Maurice Ravel, "Spanish Rhapsody"

Ravel, an outsider?
Between 1900 and 1905, Maurice Ravel completed five attempts to win the Prix de Rome. The coveted prize rewarded the chosen composer with a four-year stay in Rome. None succeeded, and such a number of unsuccessful attempts only strengthened the thirty-year-old composer's anti-academic stance, favoring a certain outsider status that the composer would maintain in the musical Paris of those years.
The son of a Swiss father and a Basque mother, in 1907 Ravel made evident his closeness to his maternal heritage by giving life in the same year to two major works: his first opera, L'heure espagnole, and his first great work for orchestra, the Spanish Rhapsody.

The work has its genesis in a proverbial habanera for two pianos composed much earlier, in 1895, by a twenty-year-old Ravel, and warmly greeted by Claude Debussy, who also had his own fascination with Spain. Never published as an independent piece, in 1907 Ravel joined to the habanera a restful Prelude and two other dances: a Malagueña and a lively "feria" of carnival spirit, to form a symphonic suite of four sections.
The first version of the work was written for two pianos, and its orchestration was completed shortly before its premiere on March 15, 1908, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

A small-scale scandal
The premiere was attended by friends and students of Ravel, who provided the necessary irreverence on a stage characterized by high prices and comfortable stalls. Ravel's admirers, naturally,
filled the gallery.

They were the ones who, from the heights, demanded, loudly, that the "Malagueña" be encored so that the gentlemen on the second floor could "understand" it. It was one of the first riots of the Parisian public. (In 1913 the most famous of them will take place: the reception of The Rite of Spring, by Stravinski).

Movements
As already mentioned, the work is in four movements or sections:

00       Prélude à la nuit - trés moderé
05:23  Malaguena - Assez vif
07:55  Habanera - Assez lent et d'un rythme las
10:57  Fair - Assez animé

DePaul Symphony Orchestra Youth Orchestra, under the baton of American conductor Cliff Colnot.

Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 - the apology of a Soviet artist

On January 25, 1938, two months after the premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5, the Moscow newspaper Vetchernia Moskva published an article by the author entitled "My Response as an Artist". This article contained the famous passage where Shostakovich pointed out that his Fifth Symphony was "the concrete and creative response of a Soviet artist to fair criticism". In the Soviet Union, the matter went almost unnoticed. Instead, in the West, it was regarded as the official subtitle that the composer himself had added to his Symphony.
The story is a complex one.

Exactly two years before, Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, called Stalin, had qualified as "pornophonic music" an opera by Shostakovich, forcing his retirement from the stage. Around the same time the composer was working on his Symphony No. 4, but due to the stormy debates held at the Composers' Union (with a troubled Shostakovich present during them), the composer chose to withdraw it from the stage when the work was in its last rehearsals.

The great purge

The thirty-year-old author's position became critical. It was not for nothing. The years 1936-38 are remembered today as the cruelest years of the great purge or campaign of repression and political persecution carried out by Stalin in the late USSR. Let us say, by the way, that the Fourth Symphony had to wait for its premiere until 1962.

D. Shostakovich (1906 - 1975)

A political wink
The Fifth, on the other hand, did not have to wait so long. Master Shostakovich, after all, ended up specializing in accommodating political circumstances, using his inventiveness. He understood that writing his music was possible, as long as the authorities were satisfied at the same time with a sort of political wink. The "fair criticism" is a simple example of mutual benefit that, as the maestro must have expected, the "nomenklatura" would minimize and the West would distinguish.

Symphony No. 5, in D minor, op 47
Composed between April and July 1937, the work premiered in Leningrad on November 21 of that year with a thunderous success, literally. The public ovation lasted forty minutes, as recalled by the famous Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in exile. Commenting on the episode, and as a dissident, he lashed out at the Russian authorities of the time, asserting that the government would have executed Shostakovich for writing such a work if the audience ovation had not lasted forty minutes on the day of its premiere.

A conservative work?
According to those in the know, compared to his earlier symphonies, the musical language of the Fifth is perceived as somewhat more conservative. Even so, and given the circumstances, the work is a bold composition. Primarily, because of its open renunciation of the slightest hint of patriotism, and prodigal, instead, in emotions and tragic feelings, expressions of the soul not seen with good eyes in revolutionary conjunctures.

Movements
Lasting approximately 50 minutes, it is structured in the usual four movements. The second of them, a Largo that is said to have provoked tears in the audience on the day of the premiere; the last one, an allegro of triumphant atmosphere with the apotheotic ending that has made it famous (47:45). It is still debated whether, in this last movement, Shostakovich made concessions to the authorities or just decided to be ironic.

00:22  Moderato
08:12  Allegretto (scherzo)
23:44  Largo
40:09  Allegro non troppo

Leonard Bernstein conducts the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Tokyo, in 1979.

Ferdinand Beyer, "Der Flohwalzer", a polka for little people

Contrary to the widespread idea, the very popular piano piece known in Latin America as "polca de los perros" (although in Colombia it is called "polca de los gatos"... and in Hungary "monkey march", and in Bulgaria "cat march", and so on) did not arise from folklore nor is it a product of popular tradition without a recognized author. On the contrary, the little piece bears No. 8 in the series of 106 basic exercises published in 1860 under the title Vorschule im Klavierspiel (Preparatory School for the Piano) by the German pianist and composer Ferdinand Beyer.

Born in 1803 in southern Germany, Ferdinand Beyer was recognized in his time as a salon pianist, author of a variety of light music, and a willing arranger of national anthems and popular orchestral pieces. None of this is remembered today. But he left a great legacy: the aforementioned piano method which, at least in part, is still used today, with some of his exercises even included in anthologies on piano pedagogy.

Ferdinand Beyer (1803 - 1863)

The author, and his method, fit perfectly with the middle-class aspiration of his time to enjoy leisure, embodied in the music that could be made at home with a piano in the living room. He shared an era in which home piano teachers proliferated, as did the methods of study, and the publishing houses that released them. In his more affluent years, Ferdinand Beyer was professionally connected to a respected publishing house in Mainz, on the banks of the Rhine. He died there in 1863.

Vorschule im Klavierspiel, opus 101, No 8
The accompanying score is a transcription of the original piece. It is written in the key of D major (that is what its "key signature" shows: two sharps, F and C). But the truth is that to the ear, the piece is in the unusual key of G flat major (an accompanying guitar, for example, should sustain the harmony in that key).

We boldly assume that this is how it was originally written, in D major, and that the obligatory alterations were simply incorporated into each measure. To do otherwise would have meant confronting a child with a score whose key signature had a few flats: six, no more, and no less. The little pianists would have come out in a huff.

The piece is very simple, needless to say. And it can be approached by anyone who is taught it "by ear". This is due to a particular property that characterizes it. The performer's hands never play simultaneously. Using this "gadget", the annoying issue of both hands' independence is solved.

As for the pianist, we only know that her name is Namtan. An excellent interpreter. Tasteful and musically intelligent, she ends the piece with a very appropriate ritardando that Beyer did not write down in the score.

Mozart, "Ave Verum Corpus" motet

Mozart wrote his first motet when he was twelve years old. He would compose his last one in Vienna in the spring of 1791, six months before his death. Written simultaneously with the famous unfinished Requiem, the sacred piece Ave verum corpus can be considered Mozart's last entirely finished religious work. A good part of his most celebrated works would come from his pen that year. To this handful of magnificent works, Mozart will add a sublime exercise in the brief sacred form originating in the Middle Ages, the motet, to thank a friend for the care lavished on his beloved Constanze.

In Baden
Constanze, whose health was somewhat fragile, used to spend several seasons "taking the waters" in Baden, a spa twenty-odd kilometers from Vienna. In June 1791 she was there, enjoying the waters with her seven-year-old son Carl, and seven months pregnant with Franz Xavier, her sixth and last child (of the six, only two survived infancy). Mozart visited them on a regular basis, making sure that his family was perfectly accommodated there. For this, he relied on the goodwill of his friend Anton Stoll, a resident of Baden, teacher and music director of the local parish.

A donation to the parish
In the last year of his life, Mozart was extremely busy. In addition to the Requiem, during those months he was simultaneously working on the Clarinet Concerto, the opera La Clemenza di Tito, and the greatest success of his life, The Magic Flute. The visit to his family in Baden served to slow him down somewhat. The 46 simple measures of the motet Ave verum corpus were then added to the repertoire of the diligent Professor Stoll's chapel choir. Completed in Baden on June 18, the little masterpiece had its premiere for the celebration of Corpus Christi on the 23rd of that month in the parish church of Baden.

Motet Ave verum corpus in D major, K. 618
It is composed on a Eucharistic hymn of the Catholic faith that begins with those words, ave verum corpus, something like "Hail, true body". The hymn dates from the 14th century and is generally attributed to Pope Innocent VI. Written for choirs, string orchestra and organ, the work contains a single dynamic indication but a masterful one: the maestro only noted that it should be performed sottovoce.

Its sublime 46 bars are barely more than four minutes long.

The Choir of King's College, Cambridge, with Matthew Martin at the organ, under the baton of Daniel Hyde.

Beethoven, Sonata No 5, the "little Pathetique"

After leaving Bonn and settling in Vienna in November 1792, Beethoven there published his first three piano sonatas in 1796. It was only three years since the heads of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI had fallen in revolutionary France, but in monarchical Vienna, the music was still fresh and light. The Eroica Symphony and the perishable dedication to Napoleon were still a few years away. Meanwhile, Beethoven tries to take Vienna by storm, trying to earn a name for himself as a piano virtuoso and unbeatable improviser.

Opus 10
For the master, these were good years. In 1798 he would publish another three sonatas, as Opus 10, following the tradition of grouping chamber works in multiples of three, a practice he had abandoned with Sonata No. 4, the only piece of Opus 7. He will also resume the healthy habit of dedicating the works to his godparents or tutors, or to his wives.

Opus 10 is dedicated to Anna Margarette von Browne, wife of a Russian diplomat in Vienna and, for the time, one of his most conspicuous benefactors. For the time being, Beethoven is a free-lance musician receiving monetary stimuli for creating music for a Viennese society that, in his own words noted on a raging day, "thinks only of laughing, drinking and dancing."

Sonata Opus 10 No. 1 in C minor - the little Pathétique?
Some scholars have sought to see in the piece a sort of "rehearsal" for the later sonatas. Precisely for the only sonata of the following opus, the rather more notable and popular Pathétique Sonata. And they have called it, very loosely, "the little Pathétique". Granted, both are written in C minor and begin by attacking, forte, the same chord. Now, as this seems a bit weak, they add in expert language their coincidence in "dramatic power" and the presence of "similar dynamic contrasts"... A lot of theories to extol a work from Beethoven's early period, simply kinder and less stormy than the later work in the genre, which does not detract one iota from its genius.

Movements:
Just under twenty minutes long, it is in the usual three movements.

00:00  Allegro molto e con brio
06:03  Adagio molto (one of the maestro's most beautiful slow movements)
14:32  Finale: Prestissimo

The rendition is by Daniel Barenboim, on the occasion of the complete Beethoven sonatas, in Berlin, in 2005.