Page 96 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

When Menuhin was planning to play Bartók’s First Sonata for Violin and Piano at Carnegie Hall, he played it first for Bartók, who said, “I didn’t think music could be played like that until long after the composer was dead.” A friendship sprang up, and Menuhin commissioned and premiered the solo violin sonata:
I knew he was in financial straits, that he was too proud to accept handouts, that he was the great est of living composers. Unwilling to waste a moment, I asked him on the afternoon of our first meeting if I might commission him to com- pose a work for me. It didn’t have to be anything large-scale, I urged; I was not hoping for a third concerto, just a work for violin alone.
Bartók gratefully accepted $500 for the work, which he finished in six weeks. Not hearing from Menuhin, he
sent the manuscript to Rudolf Kolisch, the founder of the Kolisch Quartet, which debuted works by the great Viennese composers of the day: Berg, Webern, Schoenberg, and Bartók (Arnold Schoenberg was married to Kolisch’s sister). When he taught at Darmstadt, Kolisch was friends with Eduard Steuermann and the Marxist musical theorist Theodor Adorno. My own teacher, Russell Sherman, was a student of Steuermann’s, and a friend of Gunther Schuller, who brought both Kolisch and Sherman to the New England Conservatory of Music.
Kolisch felt the piece was playable. Menuhin felt he could play it only if he changed the notes in the moto perpetuo Presto to half-tone (chromatic) notes rather than quarter tones, which Menuhin never felt competent to play.
Bartók died shortly after Menuhin debuted the Sonata.
This is a monumental and intimidating piece. It uses every trick in the book, such as enormous leaps; a melody played with the bow while the left hand plucks the accompa- niment; and double, triple, and quadruple stops (that is, chords of two, three, and four notes played on
several strings at once).
Very much like the Glass pieces, this work was based on Bach. The first movement translates the last movement of Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor into a Hungarian mode. The fugue in the second movement follows Bach’s structure in the Sonata No. 1 for Solo Violin.
PHILIP GLASS
“I Enjoyed the Laughter” from Book of Longing
Glass’s entire song cycle is about 90 minutes long, and combines Leonard Cohen’s recorded voice reading his poetry from The Book of Longing, four artists singing the poems to Glass’s music, and eight instrumentalists with featured solos. Cohen recorded all the poems in the book and left it to Glass to choose which ones should be included in the song cycle.
“I Enjoyed the Laughter” is for solo violin. Composed of triplets and rapidly bowed strokes, it is one of Glass’s many paeans to J.S. Bach, with simple accompaniments replacing melodies, as Bach’s ostinatos were as significant as his actual cadences. Often the melody lies in the accompaniment. Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata begins with exactly these triplets, which are an accompaniment treated as the melody.
I enjoyed the laughter old poets as you welcomed me but I won’t be staying here for long
You won’t be either.
HEINRICH IGNAZ FRANZ VON BIBER (1644–1704)
Passacaglia for Solo Violin in G Minor
This monumental piece is the last “Mystery” or “Rosary” Sonata (No. 16) by Biber, one of the earliest known pieces for solo violin. Each sonata portrays a different mystery of
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