Four Centuries of Great Music May 21, 2023 More Recently Released Classical Music

Today on Four Centuries of Great Music we are continuing with new classical music releases.  

First tonight is a recent recording of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major Op 61.

Beethoven and Franz Clement met in 1794, when the composer added his signature to the thirteen-year-old violin prodigy’s 415-page book of souvenirs “dedicated to the eternal remembrance of his travels.” Clement had already covered many a mile of Europe’s highways in the company of his father. By the time he introduced Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, a work he asked the composer to write for him, Clement was widely regarded as one of Europe’s outstanding violinists.

Clement was a formidable musician with an extraordinary memory. This stood him in good stead when he introduced Beethoven’s concerto in December 1806. In Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s Life of Beethoven we read that one contemporary noted “that Clement played the solo a vista, without previous rehearsal.” Even if it is a slight exaggeration to say that Clement sight-read his part—we do not know—these are frightening conditions for the first performance of an extraordinarily difficult and novel work.

Long afterwards, in 1842, Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny recalled that Clement had played the new work “with very great effect” and that there had been much applause.  The highly regarded Johann Nepomuk Möser in the Viennese Zeitung für Theater, Musik und Poesie offers a different opinion by telling us that “cognoscenti are unanimous in agreeing that, while there are beautiful things in the concerto, the sequence of events often seems incoherent and the endless repetition of some commonplace passages could easily prove fatiguing.”

Although there were occasional performances over the next three or four decades, the Beethoven Concerto did not catch on. The first violinist to make a success of it was the twelve-year-old Joseph Joachim, who played it in London in 1844 with Mendelssohn conducting. Joachim came pretty much to own the work, and it was mainly through his persuasive advocacy that it took its place as an indispensable repertory item.

The first movement marked Allegro ma non troppo, begins with five soft beats on the kettledrum. No music had ever begun like this. On the fifth of those gently resonant taps, woodwinds begin a tranquil and dolce melody. We could, for a moment, take those beats to be nothing more than a simple introduction to the melody, but the violins’ immediate imitation of the timpani notes on a strange pitch quickly disposes of that idea. The pattern of four knocks, sometimes with, sometimes without a resolving fifth note, is more than a colorful incident. This entire, immensely expansive movement will be saturated with it.

The dense knots of repeated short notes that accompany the next idea, a scale melody for clarinet and bassoon, are a variant of the drumbeat motif, and so is the rhythmic pattern of the first orchestral outburst. When the woodwinds sing the concerto’s most famous and loved theme, the violins, with discreet support from horns, trumpets, and timpani, make sure we do not forget the pervasive tapping. Indeed, the drum rhythm becomes an integral part of the melody itself.

One more grandly sweeping melody is heard before the solo violin entrance. Then, when the long orchestral passage has subsided, the violin rises from the receding orchestra. It is a beautiful touch of fantasy. So is the unexpectedly quiet resumption of the movement after the cadenza. Here Beethoven gives us something we have—perhaps unconsciously—been waiting for but that he has withheld until now, the lyric melody played by the solo violin all the way through and in its simplest form. Also, in this piece so given to high-altitude flight, we now hear it for the first time low, settled, and gentle.

The slow movement, marked Larghetto, is the concerto’s still point. The orchestral strings are muted and the motion of the harmonies is minimal. The movement is a set of variations on a theme that has the simplicity of a chorale. The fourth of these variations introduces a lyrical episode, touchingly ornamented and beautifully accompanied in utmost simplicity by clarinets and bassoons.

Now the music lsinks almost out of hearing. The orchestral strings declare that we have had enough of musing, the soloist responds, and we move attacca into the amiable finale, marked Rondo. Allegro. This is a time for relaxation—for the listener, not for the soloist. Here too there is room for a passage given to the soloist alone, and again Beethoven devises a striking re-entrance for the orchestra. He also invents a coda far longer and more eventful than the tone of most of the finale would lead us to expect. The close is brilliant, calculated to earn bravos from the audience.


EUGENE YSAYE: Berceuse Op. 20

MARÍA DUEÑAS violin    WIENER SYMPHONIKER, MANFRED HONECK conductor
BEETHOVEN AND BEYOND
DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON

Lets start this second hour of todays Four Centuries of Great Music featuring new releases with

Felix Mendelssohn: Cello Sonata No.1 in B flat Major, Op.45

In 3 Movements:

I. Allegro vivace
II. Andante
III. Allegro assai


Florence Price: Violin Concerto No. 2

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor:  Romance in G major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 39