All Keyed Up program notes

I'm super weird, because I think of program notes as an opportunity, not an assignment.  My two biggest interests (music and writing) intersect, and it usually turns into something subtly persuasive, why art music is still cool.

Case in point:  I gave a collaborative-piano recital this afternoon with a soprano, a mezzo, a flutist (ahem, that is what they like to be called) and a second pianist.  Knowing me, I got the coffee theme in there somehow.

I additionally attempted to integrate coffee puns into every paragraph of the notes, but I'm sure that would have gotten me grounded (aha! ha!).  With or without, enjoy. 

Program Notes

Frédéric Chopin may have not been able to decide between composing a nocturne, an etude, and a waltz, so he blended all of them together into one of the first programmatic instrumental pieces:  the ballade.  This genre sets forth a story in several parts, each flowing seamlessly into the next.  Musicologists wonder if the Ballade No. 3 describes a disastrous Majorca vacation with his lover –uncomfortable carriage rides and loud thunderstorms kept interrupting the romantic moments.  Considering the style reminiscent of Viennese waltz, it also seems to depict a scene from a 19^th-century ballroom.  The listener will have to guess what the performer’s personal narrative is.

Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera Paride ed Elena (Paris and Helen) chronicles the mythological opening to the Iliad:  Paris, winner of the Olympian contests, has chosen love, and falls in love with Helen of Troy.  Baroque operas such as these are rarely performed in entirety (the form dramatically and musically matured later), but vocalists often single out arias for concert performance.  Tenors often choose O del mio dolce ardor, a first-act declaration of love, but it may also be performed by a female soprano, as is done here.

Ernest Chausson’s music lands stylistically between the Romanticism of his teachers Cesar Franck and Jules Massenet and the beginnings of Impressionism.  A writer and painter himself, Chausson gave his art songs a florid and elegant simplicity foreshadowing that of Debussy’s later piano works.  In this selection from 7 Melodies, the composer lushly sets a poem by Leconte de Lisle about a lover comparing a hummingbird at the flowers to his lover’s kiss. 

Imagine stopping by the city’s favorite coffeeshop after church to find Johann Sebastian Bach directing a cantata!  After Sunday morning services wrapped up, Bach found time for his other pursuits:  a side stint at Café Zimmermann, Leipzig’s largest and best niche of its kind.  Instituted by Georg Philip Telemann, its resident collegium musicum drew its support solely from the café’s sales, and often premiered Bach’s new secular works, including the comical “Coffee Cantata.”  Essentially a miniature opera, it presents an argument between a father who wants his daughter Lieschen to give up java for a husband, and the daughter who ignores his pleas.  In the end, she pretends to agree with him, but secretly spreads the word that any potential suitor must allow her to make coffee any time she pleases.  Ei! Wie schmeckt der Kaffee süße is her “love ballad.”

Clearly undistracted by its cultural scene, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart experienced one of his most productive bursts of inspiration in Vienna from 1784-86, finishing the last 12 of his 27 piano concerti.  Of this set, No. 25 (K. 503) is one of the lesser-performed, but nonetheless has a authoritative and distinguished personality – the first movement’s themes may have inspired Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 and Symphony No. 5, and the second motif hints at France’s national anthem.  The composer supplied no cadenza for this piece, so the soloist simply takes the second-inversion chord and runs with it until cuing the orchestra - or second pianist.

Once again, we explore the fine line between French music and Impressionism in Poulenc’s Flute Sonata.  As one of “Les Six,” a sextet of composers seeking a national musical voice for France, Francis Poulenc demonstrated 20^th-century techniques of polytonality alongside traditional textures in piano and chamber works.  In many cases, he and the others ended up more or less sounding “not German” instead of uniquely French, but his compositions are distinct for being lyrical.  Rapidly changing keys and meters, the piano and flute alternate the melody in the Allegro, and the wistful Cantilena sprinkles an element of jazz into the sonata art form.  Contrasted with earlier pieces of the same name, here the soloist and accompanist are artistic equals, and thus it is well-loved in collaborative repertoire. 

 “Wouldn’t you like to be on Broadway?” asks (or rather sings) Harry to his young protégée Rose in Kurt Weill’s slice-of-life 1947 musical Street Scene.  The cavatina “What Good Would The Moon Be?” is her rhetorical retort.  Aside from show-business aspirations, these words apply to any other joy in life – without the right person, or even with the wrong person, the sparkle and shimmer cannot change the way one looks at life.  Whatever life sends, the right love in whatever form it appears brings a glisten to the everyday and ordinary.

My Fair Lady ‘s Eliza Doolittle, like Rose, is also dropping hints to her romantic interest.  During “I Could Have Danced All Night,” she has just danced with her mentor Henry Higgins, and though it took place for only a few seconds during a lesson in English diction, she is abuzz with late-night exhilaration.  Sometimes the hero simply needs a little assistance in figuring out what the heroine really desires.

In George Gershwin’s song transcriptions, the pianist gets the chance to emulate a jazz singer.  For example, “The Man I Love” features an additional staff on which the pianist is to play, with the accompaniment in the lower register leaping up to “sing.”  Playfully, “Somebody Loves Me” trades off the tune between the left and right hand with unexpected changes of style.  Finally, Gershwin presents the melody of “Nobody But You” with ostentatious chords utilizing the whole keyboard like an embellished piano roll.  Though these three fall in another order in his collection of 18 arrangements, the lyrics as configured here tell a charming tale.  

~~~

P.S.  You know what's really cool?  My parents gave me a whole tub of Trader Joe's chocolate-covered espresso beans.  I won't need them to stay up late practicing any more, but oh well...