Sarasate, "Zapateado", for violin and piano

 

Pablo Martín Melton Sarasate y Navascuez, better known as Pablo de Sarasate, made his public debut at the age of eight. At twelve, he entered the Paris Conservatory thanks to a scholarship granted by Queen Isabella II of Spain after dazzling the court in Madrid with his talent. Five years later, he won first prize for violin at the Conservatory.

The violinist

Born in 1844 in Pamplona, the city famous for the running of the bulls in the festival of San Fermin, nowadays in the doldrums due to the legitimate "animalistic" claims, he will start from Paris an extensive and endless tour that will last almost three decades, touring Europe and the United States, reaping successes and recognition of the authors in vogue who will dedicate their works to him and will gladly agree to request works for his instrument, the violin.

Pablo de Sarasate (1844 - 1908)

The composer

Pablo de Sarasate is the author of around 50 pieces for violin and piano (or violin and orchestra), which formed part of his sought-after repertoire. Among the most popular are Aires Gitanos (Zigeunerweisen), from 1878, and the Fantasia on Carmen, Bizet's opera, composed in 1883 when the opera had already gained public favor after its failed premiere in 1875, which left the unfortunate Georges convinced he had composed a failed work, three months before his death.

Sarasate spent the last years of his life in a villa in Biarritz, France. But he did not forget his origins. Every year, until his death, he traveled to Pamplona, to celebrate with his violin the festivities of San Fermin.

The Spanish Dances

Between 1878 and 1882, Sarasate composed four volumes of short Spanish dances, for violin and piano or violin and orchestra (Opus 21 to 23, and 26), which quickly won the favor of the public, generating not inconsiderable economic income for the author and others involved in his performance.

The most famous of these is Zapateado, which is No. 2 of Opus 23. The dance not only derives its rhythm and gestures directly from Spanish popular music but also represents a sort of catalog of "violinistic" effects, very popular among the virtuosos of the instrument at the end of the 19th century.

The rendition is by Japanese-American artist Midori Goto. At the piano, Robert McDonald.

Mahler in Maiernigg, 5th Symphony

An Adagietto for Alma

When Gustav Mahler was writing his Fifth Symphony, during the summers of 1901 and 1902, he was escaping from Vienna which for him had become a source of unbearable stress. On 1⁰ April 1901, he was exonerated from his post at the Vienna Philharmonic after a three-year period in which the anti-Semitic sentiment of the Viennese musical environment was exacerbated. Mahler had no choice but to cling to the other important position he held, as conductor of the Vienna Court Opera, which was also stressful, perhaps a little less so but still caused him a permanent uneasiness, affecting his health, seriously.

Meeting Alma
But in November 1901, while working on the Symphony, an important event occurred that changed his life forever. At a dinner party, he met the most beautiful woman in Vienna, the budding composer Alma Schindler, who had just ended a relationship with her composition teacher. Gustav and Alma were immediately attracted to each other. They married a few months later, on March 9, 1902, when their first daughter, Maria, was already lodged in Alma's womb. It was a complex and at times unhappy relationship, although they remained together until Mahler died in 1911.

Maiernigg, and the "composition hut"
Yet Mahler could look forward to the future, composing. In the summer of that year, he escaped to Maiernigg, on the southern shore of the Wörthersee, a bucolic place in the region of Carinthia in southern Austria, where the composer was building a villa facing the lake, which he finished while working on the symphony.
Earlier, he had had a small, sparsely furnished hut - just enough to avoid being called a hermit - built on the hill behind his villa. Every morning he walked there along a forest path to work in splendid isolation. There he completed the Fifth Symphony - though later revisions took him five years.

Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor
The work, about an hour long, is in five movements (as opposed to the typical four of most symphonies) grouped into three sections. The first and third sections comprise two movements each, while the Scherzo stands between them as a section in its own right. Also, very curiously, the first movement is written in C♯ minor and the last, a half-tone higher, in D major.

Movements:
00:00  Funeral March
13:36  Stürmisch bewegt (stormy)
28:20  Scherzo
45:17  Adagietto. Sehr langsam (very slow)
53:49  Rondo-Finale

The Adagietto
The most famous movement of all Mahler's symphonies, the beautiful Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony ("quoted" also in the last movement), deserves a separate paragraph. Written only for strings and harp, its reflective, moving, nostalgic character, more resigned than mournful, makes it unique and memorable. It was an essential part of the soundtrack of Lucchino Visconti's film Death in Venice, and has been performed at numerous funerals of great personalities, such as Robert Kennedy and Leonard Bernstein.
According to some scholars, it was written as a tribute and love letter in code for Alma Schindler, to whom he sent the finished manuscript without accompanying it with any words.

Claudio Abbado conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, 2004.

Beethoven, 9th Symphony - 4th mov

A symphony denouement unique in the history of music

Very few people do not know the tune of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". Of the millions who know it, many will be aware that it belongs to the fourth movement and finale of his Ninth Symphony, also called Choral Symphony, since it incorporates solo voices and chorus in that movement.
But such a novel ending was not clear at first.
Recent research suggests that Beethoven had misgivings about undertaking such a grandiose project. While working on the symphony's finale, he considered the alternative of incorporating a purely instrumental finale, eliminating such an innovative closure. Doubts continued and he spoke of removing solo singing and chorus on more than one occasion.
In the end, he did not do so, which shows the immense ambition with which the maestro undertook the construction of such a portentous score.

Schiller's poem
From a very young age, Beethoven was captivated by the grandiose exaltation of the brotherhood of man present in the lines of Schiller's poem, An die Freude (To Joy). As early as 1793 he thought he had to incorporate it into his music, "verse by verse". And Schiller's ode became an obsession. Year after year, sketch after sketch, the celebrated melody of the Ninth Symphony was meticulously elaborated until it found its final form only in 1822, with selected texts from Schiller's works and some introductory words by Beethoven.

The Symphony
The symphony itself, whose full title is "Symphony, with a final chorus on Schiller's Ode to Joy", was written over six years, from 1817 to 1823. Its composition was commissioned by the Philharmonic Society of London.
Dedicated to none other than King Frederick William III of Prussia, it had a grand premiere on May 7, 1824, in Vienna. It was the maestro's first public appearance in twelve years.

That evening
By this time, Beethoven's progressive deafness had reached a stage that made it impossible for him to conduct. That evening, however, he did something similar, standing close to the conductor during the performance to indicate the correct tempi.

The fourth movement arrived, and the soloists and chorus intoned the ode. The music came to an end. The applause was thunderous, but Beethoven, with his back to the audience, continued to set the tempo until one of the soloists, the contralto, signaled him to turn in the direction of the audience. Only then did the maestro realize that the work was over and that the Viennese audience was applauding wildly.

Symphony No. 9 - Fourth movement and finale
Marked Presto; Allegro assai, the fourth movement is in the form of a theme and variations, with two themes plus an introduction.

Musical material from each of the previous three movements – though none is a literal quotation – is presented in turn. These give way to instrumental passages by the low strings. After this, the theme "Ode to Joy" is introduced by the cellos and double basses. After three instrumental variations on this theme, the human voice is introduced for the first time by the baritone, who sings words written by Beethoven himself: "O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!" Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere. '' ("O friends, not these sounds! Instead, let us look for more pleasant and more joyful ones!").

The ode is played, first by the orchestra, then by the choir. Cellos, flutes, and oboes set the mood, and male and female voices alternate declaiming the Ode to Joy, accompanied by the full orchestra.

The symphony advances and rises above itself, as the choruses reach thunderous levels. A double fugue provides the leisurely counterpoint that leads to the swift and prolonged final chant, a symphony denouement unique in the history of music.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and the National US Choir, conducted by maestro Daniel Barenboim, give this magnificent performance.

Chopin, Waltz Op 34 No 1

Maria and Frédéric, getting closer 

After bidding farewell to the Wodzinsky family in Dresden, and already on his way to Paris, Chopin detoured to Leipzig to pay a brief visit to a couple of friends and colleagues: Schumann and Mendelssohn. This gave time for one more event of an emotional nature to occur, which ended up overflowing with joy that year of 1835. A letter from Maria Wodzinska had been waiting for him for a long time in Paris. It was a very affectionate, almost tender note:

"How we miss you!!!! My brothers are dejected... Mom only talks to me about you... Mom, my father and my brothers embrace you tenderly... You have forgotten the pencil here, we keep it respectfully, like an heirloom..... Goodbye!"

Marienbad and Dresden
The expressions of affection from Mother Wodzinska and Maria did not stop throughout the winter. Thus, in the summer of the following year, Frederic again found himself enjoying the summer season with the Wodzinskys. But this time it was not one week but almost two months that he shared with them, first in Marienbad and then in Dresden, so that the occasions to be together multiplied. Long walks in the surroundings brought Maria and Frédéric closer together definitively.

Maria says "Yes"
The day before his departure, Frederic received Maria's "yes" to his marriage proposal. The day before, another yes from Countess Wodzinska, who asked to keep the engagement a secret until she had the opportunity to inform her husband.
Three days after the departure, and along with sending him some slippers embroidered by her, Maria added a postscript to a brother's letter:

"...We cannot take comfort from your departure... Do you miss your friends a little? I answer for you: yes. ...I need to believe so... Farewell. See you soon. Ah! if that could be as soon as possible!"

Chopin takes a second helping... Another year, blissful, is about to come to fruition.

Brilliant waltz in A-flat
During the three weeks he spent in Karlsbad in the company of his parents the previous summer, Chopin composed a mazurka, a polonaise, and a delicious waltz: the Waltz in A Flat, opus 34 No. 1.

The version is by the Austrian-Swiss pianist Ingolf Wunder.

Schubert, Fantasia for piano four hands

Little Franz in love, in his early twenty

In just over eighteen years, Franz Schubert could write almost a thousand works. In this almost miraculous abundance that his catalog presents, about fifty pieces written to be performed by two musicians at the piano stand out: they are his pieces for piano four hands.

From the Fantasia in G minor of 1810 (when he was thirteen years old) to the Sonatina D 968 composed the same year of his death, Franz Schubert did not cease to compose works in this format and in very diverse genres, ranging from transcriptions of his own orchestral works to those written for the nascent salon music that was beginning to enchant an incipient middle class that also wanted to make music in their own homes.

In the years 1818 and 1819, Schubert, in his twenties, spent the summer in the castle of Szeliz, about 150 km from Vienna, hired as musical preceptor of the daughters of Count Johann Esterházy, cousin of Haydn's protector.

The girls were two: Carolina, 13, and Maria, 15. With Maria, the lessons were more interesting because she showed a more advanced level than her sister. Still, in the second summer, little Schubert began to be sentimentally interested in Carolina, who, of course, was now fourteen.

Countess Caroline Esterhazy

But his proverbial shyness worked against him, not allowing the little master to make much progress in the field of seduction. However, ten years later, Franz will remember his former pupil and dedicate to her, Carolina Esterházy, now a twenty-four-year-old countess, his masterpiece for piano four hands.

Fantasia for piano four hands, Op 103, in F minor
It was composed between January and April 1828 and performed for the first time on May 9 of that year, on the occasion of one of the last "schubertiades" held with his friends, among them the composer Franz Lachner, who played his part on the piano, accompanying Schubert.

It was published posthumously the following year.
We will never know whether Countess Caroline ever acceded to Franz's solicitations, but today more than a few performers have noted that it is not at all whimsical to hear in the yearning love duet of the central section "the idealized expression of a relationship that social differences alone made impossible."

Considered his best work, among many, for piano four hands, the work is structured in four movements that are played without pause, connected by a lyrical melody.

Movements:
I     Allegro molto moderato
II   Largo
III  Scherzo. Allegro vivace
IV  Finale. Allegro molto moderato

The performance is by the brothers Lucas and Arthur Jussen, Dutch pianists.