden.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)
arr. CARL CZERNY (1791–1857) Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466
As I wrote in Pianist Lost: Excesses and Excuses:
D minor . . . introduces the tense scale of D major to its two mysterious minor cousins, sloe-eyed nymphs out for trouble, and suddenly the high- collar, button-down formal dress of D is flirting with the disaster of D minor. Speaking like a graphic designer, the change is a visual one. On
the printed page, the sharps have simply been replaced with one lone mellow, melancholy flat, whose D minor despair is enough to cancel out those bouncing Bobbsey twins, the two sharps
of D major. Mozart and Rachmaninoff’s great concerti, Chopin’s final Prelude, Bach’s phantasmic Toccata and Fugue, all dig deep into the dank D minor well of death for their immense structure,
as if that lone flat demands darkness, desolation, and who among us dare fly in the face of such a depressing tradition. Happiness is simply not ton- ally possible in a minor key, and definitely not in D minor. The resonance of history cries out for blood.
Although the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor is not
the last (the popular No. 23 and the great C-minor No. 24 were also written in 1786), Mozart’s last four concertos were written almost all at once, and represent the height of the classical piano repertoire. From here there was nowhere for Mozart’s genius to go but into the greatest operas in musical history: Le nozze di Figaro was written the next year (1786), Così fan tutte in 1790, and The Magic Flute in 1791, the year Mozart died. After this, the rest is silence. The God of structure, the immortal trellis of perfect interconnections, died in that year with Mozart.
(Until the rise of the Romantic era changed entirely the way music was written: the rules were now meant to be broken. In 1792, the year after The Magic Flute, the 22-year-old Beethoven traveled to Vienna to study with Haydn. Know your enemy. Beethoven also wanted to study with Mozart, but it is not certain whether they ever met, and Mozart died before Beethoven could move to Vienna.)
In our time, we believe that the above “immortal trellis of perfect interconnections” is hidden under the surface of universes, and it is electromagnetic. This grid explains why atomic reactions (the quantum energy exchange) can travel across time instantaneously, vastly beyond the speed of light. But back to earthly immortality.
2018 Summer Season 253