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March 2004 Program Notes
Telemann and Friends
by Mary Burke
Tonight's program is devoted to a pair of instruments that rarely get to take the stage with an orchestra behind them. The recorder and viola da gamba certainly do have their respective concerto repertoires, but they seem quite puny beside the body of literature for, say, the violin or keyboard. Why this apparent neglect of two perfectly respectable and popular instruments?
Physics and fashions combined to place them at a disadvantage. Both these instruments are by nature comparatively quiet. The recorder's volume cannot be pushed beyond a certain point without changing the pitch or producing overtones, and the viol's flat back prevents its sound from projecting as effectively as that of the concave-backed violin family instruments. These qualities made them perfectly well suited for performing in small ensembles and intimate venues, such as the salons of noble families. Around the turn of the 18th century, however, the musical scene in Europe was undergoing decisive changes: Music was becoming an increasingly public event, and concert halls had to grow to accommodate the larger audiences.
At the same time, the orchestral sound from Italy was becoming firmly entrenched in Europe, and the violin and its siblings with their brilliant, resonant sound—excellent for filling those larger concert halls—were well on their way to complete ascendancy. The concerto collections of Corelli and Vivaldi took Europe by storm and helped to popularize the genre as well as to cement the large string band into place as the core of the orchestra. Other composers, naturally enough, adapted to the prevailing conditions and wrote music centered around these big, beefy ensembles (beefy by Baroque standards, at any rate).
With acoustic and stylistic trends heading in this direction, the more soft-spoken instruments that worked so well for chamber music found themselves largely excluded from the orchestral scene. Luckily, some composers took up the challenge of writing concerti for them; and inevitably, one of those composers had to be the pathologically productive Georg Philipp Telemann.
Telemann wrote in one of his three autobiographies that the concerto did not come very easily to him, as evidenced by the fact that he produced only about 125 of them. He further commented that he was not that impressed by music packed with virtuoso writing simply for the sake of display, and so he resisted the tendency in concerto writing to give the soloist a lot of pyrotechnic passagework. He generally kept to his guiding principle of "giving each instrument that which suits it [and] exploiting the potential of each to the utmost." Thus his concerti, and particularly the earlier ones, have a somewhat more "cooperative" character, with the focus on sound colors and combinations rather than on the back-and-forth of soloist vs. orchestra. In this regard they lean in the direction of the sonata, and Telemann often departed from the typical three-movement Vivaldian concerto scheme to use the slow-fast-slow-fast sequence of the sonata da chiesa.
His excellent understanding of the qualities and strengths of numerous instruments (he played nearly a dozen himself) allowed him to group them in the most unlikely combinations and engineer a concerto that would show them all to advantage. In his œuvre we find concerti for: recorder and horn; two bagpipes; two flutes and calchedon (a/k/a mandora, which Telemann played); three horns and violin; two chalumeaus and two bassoons; and recorder, viol, cornet, and three trombones. The combination of recorder and viol seems fairly ordinary by comparison, and in Telemann's expert hands the slightly breathy voice of the former works very well with the mellow tones of the latter. The E minor concerto for flute and recorder highlights the unique combined sound of two similiar instruments without effacing their individual identities.
Interspersed with these concerti we will hear several chamber works that display the viol and the recorder in their natural habitat, so to speak.
The trios by Telemann and Leclair are fairly well known to concert audiences, and great favorites with performers because they're such fun to play. Telemann gives the two solo lines a sunny, carefree interplay that contrasts nicely with the more elegant conversation of Leclair.
From Marin Marais we have a fine example of the tombeau, a popular type of piece in French Baroque music. Laments for specific persons had a long history in Western music, under a variety of names: planctus, plainte, déploration, elegy, lamento, apothéose, etc. The tombeau is an instrumental genre with a rhetorical structure similar to a funeral oration, and ideally reflective of the personality of the deceased. While many laments honored a public figure, such as a monarch or eminent composer, tombeaux were often more personal, in memory of a teacher, patron, or close colleague. Marais wrote several of these pieces, most notably this homage to his teacher, the mysterious M. de Sainte Colombe. (Coincidentally, Sainte Colombe's best-known work is the Tombeau les Regrets, one of the most beautiful and evocative examples of the genre.)
These works belong to the viol's golden age in the decades bracketing the turn of the 18th century. By the time of Bach's death in 1750, the viol had already become something of a relic. However, a few holdouts remained in the form of virtuoso players and the composers who wrote new music for them (some, like Abel, eliminated the middle man and wrote their own). The Berlin-based harpsichordist Christoph Schaffrath did his part around 1760, producing an unaccompanied viol duet that could easily be mistaken for Mozart.
Little needs to be said of the Pachelbel canon, which is arguably the most identifiable piece of Baroque music in existence—except to mention that it originally came as a set, paired with an attractive gigue that is arguably the least identifiable piece of Baroque music in existence.
Although he has achieved immortality on the basis of a single four-minute piece, Pachelbel deserves a little more notice, if only for the influence that he had on the young J.S. Bach. A respected organist and composer, Pachelbel occasionally tutored some of Johann Ambrosius Bach's children over a period of years beginning in 1677. When Sebastian was old enough, he also received some instruction from the master, and would later study his scores to learn composition. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach later reported that his father "admired" Pachelbel's music. (His opinion of the canon is not recorded.) Without Pachelbel, would J.S. Bach have reached quite the same heights?
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