John C. Adams: "Short Ride in a Fast Machine", a fanfare

To give a name to a musical work, the title is unusual, no doubt: "Short ride on a fast machine". What exactly does it mean? The question has been asked before. When its author, the American composer John Adams, was asked about the reason for such an unusual title for this exultant fanfare full of rhythm, he did not dwell on it and simply answered with another question: do you know what happens when someone invites you to race in a magnificent sports car and then you regret it?
There is no better answer.

John Coolidge Adams (1947 -)

John Coolidge Adams, born in Massachusetts in 1947, is the author of the famous and controversial opera Nixon in China, from 1987, which brought contemporary history to the opera, thus opening a new genre. In the same line, in the postmodern musical drama, the author has ventured into content such as the life and work of the inventor of the atomic bomb or the terrorist attacks of the last twenty years.

Initially a minimalist composer, the composer has also tackled chamber, orchestral and concertante music. Today, still active, Adams is still in demand by the most important orchestral ensembles as a provider of symphonic material.

Short Ride in a Fast Machine is one of two fanfares for orchestra commissioned from the composer by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1986.
It is an exuberant work, brilliantly written for a large orchestra, with boundless polyrhythmic energy. Along with the traditional sections of strings, winds and woodwinds, the work includes the participation of synthesizers. And the inescapable timpani are joined by triangles, Chinese box, xylophone, cymbals, bells, snare drum, bass drum, tantan, and tambourine. In short, a festival of percussion. 
If nowadays, one wants to provocatively "open" a program of contemporary music, there is nothing better than to start the show with these four minutes of "fast riding".

The performance is by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the American conductor and violinist Marin Alsop.

Mozart Piano Concerto 26 - "Coronation" Aimi Kobayashi, aged 11

On the occasion of the coronation of Leopold II as Holy Roman Emperor, Mozart visited Frankfurt am Main in October 1790. More than a year before, he had completed a piano concerto that he had little opportunity to make known. Gone were the days when he composed six or seven concertos a year to present to an eagerly awaiting audience. His popularity had declined in a Vienna of swinging tastes. In the last five years of his life, he composed only two, the penultimate being the one he presented in Frankfurt on October 15, 1790, as part of the festivities that greeted Leopold's coronation. Thus Concerto No. 26 earned its nickname.

The concert is presumed to have been sketched out more than two years earlier, in the spring of 1787, after Mozart returned to Vienna having witnessed live the success of Le Nozze di Figaro in Prague. The new season had to be organized, with eyes set on the Lenten season. Opera, the music par excellence at that time, was forbidden in Vienna during Lent, so this was the time (which, as we know, lasted forty days) when his subscription concerts had to be presented in order to optimize the results.

In a letter to Michael Puchberg, his usual financial helper and fellow mason, Mozart assure him that he will soon pay off the last debt because he is working intensely on a new concerto (he also takes the opportunity to request a new loan). But he did not manage to finish the Concerto for Lent of that year. The concerto was completed in February of the following year, as can be seen in Mozart's private catalog, to which it was added on February 24, 1788.

Piano Concerto No. 26, in D major, K 537, "Coronation"

It is in three movements: a bright, festive allegro; a slow movement, more gentle than lyrical; and a drama-free, almost humorous allegretto. Its simple beauty has made it one of Mozart's most performed concertos on the world's stages.

Movements:

00:00  Allegro

14:30  Larghetto

20:32  Allegretto

The performance is by Japanese pianist Aimi Kobayashi, only eleven years old for the occasion: her orchestral debut, in Moscow, in December 2006. She is accompanied by The Moscow Virtuosi Orchestra conducted by the Russian maestro, violinist, and conductor, Vladimir Spivakov.

Liszt, Piano Concerto No 2, in A major / Khatia Buniatishvili

As with the First Concerto, the initial writing, the necessary revisions, and the final version of the Piano Concerto No. 2 took Liszt a long time. Almost twenty-five years. He started working on it in 1839 and finished a first version (let's say, a first draft that satisfied him) in 1857, that is, eighteen years later. After the necessary revisions, he considered it finally finished in 1861, but its publication would be delayed until 1863.

Franz Liszt, in 1866, at the age of 55
Engraving from a photography

The urgencies of the composers
If we talk about dynamism or fluency for the concertante composition, the distance from his predecessors, let's say the "classics", is wide. And if the comparison is made with Mozart, it is gigantic: let us remember that the genius of Salzburg in his Viennese years came to compose two concertos a month (in February and March 1785, no more and no less than Concertos Nos. 20 and 21). The circumstances of life, of course, are very different. Mozart composed with an eye to his subscription concertos, a vital income. Liszt, instead, would make ends meet, dying with laughter.

Liszt, the concert pianist

It was precisely in 1839 that Franz Liszt began a career as a piano virtuoso that has no parallel in the history of artistic performances in the 19th century. Between 1839 and 1847 his tours as a "concert pianist" ( let's remember that he is the inventor of the "recital", the first pianist to perform alone on stage) took him to - let's take a breath - Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Austria, England, Ireland, Romania, Turkey, and Russia.

Abandoning the stage

In 1849, however, his new companion, Carolyne de Sayn Wittgenstein, suggested his definitive abandonment of the stage and his exclusive dedication to composition. Thus, the concert he had given in Russia in September 1847 became his last paid concert. From then on, the 36-year-old maestro played the piano for charity, making known the compositions of his lesser-known colleagues. He also took time to work on the works he had envisioned ten years earlier.

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2, in A major

The concerto is dedicated to Hans von Bronsart, Liszt's pupil, who premiered it in Weimar on January 7, 1857. Like the first concerto, the work is built on a single movement, made up of numerous sections, all of them derived from the same initial melody. So much so that one prominent musicologist felt free to rename the work "Life and Wanderings of a Melody".

A bit disrespectful perhaps, but not so far from reality because throughout the twenty-odd minutes that the piece lasts, the initial melody comes and goes, undergoing variations, transformations, and diverse twists and turns. Very wide glissandos covering the entire keyboard announce a grand finale of breathtaking characteristics.

Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili, accompanied by L'Orchestre de Paris, under the direction of Russian conductor Andrey Boreyko, perform this version.

W.A. Mozart, Flute and Harp Concerto

Mozart never had a particular fondness for the harp as a concert instrument. Still, when he visited Paris in 1778 in the company of his mother, Maria Anna, he decided to take as a music pupil a harpist girl, whose father, a duke who played the flute, commissioned Mozart to compose the only concerto for harp and flute that ever came out of the ingenuity of the Salzburg's genius. Mozart did not freak out about the commission but duly fulfilled it. Not so the flute-playing duke who did not pay Mozart for the concerto and settled only half of the girl's tuition.

A painful tour
It was one of the many misfortunes faced by Wolfgang and his mother during this unfortunate tour, the final shadow falling on them when Maria Anna, in July of that year, died in an inglorious room in Paris. Both mother and son had come from an extended stay in Mannheim where Mozart had been greeted as the genius he was, but whose longing for a position at court was, as usual, unfulfilled. Falsely hopeful, too, he took leave of Aloysia Weber, with whom he had fallen in love, but that is another story.

Concerto for harp and flute in C major, K 299
The combination of both instruments is not easy, but Mozart did it, and built with them a stylistically perfect work, hailed today by the widest audiences. Harpists and flutists all over the world are also grateful for it since opportunities to perform on stage as soloists, at least for the harp, are not plentiful. The work, intended for the salon, requires only a few woodwinds and the standard string ensemble.

Movements: 

Lasting approximately just under thirty minutes, the work is in the usual three movements for a concerto of the period, following the Vivaldian style, fast-slow-fast sections:

00:00  Allegro

10:12  Andantino

19:01  Rondeau. Allegro

The rendition is by the French artists Patrick Gallois (flute) and Fabrice Pierre (harp), accompanied by the Swiss orchestra based in Lugano, RTSI (Radio Televisione Svizzera Italiana), conducted by the British conductor Sir Neville Marriner, now deceased and illustrious founder of the celebrated London orchestral ensemble Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields.

Borodin, String Quartet No 2 - "Nocturne"

Unlike the long time Alexander Borodin invested in most of his major works, his String Quartet No. 2 in D major was composed during a short summer vacation in August 1881. Borodin, a doctor of chemistry and cellist, had met the pianist Ekaterina Protopopova twenty years earlier, during an internship in Heidelberg as a scientist. Married in 1883, he wanted to pay tribute to the discovery of his love of two decades with the quartet that was to become the most important of the only two he composed for the genre.

The "secondary" vocation
Brief is the chamber music that Borodin wrote. The complete list of his corpus is also short. The illegitimate son of a Russian prince, the author of the popular Polovtsian Dances had access
to a privileged education that allowed him to spend most of his life as a chemistry professor at the medical academies in St. Petersburg. So music was always his secondary vocation, which did not prevent him from being part of the famous group known as The Five, Russian nationalist musicians who, by the way, did not look favorably on chamber music.

A. Borodin (1833 - 1887)

String Quartet No. 2 - Nocturne
The complete work lasts about half an hour. Structured in the traditional manner for the typical string quartet (two violins, viola, and cello), its four movements (scherzo and andante embraced by two agile outer sections) brim with warmth and bliss, reflecting the fact
that this is the work of a man in love who lacks nothing, and where, apparently, the cello sings for Alexander and the first violin for Ekaterina.

The third movement, andante, and entitled Nocturne, is the one
that has made the quartet popular and captivated a wide audience. Numerous versions proliferate in the most diverse art circles; in 2006, a Disney Studios animated short film made full use of the famous andante.

The rendition is by musicians of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York.