J.S. Bach, Keyboard Concerto in A major BWV 1055
As the municipal director of music in Leipzig, J.S. Bach had two chief responsibilities: overseeing music in the city’s churches and directing the Collegium Musicum, an ensemble of professional and university musicians which gave weekly concerts in coffee houses and public gardens. It was for the latter organization that he composed nearly all of his harpsichord concertos, including the Keyboard Concerto in A major.
Bach took over direction of the Collegium Musicum from its founder, Georg Philipp Telemann, and starting in 1729, regularly hosted Friday night programs in Gottfried Zimmermann’s coffee house (a distant precursor to today’s “alternative” venues). Bach’s affiliation with the Collegium lasted over a decade and spawned the very first solo keyboard concertos — the harpsichord having been a mostly accompanying instrument in group settings. These were not fully original compositions, but rather, “fleshed out” arrangements of concertos once written for other instruments.
The BWV 1055 concerto likely started as a (now lost) concerto for oboe d’amore, given how the keyboard’s right-hand melodies perfectly align with that instrument’s range. Scholars believe that this was one of the final concertos that Bach recast, given its notable sophistication. The opening Allegro builds on the ritornello principle pioneered by Antonio Vivaldi, in which the full ensemble, playing the main theme, alternates with showier passages for the soloist and accompanying strings.
The central Larghetto, in 12/8, is an aria for the keyboard, a melancholy tune punctuated with dissonances. The final Allegro presents a main theme that features an upward leap followed by tumbling scales. One could imagine the coffeehouse crowd clapping or stomping their feet along with the robust, dance-like rhythms.
Jessie Montgomery, Rounds for piano and string orchestra (2022)
Jessie Montgomery won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition this past February for Rounds, one of six works that pianist Awadagin Pratt commissioned a few years ago, and subsequently gathered on his 2023 album Stillpoint. Each of the six featured composers was asked to interpret a portion of T.S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece The Four Quartets. Montgomery was inspired by the early lines in Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton, which reads:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
Montgomery is no stranger to iconic texts. One of her first major works was Banner, a 2017 meditation on The Star-Spangled Banner, composed for the anthem’s 200th anniversary. A native of New York City, where she studied at the Juilliard School and New York University, Montgomery has played violin in the PUBLIQuartet and the Catalyst Quartet. This past spring, she finished a three-year tenure as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra where among her commissioned works was Hymn for Everyone, a 2021 meditation on the pandemic and social-political upheaval.
In Rounds, Montgomery draws on a potpourri of interests. She references fractals (the infinite patterns found in nature) and the writings of Andreas Weber, a German biologist and philosopher who writes about the interdependency of living creatures. “Like Eliot in Four Quartets,” she explains, “beginning to understand this interconnectedness requires that we slow down, listen, and observe both the effect and the opposite effect caused by every single action and moment.” She adds, “I’ve found this is an exercise that lends itself very naturally towards musical gestural possibilities that I explore in the work – action and reaction, dark and light, stagnant and swift.”
Rounds contains three sections: Rondine, Playing with opposites, and Fractals. The concluding section features a solo cadenza that can be partly improvised. Since its premiere in 2022, Rounds has been performed more than 30 times around the globe.
Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade
The character of Scheherazade — the young woman of The Thousand and One Nights who enters a forced marriage with a murderous king and uses her storytelling gifts to avoid execution — is the focus of two programs at this year’s Colorado Music Festival. Ravel’s 1903 song cycle Shéhérazade will conclude the season on August 4, but first comes Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s atmospheric and dreamlike symphonic suite of 1888.
The professorial Russian composer was busy completing Alexander Borodin’s unfinished opera Prince Igor in the winter of 1887 when its Central Asian setting sparked an idea: a piece based on The Thousand and One Nights, the collection of Arabian, Indian, and Persian stories written in Arabic and dating back to the Eighth Century. Orientalism had been all the rage and the stories of Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba lent themselves to the colorful, 19th century Russian orchestral palette.
Rimsky-Korsakov struggled with how closely to link music to text, and eventually decided on a suggestive, rather than literal, interpretation. Nevertheless, the suite opens with a snarling depiction of Sultan Shahryar, the misogynistic king who has one member of his harem brought to him each evening and executed the following morning. Scheherazade enters, represented by a sinuous violin melody. Skilled in the art of storytelling, she entertains him with her cliffhanging tales, delaying her execution. As the story goes, after 1001 nights, the king decides that she is suitably faithful and abandons his ruthless murder plot.
In the first movement, titled “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship,” the cellos introduce a wave-like accompaniment that may recall Rimsky-Korsakov’s service in the Russian navy. Scheherazade’s theme begins the second movement, “The Story of the Kalendar Prince,” whose title refers to the members of a wandering Sufi mystical order. After the brief solo violin introduction, plaintive bassoon and oboe melodies outline a theme and variations, punctuated with brass fanfares.
The lyrical third movement, “The Young Prince and the Young Princess,” charts a romantic narrative with rippling clarinet and flute figures, gentle harp flourishes, and percussion effects, before Scheherazade again has her say. The finale is titled “Festival at Baghdad. The Sea. Ship Breaks upon a Cliff Surmounted by a Bronze Horseman.” The mood is brisk and agitated but ends not with a shipwreck, but with a lush epilogue, as Rimsky-Korsakov summons his full powers of orchestral color and brilliance.
— Brian Wise
