Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21
Born and educated in Bonn, Germany, Beethoven settled in Vienna in 1792, hoping to take the city by storm; but it took him several years to establish his credentials in this musically sophisticated city whose idol was the aging Franz Josef Haydn. Beethoven studied with Haydn, soaking up many of his compositional techniques and innovations. By the time the now not-so-young composer premiered the First Symphony on April 2, 1800 at the Burgtheater, his reputation was secure. He was well known as a pianist and in great demand as a soloist; his chamber and piano compositions had begun to attract serious attention and he had acquired numerous sponsors from among the aristocracy and the well-to-do. He dedicated the First Symphony to one of them, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, a supporter and friend of Mozart, who had established a large library of music and promoted the music of Bach and Handel to Viennese audiences. The period of the First Symphony is also that of the Op. 18 String Quartets, and both represented important milestones for Beethoven as he sought to assimilate and surpass the achievements of Haydn in these two genres.
The concert was a benefit for Beethoven where he was featured both as performer and composer. The hefty program – by no means unusual for the time – included a Mozart symphony, two movements from Haydn’s Creation, an improvisation on the piano by Beethoven, the Septet, Op. 20, Symphony No. 1, and probably the First Piano Concerto in C major.
Yet, despite Beethoven’s growing reputation, the critics' initial reception of the symphony was lukewarm at best, "...a caricature of Haydn pushed to absurdity." That absurdity was already apparent in the opening chords that trick the listener as to the true key of the piece, which is definitively established in the Allegro. The third movement, although labeled "Minuet," dashes forward almost at a gallop with oddly placed forte outbursts, the first of Beethoven's symphonic innovations, the scherzo. If there’s a minuet at all in this work, it’s the lilting second movement, unusual also in that it begins as a fugue, in the strings, adding the other sections of the orchestra with each statement of the fugue subject.
The humor of the stammering scale, plus another bit of tonal ambiguity in the introduction to the final movement, also went unappreciated. The Finale begins with a slow opening of a repeated partial scale in the violins, reaching one note higher with each repetition, until it suddenly bursts forth into a dance-like theme. It is an opening worthy of Haydn at his most humorous. Like the Finale, the Minuet theme is also based on a rising scale motive.
In a short time, however, the Symphony became a great favorite, "...a glorious production, showing extraordinary wealth of lovely ideas..." A measure of its popularity was the appearance only two years later of an anonymous pirated arrangement for piano quintet that elicited a nasty letter from Beethoven -– who always kept wary surveillance of his finances – to the Wiener Zeitung of October 30, 1802, disclaiming authorship and complaining of publishers' actions and the insecurity of a composer's rights. Copyright laws were still in the future, but one of Beethoven’s younger contemporaries, the enterprising composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, made significant contributions to copyrights for composers.
Jorge Sarmientos
b. 1931
Jorge Sarmientos
Concertino for Marimba and Orchestra, Op. 21
Composer and conductor Jorge Sarmientos was born in the village of San Antonio, in the Suchitepéquez district of southern Guatemala, close to the Pacific coast. He studied at the National Conservatory of Music in Guatemala, and later in Paris and Buenos Aires. Sarmientos also studied with Mexican composer Alberto Ginastera, through whose influence he expanded his style to include such twentieth-century techniques and serialism and even aleatoric music.
The Concertino for Marimba is an early work, composed immediately after Sarmientos returned to Guatemala from a year at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. In 1957 marimbist and ethnomusicologist Vida Chenoweth met Sarmientos while she was a Fulbright scholar studying indigenous marimbas in Guatemala. He immediately composed the Concertino for her during November and December of that year. It was premiered in early 1960, with Sarmientos playing timpani, and Chenoweth as soloist.
The style of the Concertino reflects a combination of Western classical form, indigenous Guatemalan melodies and a touch of the harmonies of French Impressionism. Listeners who expect all music from Central America to incorporate one or more of the rhythms associated with popular music are in for a surprise. The Concertino more readily reflects the indigenous musical culture of the composer’s native village, especially the combination of flute and marimba. The “four-square” tonal melodies and rhythms, however, sometimes sound “westernized.”
The first movement, while in classical sonata form, reflects the music from the Chapín area, in the Eastern Guatemala highlands. The Concertino begins with the solo clarinet playing the main theme in its purest form. The marimba entrance, however, has a mixed flavor: a ‘50s pop lead-in to a stereotypical pounding “Indian” rhythm along with chromatic embellishments to the theme. The violins and solo oboe introduces the second theme. After Sarmientos interjects a short passage of syncopated Latin rhythm, he develops the principal theme in the marimba against a counter-melody in the flute.
The second movement, subtitled Canzone India, is a dialogue between the solo flute and marimba accompanied by a rocking ostinato of muted strings similar to the accompaniment of Eric Satie’s famous Gymnopedie No. 2 When the two instruments play in unison, the marimba matches the long, legato lines of the flute’s melody. The pair continues their discussion in a faster middle section with another indigenous melody.
The third movement is a classical rondo, but refrains exist in musical diverse cultures worldwide. The movement is based on music of the Suchitepéquez district. The rondo theme is a dialogue between marimba and orchestra with a melody sounding a little like Prokofiev, but the composer also explores more syncopated dance rhythms in the episodes.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op.55, “Eroica”
Few musical manuscripts have elicited so much musicological discussion as has Beethoven’s personal conductor’s copy of his Symphony No. 3. The story of its original dedication to Napoleon, the chief military defender of the French Revolution with its ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, and the subsequent violent erasure of the dedication when Napoleon crowned himself emperor, has been told time and again.
Reality, however, is often more complex than history books would have it. Beethoven was clearly disgusted at Napoleon’s coronation, exclaiming: “Is he then, too, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man...become a tyrant.” But his disappointment with the Emperor was tinged in no small part by self-interest. Hoping at the time to establish a foothold in the musical life of Paris, the composer had planned to travel there with his mentor, Prince Lobkowitz, using the premiere of the Symphony as a passport to the French capital and lucrative commissions. Napoleon’s coup, and the resultant political upheavals, disrupted these plans and are the probable reason why the Symphony, finished at the beginning of 1804, did not receive its premiere in Vienna until a year later.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Symphony is how Beethoven – who had surprising difficulty coming up with melodies – was able to make so much out of so little. The opening theme is nothing more than an arpeggiated e-flat major chord; the Scherzo theme is a descending E-flat major scale; and the theme for the Finale is a brief simple bass pattern that he had used three times previously – in the Piano Variations, Op. 35, in one of his Contredanses (WoO. 14, no. 7) and in the grand finale of his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43 – repeated beneath a set of spectacular variations. Only the second movement, the Funeral March, begins with a fully formed theme.
It is hard for us today to appreciate the revolutionary impact of this symphony on Vienna’s audience. The constantly modulating keys, rhythmic shifts, large dynamic leaps and unfamiliar harmonies baffled Beethoven’s friendly but conservative public, and the reception was anything but enthusiastic. It took a few years for the Viennese to warm to this innovative work.
Although it would take many pages of in-depth musical analysis to explain what was so new, different and disturbing about this Symphony, here are some highlights that we now take for granted after over 200 years of development and change in Western music.
To begin with, there is the sheer length and scope of the work. The first movement alone is longer than anything that had been written up to this time. And then there's Beethoven's treatment of themes. The opening of the Symphony contains as its first theme that simple E-flat major arpeggio, but appended to it one note that propels it into greatness. What follows is a complex and, at times, astonishing key structure, whose wanderings and surprises blur the distinctions between the parts of sonata form. The movement contains no less than seven themes (some people count more). Here are the ones that Beethoven later develops. & The development section, however, introduces an entirely new theme in the minor mode that never appeared in the exposition. Even though the theme is short, the change in mode is particularly stunning in view of the overwhelming number of major themes in the exposition. The movement's most significant surprise, however, is the appearance of the three-minute coda in a distant key.
The Andante, entitled “Funeral March for a Hero,” counters even the most poignant Mozartian second movement with a totally novel level of emotional intensity and grandeur. Its middle section transcends tragedy to arrive at the triumph that gives the Symphony its moniker. The Scherzo – an earlier Beethoven invention to replace the sometimes stately, sometimes thumping minuets of Mozart and Haydn – consists of a theme that is nothing more than a slightly decorated descending major scale. Its trio scored for a sections solo for the horns.
Instead of creating a sprightly and upbeat rondo in the style of his predecessors, Beethoven gives a weight and importance to the Finale that would inspire both his own future symphonic writing (culminating in the Ninth Symphony) and that of his successors. The theme is nothing more then a skeleton, actually more a ground bass than a true melody. The variations that constitute this lengthy movement are also new in structure. Whereas most sets of variations move steadily from the simple to the complex, Beethoven was less interested in bravura and ornamentation than in giving each variation its own mood, for which he also employed an innovative use of orchestral solos and ensembles. The first few variations are conventional, reinforcing the theme. Then Beethoven relegates the theme to the bass, where it really belongs, the oboe melody over it sounding more like a true theme. In fact, this was the theme Beethoven reused in The Creatures of Prometheus, mentioned above. While variation forms had tended to be somewhat static, adhering throughout to a single key and the same length as the theme, Beethoven includes variations in different keys and lengths, for example, this little fugue. He even breaks away from the variations altogether in the middle of the movement. Most important, however, is that the climax of the movement is not created by means of faster and faster demonstrations of technical virtuosity, but rather through increasing emotional intensity and grandeur.
ECKHARD KOPETZKI
Concerto for Marimba and String Orchestra
PROGRAM
ENRIQUE DIEMECKE, Music Director and Conductor
SAÚL MEDINA, marimba
Eckhard KOPETZKI
Concerto for Marimba and String Orchestra
I. Allegro vivace
II. Lento
III. Scherzo
IV. Adagio, Allegro moderato, Andante, Allegro moderato
SaÚl Medina, marimba
Concerto for Marimba and String Orchestra
ECKHARD KOPETZKI
Born December 9, 1956, Hanover
Now living in Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Bavaria
Eckhard Kopetzki studied at the University of Osnabrück and the Hochschule für Musik in Würzburg to prepare himself as a teacher of music and physics. Since 1985 he has been teaching percussion instruments, theory and harmony at the Berufsfachschule für Musik in Sulzbach-Rosenberg, in Bavaria. He has composed music for instructional use as well as concert works, and his name has become especially linked with the marimba in a long and still-expanding list of compositions for the instrument, among which we find such titles as Marimba Joy (ten light solos), Easy Rock (three light pieces for marimba and drum set); Marimba Splash (a Konzertstück for two marimbas and percussion quartet); Double Groove, for marimba and vibraphone; Night of Moon Dances (for two marimbas, saxophone and orchestra); Double Concerto for saxophone, marimba and orchestra; Summer Waltz (for marimba solo and orchestra); Marimba in the Wind (for marimba and wind orchestra), and the solo piece Canned Heat. He has won prizes for his compositions, several of which have been recorded, and he frequently serves as a juror at international competitions.
The concerto performed in the present concert was composed in 1998 for the Polish virtuosa of the marimba, Katarzyna Myćka—not exactly a formal commission, the composer explains, but more in the nature of a request from a good friend whom he admires. The score bears a dedication to Ms. Myćka, who gave the premiere in Stuttgart on June 5, 1999, with the Camerata Pforzheim, and subsequently recorded the work with the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra under Dominique Fanal, on the Audite label.
Mr. Kopetzki describes the concerto as being “in a late Romantic/Impressionistic style, because Katarzyna Myćka likes this kind of music very much.” The work is further described by the composer as a concerto in the strictest sense which “places the main emphasis on the manifold possibilities of the marimba.” As the list of titles given above illustrates, the marimba is an instrument with which this composer is intimately associated and which he understands completely. It is not treated as a “novelty” in the concerto, but is given a role as serious as it is demanding, in solo passages and in dialogue with the string orchestra.
There are four substantial movements, adding up to about 25 minutes of music: an opening Allegro vivace, a slow movement (Lento), a Scherzo, and a finale whose slow introduction leads to an Allegro moderato which is interrupted by a brief Andante. There is a cadenza in the first movement and another cadenza, accompanied by the orchestra, at the end of the finale.
