Concertstück (1906), Georges Enescu (1881-1955)

Post-humously hailed by historian Noel Malcolm as “Romania’s greatest composer,”

Georges Enescu is today best know for his compositions, especially those in the Romanian
nationalist style. However, he first began violin studies at the age of four, soon writing his first
original compositions at the age of 5. The young Enescu’s prodigious skills in violin led to his
acceptance at the Vienna Conservatory when he was 7 years old, where he studied violin and
composition until 1893.
In 1895, he made a crucial move to Paris to study at the Paris Conservatory, studying
composition with Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré. After gradating from the Paris
Conservatory, Enescu split his life between Paris and Romania, as well as between composing
and performing. Well connected in the vibrant turn-of-the-century Parisian musical world,
Enescu continued to find wide popularity as a violin virtuoso (performing several European
tours), a conductor, and a composer. Enescu’s pre-World War I musical style was decidedly
Romantic with faint glimmers of early French musical impressionism shining through. The
Concertstück for Viola and Piano is emblematic of this style, though it is enigmatic in his oeuvre,
owing to the circumstances of its composition.
Concertstück was composed in 1906 at the commission of Théophile Laforge (the first
professor of Viola at the Paris Conservatory, the studio created only years earlier in 1894) as a
final examination piece that student violists had to play to be considered for graduation. As such,
the Concertstück is filled with technical challenges and contrasting musical material to test the
scope of a violist’s abilities in a relatively compact work. The challenge for the composers of
these works was to make the music sound like “real” music, utilizing technical passages without
devolving into uninteresting exercises and contrasting musical material without creating a frantic
collage of disparate ideas.
Of the 27 pieces written for the examination between 1894-1940, Enescu’s Concertstück
has come to prove the most popular of the bunch in the general Viola repertoire for his outright
success in creating a musical masterpiece despite the challenges put towards him. Concertstück
contains a myriad of mini-challenges for the violist, including long, lyrical passages, quick and
dextrous gestures, a plethora of different bow strokes, and a smattering of tempo changes that at
times come quickly and might disorient the unprepared student. Woven between these
challenges, Enescu takes the listener on a journey through multiple pleasant vignettes, evoking
warm fireside pontifications, jaunty journeys through the countryside, moments of romance, and
sparkling celebrations.

Cadenza (1984), Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020)

Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki experienced chaotic times during his young life.
The Nazi invasion of Poland occurred when he was just six years of age, which delayed his
schooling until 1946. The cloak of Stalinism covered Poland until the mid 1950s, just a few years
before Penderecki graduated from the Academy of Music in Kraków in 1958. By this time,
Soviet blockades of cultural exchange began to soften, allowing avant-garde music from Western
Europe into Poland and, crucially for Penderecki’s career, Polish music out of Poland. It was in
1960 that Penderecki gained worldwide acclaim for his haunting Threnody to the Victims of
Hiroshima for 52 string instruments. Primarily implementing a graphical notation (as opposed to
a typical 5-line staff), this piece conveys musical structures through physical gestures written out
in blocks of ink, scribbles, and arrows instead of measures, notes, and rhythms. This piece firmly
established Penderecki’s place amongst the mid-century avant-garde.
Throughout his career, however, Penderecki found ways to incorporate older forms into
his pieces. This is especially true of historically religious/liturgical forms, as can be found in his
well-known St. Luke Passion, Stabat Mater, and Magnificat. For Penderecki (having been raised
in a Protestant family, married and converted to Catholicism, and finding great personal meaning
in the teachings of the Christian bible) this engagement with religious material wasn’t just
personal, it was political as well. Under the influence of the Soviet Union, the Polish
government’s policy towards religious practice was less than liberating. In 1980 Penderecki
became very involved in the Polish Solidarity movement. The Solidarity movement started in
1980 and was centered around Poland’s first independent labor union (“Solidarity”) since
Stalinism was imposed on the country. Penderecki was commissioned by Solidarity to compose a
piece to pair with the 1980 building of a statue to memorialize those killed in 1970’s anti-
government riots. His Lacrismosa was dedicated to Lech Wałęsa, leader of the Solidarity union,
who would later go on to win the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize and become Poland’s first
democratically elected president in 1990. Subsequent movements of the expanded Polish
Requiem were dedicated to other Polish patriotic individuals and events. Using the religious
format of a requiem in the context of honoring political heroes of his, Penderecki’s Polish
Requiem itself can be seen as an act of rebellion against an agnostic Polish government.
Seeing Penderecki’s commitment to revolutionary political ideas, the Venezuelan
government no doubt thought Penderecki was the appropriate composer to write a work to
commemorate the 1983 bicentennial of the birth of Simón Bolívar (Venezuelan politician and
military leader who led the successful rebellion against Spanish rule in 1808-1819). That work
became the Viola Concerto (1983). The choice of the Viola as a solo instrument for this concerto
no doubt reflects the humbly heroic revolutionary beloved by millions, a single individual thus
far ignored, considered flawed by many, who yet overcomes and triumphs against the scourge of
the status quo. Penderecki’s Viola Concerto was premiered in Caracas on July 24, 1983. Soon
thereafter Penderecki himself conducted a performance of the work in Leningrad with Grigorij
Zyslin playing the solo. So enamored by Zyslin’s playing, Penderecki decided to write a piece
for the violist. That piece is the Cadenza heard this evening.
While sharing similar thematic and structural similarities to the Concerto, Cadenza is a
stand-alone piece with several distinct features that make it a unique musical experience.
Beginning with a similar semitone downward “sigh,” the opening phrases of both pieces sound
similar. The Concerto wanders and meanders through varying tonal landscapes. The Cadenza,
however, seems to be cognizant of its relatively imminent mortality and struggles against the
gravity of the downward semitone. This struggle breaks out into frenzy in the rapid middle
section of the piece, frenetically searching for somewhere to rest but finding no respite as the
harmonies get thicker and more dissonant. Finally the music seems to find a place to rest, though
it is a return of the semitone “sigh” from he beginning. Rather than a Hindemithic repeat of the
primary phrase, however, we feel this section as altered from the emotions of the beginning.
Whereas beginning music searches for change, this final section seems exasperated, knowing
how much effort was expended on the journey, hoping that the toil effected a change, but
worrying that it wasn’t enough. Eventually the “sigh” motif repeats continuously, poetically
fading out into silence.
We lost Krzysztof Penderecki on 29 March this year.

Sonata No. 1 in C minor for Viola and Piano (1905), York

Bowen (1884-1961)
York Bowen was born the youngest of three sons of a whisky distiller father and a piano
teacher mother. A supremely talented pianist, the young Bowen attended several regional music
schools before being awarded the Erard Scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music at
the age of 14. There he studied composition with Frederick Corder and piano with Tobias
Matthay. So talented was Bowen at both piano performance and composition that he was invited
to perform his Piano Concerto No. 1 in Eb at the Proms in 1904 with Henry Wood conducting.
(Of note is the fact that Henry Wood also conducted the premiere of Cecil Forsyth’s Viola
Concerto the year prior with the violist Emil Ferir.)
Most fortunately for us, however, is that Bowen took an interest in studying Viola and
enrolled in lessons with the titanic Lionel Tertis. Tertis had a knack for asking just about every
composer he met for a new piece for Viola and was especially effective in getting his students to
write a plethora of pieces for the instrument. The Sonata No. 1 in C minor of 1905 is the first
known large-scale work for Viola that Bowen wrote and the first in a series of compositions he
collaborated closely with Tertis on. It is likely that Tertis performed the premiere with Bowen at
the piano, one of many performances the two had together.
Sonata No. 1 in C minor is typical of Bowen’s composition style, matching tuneful
lyricism with agile virtuosity within the context of a lush, late-romantic harmonic treatment.
While this Sonata can demand a lot from the violist and draw the listener in with impressive
leaps, scales, double stops, and feats of articulation from the bow, it never devolves into gauche
spectacle. This is a particular feature of British string writing at the turn of the twentieth century;
every note seems to have a certain chewy density and stately purpose to its position in the piece.
In a typical three-movement scheme, the first movement begins with a poignant melody, almost
lopsided in its rhythm, that searches up and down for finality. The theme comes back several
times throughout the movement (a feature of the Classical/Romantic sonata form), each time
slightly altered emotionally so that Bowen takes us on a musical journey, not simply restating the
theme for formulaic purposes. The second movement is constructed around an ABA form with a
warm, almost folky melody in the first section, a dreamlike middle section where nocturnal piano
arpeggiations create a mist from which the Viola’s melody seems to flit fairy-like in and out of
focus, and the return of the principle theme feeling familiar, yet slightly mysterious with a
thinner piano accompaniment. A rondo-esque last movement takes the folky character introduced
in the second movement and turns it into a dance, interspersed with heartfelt longing gestures.
After writing the Sonata No. 1 in C minor, Bowen would become a professor at the Royal
Academy of Music at the age of 25 and would go on to serve in a military band in World War I,
returning to England after contracting pneumonia in France. After the war, Bowen continued
teaching at the RAM and would continue to find success as a concertizing pianist, though his
compositions, while remaining relatively popular with audiences, lost popularity in academia as
the compositional world moved away from the lush harmonies of the Romantic towards the
multifaceted branches of Modernism. At the time of his death in 1961 many of Bowen’s works
were unpublished and thus unperformed. However, with recent efforts to publish, record, study,
and perform his music (some recent projects of note having been spearheaded by younger
violists like Lawrence Power), hearing a piece by Bowen in today’s concert halls is fortunately
becoming more and more likely.