ERIC HARRISON, HOST:
Good afternoon and thanks for tuning in to Little Rock Public Radio and Classical KLRE-FM, 90.5. I'm Eric Harrison, I write about arts and culture at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and I’ll be your host for the next two hours.
You're listening to ‘Major and Minor Masterpieces,’ where we will focus each week on a broad range of classical music, from chamber music to choral works to full symphonies and maybe even a touch or two of opera.
This week we’ll focus on some Baroque era violin concertos by Antonio Vivaldi — The Four Seasons, in fact — and J.S. Bach, with a bit of a 20th century surprise in between.
Vivaldi (born the eldest child of a musician in 1678, trained for the priesthood and was ordained in 1703. His distinctive reddish hair earned him the nickname “Il Prete Rosso” (“The Red Priest”); 1703 was also the year he became violin master at the Ospedale della Pietà, a convent, orphanage and music school for female foundlings in Venice, which had a noteworthy choir and orchestra that absorbed much of Vivaldi’s musical output for much of his life.
Vivaldi also composed operas and sacred music, but he is probably best known today for his concertos, for everything from violin to lute to mandolin to bassoon. He wrote about 500 concertos in all, although more modern critics have sneered that he wrote one concerto 500 times.
Among his roughly 230 violin concertos are the ones you will hear today. The four separate pieces now grouped together to create “The Four Seasons” were published in 1725 as part of a set of 12 concertos under the overall umbrella title of ““Il cimento dell' armonia e dell' inventione” (“The contest between harmony and invention”).
This is an early example of program music. Each concerto is accompanied by a sonnet, possibly written by Vivaldi himself, which gives specific descriptions of what he portrays in the music. For example, the Spring sonnet describes “the goatherd sleeping next to his trusty dog,” (in the music, a viola forcefully imitates the barking of the dog); the final movement of Summer delivers a violent thunderstorm, with the sky full of thunder and lightning while “hailstones hew off the heads of proud cornstalks.” And the last movement of Autumn depicts a hunt, complete with the strings imitating horn calls and even individual gun shots.
The Four Seasons fell out of the repertoire for more than a hundred years before being "rediscovered" in the first part of the 20th century.
Violinist Isabella d’Éloize Perron joins the Montreal-based Orchestre FILMharmonique and conductor Francis Choiniere in the four concertos — Spring in E major, Summer in g minor, Autumn in F major and Winter in f minor — comprising The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi.
(ANTONIO VIVALDI’S “THE FOUR SEASONS” )
You’ve heard violinist Isabella d’Éloize Perron and the Orchestre FILMharmonique with conductor Francis Choiniere in The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi on Major and Minor Masterpieces here on Little Rock Public Radio and classical KLRE-FM, 90.5. I’m your host, Eric Harrison, of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons were a considerable influence on composers that came after him and also even on modern rock bands. Weezer for example put together a series of four EPs called “Seasons” with these concertos as the inspiration. And twentieth century Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla, whose roots were in the world of the tango, took these concertos to a new level . Like that dance form, he was born in Buenos Aires, though he moved with his parents to New York’s Little Italy when he was 4. Returning to Buenos Aires as a teenager, he picked up the bandoneon, a type of accordion (with buttons instead of keys), playing in tango orchestras, and became a composer, focusing on — naturally — the tango.
His "Cuatros Estaciones Porteños” (“The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires”), composed in 1969, quote from Vivaldi’s work, but the program — and the musical style — is Piazzolla’s own tribute to his hometown. It’s been adapted for all sorts of instrumental combinations over the years, this version is Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov’s 1996-98 arrangement for solo violin and orchestra.
Here again are violinist Isabella d’Éloize Perron, conductor Francis Choiniere and the Orchestre FILMharmonique playing “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires” by Astor Piazzola, arranged for violin and orchestra by Leonid Desyatnikov.
(ASTOR PIAZZOLA’S “THE FOUR SEASONS OF BUENOS AIRES” )
Violinist Isabella d’Éloize Perron and the Orchestre FILMharmonique, conducted by Francis Choiniere, have performed “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires” by Astor Piazzola, arranged for violin and orchestra by Leonid Desyatnikov, here on Major and Minor Masterpieces on Little Rock Public Radio and classical KLRE-FM, 90.5.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
—PROGRAM BREAK—
[EDUCATIONAL SEGMENT]
SARAH BUFORD, PRODUCER:
Hey listeners, welcome back to Major and Minor Masterpieces. I’m your producer, Sarah Buford, and it's time for our show’s little educational session, in which we break down some of the terminology we use when describing classical music and its history.
Eric, you referred to the music we are hearing today as coming from the Baroque era. What is the Baroque era? What does that mean?
ERIC HARRISON, HOST:
Well, Sarah, the genre we generally refer to as “classical” music is divided into eras, encompassing styles consistent with the time it was composed.
The usual subdivisions are the Renaissance, music composed somewhere between 1300 and 1600 A.D.; the Baroque period, which covers 1600 to 1750; the “Classical” period, from 1750 to about 1800 or so; the Romantic period, 1800 to around 1900 or 1910, depending on the composer; and the Modern era, anything composed after that.
SARAH: Is that where we include Taylor Swift’s era tour?
ERIC: Certainly! That’s an era all by itself!
Focusing on the Baroque era, the music has a more formal and ornate, sometimes highly ornamented, structure (the word baroque is also used to describe highly ornamented architecture) with intricate melodies, complex harmonies and the use of basso continuo, a continuous bass line with an improvised or written-out accompaniment.
The period saw the birth of several musical forms, including opera, oratorio and concertos and sonatas for single and multiple instruments. Some of the era’s most prominent composers include Vivaldi, George Frideric Handel, Georg Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach, whose work you will hear a little later in the program.
SARAH: And Eric, you mentioned the baroque era ended in 1750 which seems a little specific compared to the other eras of music. Is there a particular reason for that?
ERIC: Actually yes, Sarah. Because 1750 was the year Bach died.
SARAH: Thanks, Eric, now back to the music. You’re listening to Major and Minor Masterpieces on KLRE 90.5.
[END OF EDUCATIONAL SEGMENT]
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
ERIC: Johann Sebastian Bach was not quite as prolific a composer of concertos as Vivaldi, but he wrote a lot of them. Only two of his solo violin concertos have survived as they were originally written, and according to Martin Pearlman, music director of Boston Baroque, they exist only in copies made not by Bach but by others.
Bach, as with other Baroque composers, recycled a lot of his music — that enabled him to write a lot of things in a hurry according to the demands of his various gigs, including his church duties. So he frequently repurposed concertos for play on different instruments — for example, adapting several keyboard concertos for violin and vice versa, including the first of this set, which Bach transcribed for harpsichord into the key of g minor, which is now listed in Wolfgang Schmieder’s 1950 catalog of Bach’s works as BWV 1058.
These two violin concertos were likely written while Bach was situated between 1717 and 1723 in the eastern German town of Cöthen, not far from Leipzig, where he served as cantor at St Thomas's Church and where he lived out the last years of his life.
And while most of the time you will hear these violin concertos played by a soloist in front of a string orchestra, for these recordings, violinist Leonidas Kavakos experiments with using just one instrument on each part.
Let’s hear Kavakos and the Apollon Ensemble — Noe Inui and Alexandros Sakarellos, violins; Ilias Livieratos, viola; Timotheos Gavrillidis-Petrin, cello; and Michaelis Semsis, double bass, with Iason Marmaras at the harpsichord — play Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in a minor, BWV 1041, on a recent release on Sony Classical.
(JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH’S “VIOLIN CONCERTO” )
That was Bach’s Violin Concerto in a minor, BWV 1041, with violinist Leonidas Kavakos and the Apollon Ensemble on Major and Minor Masterpieces on Little Rock Public Radio and KLRE-FM, classical 90.5.
Like the first concerto, Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in e major, BWV 1042, was likely written in Cöthen between 1717 and 1723, and like the first concerto, Bach also transcribed it into a version for keyboard — this one the Harpsichord Concerto in D Major, BWV 1054.
Violinist Leonidas Kavakos again joins the Apollon Ensemble for this performance.
(JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH’S “VIOLIN CONCERTO” NO. 2)
That was violinist Leonidas Kavakos and the Apollon Ensemble performing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in e major, BWV 1042 here on Major and Minor Masterpieces on Little Rock Public Radio and Classical KLRE 90.5.
And now here’s an example of a concerto transcribed in the other direction — originally a concerto for harpsichord and strings in f minor, catalog number BWV 1056, which has been “reconstructed” into a violin concerto in g minor, BWV 1056R. Leonidas Kavakos joins the Apollon Ensemble for this performance.
(JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH’S “VIOLIN CONCERTO”)
That was Leonidas Kavakos and the Apollon Ensemble performing Bach’s Violin Concerto in g minor, BWV 1056R, on a recent Sony Classical recording.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
Thanks for tuning in this week to Major and Minor Masterpieces. I've been your host, Eric Harrison, of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Our producer is Sarah Buford of Little Rock Public Radio. And a big thank you to our friend Wojciech Chiselinski for our transition and credit music.
Tune in again next week for Major and Minor Masterpieces on Little Rock Public Radio and classical KLRE-FM, 90.5.