Chausson, Poem for Violin and orchestra

The French composer Ernest Chausson was born lucky, but died unlucky. He was the son who survived the early death of his two brothers, a tragedy that does not count, of course, in the inventory of his good fortune. But from those specific events, he became the spoiled son, the "apple of his eye" of his beleaguered but very wealthy parents. His father, called Prosper because fate is perspicacious, was a renowned public works contractor who was there, in Paris, at the time of the Second Empire, when Napoleon III had the idea of redrawing the City of Light, remodeling its buildings, avenues, parks, and gardens.

And so Ernest never needed to work a day in his life. Possessing, since childhood, diverse talents for painting, philosophy, or literature, as a teenager he added music to his vast wealth of interests. When he finally decided on musical composition as a life project, his parents applied the indispensable correction in these cases: they sent him to the university to study law. The young Chausson was sworn in as a lawyer in 1877. But that same year he changed course. The most notable achievement of that year would not be his oath but the composition of his first song, Les Lilas.

Ernst Chausson (1855 - 1899)

At Paris Conservatory
Chausson will never practice the profession. Two years later, in 1879, when he was 24 years old, the lawyer entered the Paris Conservatory to study composition with master Jules Massenet. Later, integrated into the circle that surrounded César Franck, he was encouraged to compose music despite his very late musical initiation.

His lyricism 
He was not a virtuoso composer, but an innate lyricism helped him overcome his technical limitations. With all the time in the world to mature his compositions without being disturbed by any extra-musical occupation, Chausson wrote songs, choral music, some operas, and chamber music. Today he is remembered mainly for two imaginative orchestral works: a Symphony, and the Poem for Violin and Orchestra, from 1896.

The fateful end
He lived in Paris with his wife all his lifetime but every summer the couple would take off to the provinces. In the summer of 1899, while riding a bicycle, he lost control of the vehicle and crashed his head against a wall. He died on the spot.
His funeral was attended by the most conspicuous personalities of French music and arts.

Poem for violin and orchestra, op. 25
Chausson hardly had any reason to be sad during his lifetime. However, much of his music exudes an undeniable melancholy. The Poem for Violin does not evade it, during its 17 minutes of beautiful nostalgia, or "spleen", to use the word Baudelaire invented during those years.

Premiere 
Composed between April and June 1896, the work had its public premiere on December 27 of that year, with the participation as soloist of the Belgian master Eugène Ysaÿe, to whom it is dedicated and who would have been its applicant.

Janine Jansen, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Johannes Gustavsson.

Mozart, Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major

The first sonatas for piano four hands or for two pianos composed by Mozart were intended to be performed together by him and his sister Nannerl, five years older. With them they toured most of Europe between 1763 and 1766, dazzling with their prodigious virtuosity every prince and noblewoman who had the opportunity to listen to them. The august audience entertained them with kisses and from time to time with a gift, once a watch, another time a gala dress, like the one Mozart as a child, wears in the picture below, a gift from the Empress Maria Teresa of Austria.

Settled in Vienna
In 1781 Maria Theresa was no longer in this world and Mozart had long since ceased to be a child prodigy. He was 25 years old and had long since stopped "rolling around the world like a beggar," in Maria Theresa's not very restrained words ten years earlier.
And he had settled in Vienna, after his patron, Prince-Archbishop Colloredo, had removed him from his position at the irrelevant court of Salzburg, following a bitter dispute a few months earlier.

As a free-lance pianist and composer, he obtains in Vienna his first "considerable success" with the opera Idomeneo. He falls in love with Konstance and plans to marry. Mozart, hunter and gatherer, gets some pupils and prepares and produces concerts in which he presents his own works, but his talented sister is no longer there to accompany him. Nannerl leads a simple life in Salzburg, cared for by her father Leopold, somewhat oblivious to her art.

Sonata for two pianos in D major, K. 448
Premiered in November 1781, it was composed for the occasion and performed in the company of fellow pianist Josephine von Aurnhammer, with whom he had already duetted in the Concerto for two pianos of 1779.
Written in gallant style, luminous and brilliant, it is in the three "classical" movements:

00        Allegro con spirito
08:00  Andante
18:01  Molto allegro

The Mozart Effect
The sonata was part of a scientific study aimed at testing the theory of the Mozart Effect, which postulates that classical music increases brain activity more than any other type of music. The research continues.

The rendition is by Russian pianists Anatalia Injushina and Vlatseslav Novikov, in a performance at Helsinki's brand new Temppeliaukio Lutheran stone church, inaugurated in 1969.

Scriabin Études - Étude Opus 2 No 1

The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin is part of the long list of talented composers who left this world at an early age without seeing their most daring projects come to fruition."Mysterium" was the name of his last work, a piece of grandiose characteristics that would last a whole week, destined to be premiered in the foothills of the Himalayas, incorporating the senses of sight, sound, smell, and touch. After the premiere – the author believed – the world would end, vanishing amid great joy, giving way to a new human race composed of nobler beings.
Impossible to say that Scriabin did not aim high. But fate was not with him. Alexander Scriabin died in Moscow at 43 from septicemia caused by a mosquito bite.

Alexander Scriabin (1872 - 1915)

A piano virtuoso
Simultaneously with his mystical stage, the author also flirted with dodecaphony at the end of his life. But in his beginnings, as a piano virtuoso, he was influenced by the romantic pianists of the first half of the 19th century. It is a period in which he wrote mainly for the piano, working in the genres that Chopin used without rest: preludes, nocturnes, and studies written in an openly tonal language. Unusual textures and harmonies will come later.

He also wrote sonatas and a Piano Concerto but is today remembered mainly for his earliest works, which today turn out to be essential pieces of the piano repertoire, among them the 24 Preludes of Opus 11, brimming with lyricism and poetry.
Also noteworthy for their precocity are the Three Pieces of Opus 2, a set of three Etudes written in the period 1887-1889, the first of them when the author was fifteen years old, at a time when, of course, he was a fervent admirer of Chopin and Liszt.

Etude Opus 2 No 1, in C sharp minor
The influence of the Polish musician is undeniable here. Moreover, it is not difficult to guess Chopin's Etude which is inspired by: No. 7 of Etudes Opus 25, those dedicated to Marie d'Agoult, Liszt's partner at the time.

The harmonies are "Chopinian" and so is the emotional tone of the piece. However, the melody brings to mind, characteristically, Russian gypsy music, for its exoticism, somewhat melancholic. It is a slow and rather somber piece, yet, in its scarce three minutes of length, it presents the interpreter with no few difficulties while offering the listener an undeniable attraction.

The performance is by the Russian master Vladimir Horowitz.

Franz Liszt, "Les Preludes", symphonic poem

Although it is customary to point to Franz Liszt as the inventor of the symphonic poem, the term is not of his authorship, and it seems to be born almost unthinkingly. While in Weimar (1842-61), the master wrote twelve works in this genre, in the company of his writer Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, who collaborated with the texts that usually accompanied them.

The third of these, called "The Preludes", was the first to bear the title "symphonic poem", although, in a letter to one of his publishers, dated February 1854, Liszt presents the work simply as "one of my new orchestral works: the Preludes".

A new genre
Two days later, however, a Weimar newspaper announced the work's premiere with the words: "Les preludes - symphonische Dichtung" (Dichtung = poem). Thus was born a new genre, the symphonic poem, which will have exalted continuers of the stature of Smetana, Dvorak, or Richard Strauss.

Considered the seed of the "programmatic music" of the 19th century, it is defined, in general terms, as a musical form in which a literary or other source provides the narrative basis for a single-movement orchestral work. Liszt's symphonic poems, in particular, are intended to inspire the listener to evoke scenes, images, or moods.

Liszt, in 1856
(1811 - 1886)

Lamartine Preludes
In the case of The Preludes, the most popular of them, the maestro "reconditioned" musical materials he already had, organizing them in such a way that they would tell a certain story, that would contain some kind of plot. It was not easy.
But he found the solution in a poem by Lamartine, precisely called The Preludes.
Now, the precise connection between Lamartine's poem and Liszt's music is rather vague, apart from the fact that both works mix, compare, or contrast, elements of idyll and stark reality. The work contains four sections that focus, successively, on love, war, country life, and fate.

Liszt's words
And since it was a matter of beginning the path of programmatic music, Liszt added to the premiere program a long text that begins with these words:

"What is our life but a series of preludes to an unknown song, of which the first solemn note is the one that sounds death?"

The text continues, wearily romantic, with references to love, fate, and death here and there. The audience who attended the premiere, on February 23, 1854, in Weimar, went home convinced that they had been given pieces of Lamartine's prose. Today, they are believed to have originated in the boundless stylistic loquacity of Carolyne, the princess writer.

Some pieces of the work have become part of popular culture. The most recognizable makes its first appearance at minute 2:35.

Daniel Barenboim conducts Berlin Philharmoniker - Staatsoper Berlin.

Beethoven, Symphony No. 8, in F major

The year 1812 marked the end of Napoleon's glory and the beginning of his downfall. After a dazzling invasion, he defeated the Russians and reached Moscow, but the victory was short-lived. He could not cope with the military technique of "scorched earth". After setting fire to Moscow, the Russians sat back and waited (that's putting it mildly) for Napoleon to retreat. During the retreat, the powerful Napoleonic army was annihilated at Vilna.

Beethoven meets Goethe
While the beginning of the end was brewing for his once idol, Beethoven traveled to Teplice to meet another model, the revered and great poet Goethe. He was invited. It was not an invasion. But the results were, in turn, also disastrous. Beethoven met, in his opinion, an aging courtier who was neither a fellow democrat nor even less an agitator, perhaps a dilettante. The poet, for his part, while impressed by Beethoven's personality, intensely disliked his coarse manners. It was all a great disappointment. However, it didn't stop the coarse-mannered maestro from sketching the first sketches of Symphony No. 8, just there, in Teplice.

Symphony No. 8, in F major, Op. 93
He completed it in Linz in the autumn of the same year. It was written "simultaneously" with Symphony No. 7, that is, when he started to write it he had already begun the Seventh, which was left for later. It seems that the Eighth functioned as an escape valve for the compositional problems presented by the Seventh. Scholars agree that the writing of the Eighth Symphony was for the maestro a task without difficulties, almost a divertimento, which would have been reflected in a pristine way in the general character of the work.

A " light-hearted" work
Indeed, compared to the Third, the Fifth, and certainly the Seventh, Symphony No. 8 has been called "benign," or "harmless," by acerbic critics. Others have jokingly described it as "Haydn's last symphony".
The truth is that Beethoven adopted this time a jovial, carefree scheme. He dispensed with the slow tempo and instead wrote two scherzos, the first of them a parody of the musical chronometer, of recent appearance, the device we know today as a metronome. And if it is a question of making comparisons, it is fair to say that not since Haydn's time had a more amusing resolution to a symphony been written than that offered by the allegro vivace with which the work ends.

The end
But as we can't always have rain on everyone's parade, a critical article of 1827 pointed out that the work depended "entirely on the final movement, destined to get applause at any cost; the rest is eccentric without entertaining, and laborious without any results."
Bad timing for such bitter criticism: the maestro died that same year.

Premiere
The work, without a dedication, and less than half an hour long, had its premiere on February 27, 1814, at the Redoutensaal, in Vienna, with Beethoven conducting. Audience impressions were not very enthusiastic either: the program included the Seventh as a poster work.
Sir George Grove, founder of the dictionary that to this day bears his name, recounted:

'It was not well received. Much more applauded was the Seventh, which puzzled Beethoven. But he took it philosophically: "That's because it's so much better than the other one," he observed.

Movements:
00:00  Allegro vivace e con brio
10:50  Allegretto scherzando
15:02  Tempo di menuetto
20:14  Allegro vivace

Daniel Barenboim conducts the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – a conductor's creation, made up of Palestinian, Arab, and Israeli musicians – during the 2012 BBC Proms.