Martinů: Duo No.1 for violin & cello


Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959)

The 1927 Duo for violin and cello was composed in the years when Martinů was the leading Czech musical correspondent in Paris, shuttling back and forth to Prague and reporting on the Parisian musical scene to the Czech cultural press. In Paris he studied composition with Albert Roussel and assimilated many of the trends of the time including jazz, surrealism, and neoclassicism. He was especially taken with Stravinsky's music. During these years he likely heard such characteristic works as Stravinsky's Octet, Concerto for Piano and Winds, and Serenade in A. But as much as one can hear the influence of Stravinsky's neoclassical style in his music at this time, Martinů's own voice clearly comes through.

One of the interesting features of the Duo is just how incredibly close the violin and cello lines remain throughout the work, both vertically, as they often share a narrow range of pitches, and horizontally, as they nip at one another's heels in close or overlapping imitation (stretto) and split phrases (hocket). Composer Mel Powell has given an updated definition of 'counterpoint' as 'the art of creating multiplicity.' One normally expects some sort of counterpoint in a work for two distinct instruments, especially if one is voiced in the upper register and the other in the lower. But Duo fails Powell's criterion almost entirely (at least at the 'note-against-note' surface level). And this is where its genius lies. If you close your eyes so that you don't actually see the two performers, you begin to hear the work not as two distinct lines of notes tangling and weaving in and out, but as a kind of ribbon of many colors – call it a 'hypermelody'. (But remember, you have to close your eyes and just listen.)
–– Program Note for Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival by Stephen Soderberg (2016)



Duo for violin and cello, 1927, Paris
1. Praeludium. Andante Moderato
2. Rondo. Allegro con brio
Jakub Junek (vl), Ivan Vokac (vc)
(Winners of Concertino Praga 2006, Rudolfinum, Prague),


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

A Concert and a Painting 1911

Image
On Monday, January 2nd, 1911, there was an historic concert in Munich. The program was devoted entirely to the music of Arnold Schönberg: two string quartets, five lieder, and three short pieces for piano. I doubt anyone in the audience at the time would have considered the concert significant, let alone historic, except for Schönberg and his circle – and one man who had recently arrived in Munich, Wassily Kandinsky. He was so taken with Schoenberg's music that he made this sketch for a painting: The sketch indicates colors for the final work: 'Schw[arz]' = black for the piano; 'gelb' = yellow for a mass or large space on the lower right; and  'w[eiß]'  = white for the two posts and the dress of the pianist, Etta Werndorff (see Schönberg's more figurative portrait of Werndorff below). Etta Werndorff, pianist Portrait by Arnold Schönberg Kandinsky completed the painting only a couple of days later. In both sketch and painting, the shapes
Read more

Martinů

Image
Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959) "A system of uncertainty has entered our daily life. The pressures of mechanization and uniformity to which it is subject call for protest and the artist has only one means of expressing this, by music." 1942 – Bohuslav Martinů composed his First Piano Quartet. It would be nice if we could extend the line of tradition in a simple, straightforward way between Dvořák and Martinů – both came from peasant Czech origins; both studied in the organ school at the Prague Conservatory; Dvořák’s student Josef Suk was one of Martinů’s first teachers. But Europe’s musical map (let alone its socio-political map) had changed too much in the intervening years due in large part to the search for new melodic and harmonic resources that had begun in the romantic era.
Read more

The Basics: Berio's Duetti

Image
Image courtesy of Naxos Records Luciano Berio (1925–2003) Duetti for two violins It can happen that a violinist friend tells a composer one night that, other than those of Bartók, there are not enough violin duets today. And it can happen that the composer immediately sets himself to writing duets that night until dawn… and then more duets in moments of leisure, in different cities and hotels, between rehearsals, travelling, thinking of somebody, when looking for a present... This is what happened to me and I am grateful to that nocturnal violinist whose name [musicologist Leonardo Pinzauti (1926–2015)] is given to one of these   Duetti . [1] This is how Luciano Berio described the genesis of the 34 Duetti for two violins. With the exception of the first duet – a nod to those Bartók violin duos – each of the pieces is associated with one of his friends, inspired by "personal reasons and situations" and connected by "the fragile thread of daily occas
Read more