Music Mondays - Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E Minor Op.64

Written with barely enough time to be considered Monday...

This week's gem is one of my all time favorite violin concertos.

Premiered on this day, March 13, 1845 by Ferdinand David, it seemed a perfect fit for this week's Music Monday.

I love the combination of Classical finesse and Romantic expression that simmers throughout the entire piece. Heifetz, Perlman, and Nathan Cole all deem this concerto one of the most challenging in the repertoire citing the flashy (and very exposed) violin solo that happens immediately - no chance to warm up, no orchestral introduction, just wham bam fireworks straightaway! 

Check out what the Scholars ;) at Wikipedia have to say about it.......

The concerto is innovative in many respects. In the first movement alone, Mendelssohn departs from the typical form of a Classical concerto in many ways, the most immediate being the entry of the soloist almost from the outset.

Although the first movement is mostly in the conventional sonata form, Mendelssohn has the first theme played by the solo violin and then by the orchestra. Classical concertos typically opened with an orchestral introduction followed by a version of essentially the same material that incorporates the soloist.

The cadenza is also novel in that it is written out as part of the concerto and located before the recapitulation. In a typical Classical concerto, the cadenza is improvised by the performing soloist and occurs at the end of a movement, after the recapitulation and just before the final coda. Mendelssohn's written cadenza was not included in the first published version of the concerto, but instead a "streamlined" version by Ferdinand David without the contrapuntal complexity of the original. This is the most played version today.

The violin concerto stands out from previous concertos with its connected movements. There is no break between the first and second movements, with a bassoon note held between the two. The bridging passage between the last two movements begins almost immediately after the slow movement. The melody is similar to that of the opening, which hints at the cyclic form. The linking was designed to eliminate applause between movements. This would have come as a surprise to Mendelssohn's audience, who, unlike today's, were used to applauding between movements.

The concerto also calls on the soloist to be nothing more than an accompanist to the orchestra for extended periods, such as the ricochet arpeggios at the start of the recapitulation. This too was novel for a violin concerto of its time.

Legacy

Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto influenced the concertos of many other composers, who adopted aspects of it in their own concertos.

For example, the unusual placement of the cadenza before the recapitulation is reflected in the violin concertos of Tchaikovsky (where the cadenza is similarly placed) and Sibelius (where the cadenza serves to extend the development section). Moreover, following this concerto it was very rare for a composer to leave a cadenza unwritten for the soloist to improvise as in the days of Mozart and Beethoven. The linking of the three movements also influenced other concertos, such as Liszt's Second Piano Concerto.

The concerto itself was an instant success, warmly received at its premiere and well received by contemporary critics. By the end of the nineteenth century, the piece was already considered one of the greatest violin concertos in the repertoire. It would become one of Mendelssohn's most popular pieces, and was still regularly performed, even when interest in his music declined in the early twentieth century. In 1906, the year before his death, the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim told the guests at his 75th birthday party:

The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart's jewel, is Mendelssohn's.

Music Mondays - Fratres

In honor of the SoNA concert this past weekend; my musical offering this week is Fratres by Arvo Pärt for violin and accompaniment.

Silly me, when I first saw the program for our most recent concert, I assumed that our guest soloist, a young violinist named Alexi Kenney, would be performing this awesome piece. I completely forgot that there exists a version (the original, actually) for string orchestra and percussion WITHOUT solo violin.

In fact, I did not know that Fratres is ‘three-part music, written in 1977, without fixed instrumentation’ and there are about 17 different versions listed on the Wikipedia page. Fratres is a “mesmerizing set of variations on a six-bar theme combining frantic activity and sublime stillness that encapsulates Pärt’s observation that ‘the instant and eternity are struggling within us’.”

The following films feature Fratres in their soundtracks:

• 1987 film Rachel River
• 1997 German film Winter Sleepers
• 2005 six-part BBC documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ produced by Laurence Rees, used the composition performed in 1997 by the Hungarian State Opera Orchestra, conducted by Tamás Benedek
• 2006 film La Morte Rouge directed by Victor Erice
• 2007 film There Will Be Blood directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
• 2013 film To the Wonder directed by Terrence Malick
• 2013 film The Place Beyond the Pines directed by Derek Cianfrance
• 2013 teaser trailer for the film A Single Shot, starring Sam Rockwell
• 2013 film Violette directed by Martin Provost
• 2015 film Le Club directed by Pablo Larraín

So here is my favorite version of the piece ~

....and here is the version we performed

P.S. I have started a Spotify playlist of all of the music listed in these posts. Please follow or subscribe to it, as I will be updating it weekly with every Music Monday Post on the Blog. I set that account up pre-Active Violinist so search for the user okmurray and the playlist is titled “Active Violinist – Music Mondays.”

Enjoy!

Music Mondays - Prince of Clouds

Fact: I spend a great deal of time listening to music. 

This happens for a variety of reasons ~ 

I like music.

To prepare for upcoming concerts that I am performing

To hear new albums by artists I love.

To discover new artists.

To explore new repertoire.

To experience unfamiliar performers and creators.

To revisit some of my favorite music. 

There are some incredibly talented performers, composers, ensembles, collaborators, and creators out there and sometimes I just want to share the sounds that I cannot get enough of myself.

Every Monday I plan to share some of the music that I love. Some of it will be music that I am preparing for a concert, some of it will be things I have recently discovered, some will be things I hope to one day perform, and some will simply be old favorites that I just can't stop loving. 

I hope you enjoy!

This first one is Prince of Clouds by Anna Clyne, performed by Jennifer Koh and Jaime Laredo with the Curtis 20/21 Ensemble.

I discovered this weekend by accident and have been listening to it on repeat ever since.

Anna Clyne

(from her website) www.annaclyne.com

London-born Anna Clyne is a Grammy-nominated composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music. Described as a "composer of uncommon gifts and unusual methods" in a New York Times profile and as "dazzlingly inventive" by Time Out New York, Clyne’s work often includes collaborations with cutting-edge choreographers, visual artists, filmmakers, and musicians worldwide. 

Appointed by Music Director Riccardo Muti, Clyne served as a Mead Composer-in-Residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2010-2015. She also recently served as Composer-in-Residence for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra during the 2015-2016 season and for L’Orchestre national d’Île-de-France from 2014-2016. This season, Clyne was selected by the League of American Orchestras and New Music USA to serve as the Music Alive Composer-in-Residence with the Berkeley Symphony through the 2018-2019 season. She has been commissioned by such renowned organizations as American Composers Orchestra, BBC Radio 3, BBC Scottish Symphony, Carnegie Hall, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Houston Ballet, London Sinfonietta, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, and the Southbank Centre, and her work has been championed by such world-renowned conductors as Marin Alsop, Pablo Heras-Casado, Riccardo Muti, Leonard Slatkin, and Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Clyne was nominated for the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her double violin concerto, Prince of Clouds. She is also the recipient of several prestigious awards including the 2016 Hindemith Prize; a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; awards from Meet the Composer, the American Music Center, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Jerome Foundation; and prizes from ASCAP and SEAMUS. She was nominated for the 2014 Times Breakthrough Award (UK) and is the recipient of a grant from Opera America to develop a new opera, Eva. 

Recent highlights include the world premieres of Masquerade for the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Marin Alsop at the Last Night of the Proms; This Lunar Beauty for the Britten Sinfonia and soprano Julia Doyle; RIFT, a symphonic ballet in collaboration with choreographer Kitty McNamee for Marin Alsop and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra; Pocket Book VIII for Roomful of Teeth; Threads & Traces for 100 cellos, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and performed at Disney Hall; and her violin concerto, The Seamstress, performed by Jennifer Koh with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Share your thoughts in a comment! Also - let me know what you are listening to and loving these days.

Enjoy!