Antonio Vivaldi (1678 - 1741)
Guitar Concerto in A Major

Nicknamed “The Red Priest” due his flaming red hair, Vivaldi was one of the most influential of Baroque composers and a pioneer in the composition of “program music” - that is, music written to depict a specific story or dramatic scene. Born in Venice on March 4th, 1678, Vivaldi taught for most of his life in the city’s Ospedale della Pietá, an “orphanage” that was in fact a home for the illegitimate daughters of Venetian noblemen. The Ospedale was thus well endowed by the “anonymous” fathers; the young ladies were well looked after, food and furnishings were opulent, and the standards of academic and musical training were among the highest in Italy. Most of Vivaldi’s concerti were written for his many talented pupils there. He was also involved with composing and staging operas at Venice’s Teatro Sant’Angelo.

Prolific to a fault, Vivaldi wrote 46 operas, 73 sonatas, dozens of sinfonias and sacred works, as well as over 500 concertos - half of them for violin! His “Four Seasons” for solo violin and orchestra, still number one on the list of top selling classical recordings, are wonderfully vivid musical depictions capturing the essence of these Venetian seasons, based on sonnets that Vivaldi himself penned. Much of Vivaldi’s music has a playful exuberance and rhythmic vitality that contrasts with the serious Baroque music written by many of his contemporaries. Vivaldi was a great influence on J.S. Bach as well as the next generation of composers who were forging a new, lighter “classical” style.

Vivaldi’s Guitar Concerto in A Major was originally written for lute, the gentler grandfather of the guitar. Typically, this piece has three movements in a fast-slow-fast pattern. The opening Allegro non molto is a courtly march. Vivaldi turns to the minor mode in the lovely Larghetto, which features guitar figurations over simple, pulsing chords. A bright Allegro, back in A major, dances the concerto to its conclusion.

Roberto Sierra (b. 1953)
“Pequeño Concierto” for Guitar and 5 Instruments (1998; written for David Tanenbaum)

One of Latin America’s most acclaimed and active contemporary composers, Sierra was born in Puerto Rico. He attended college in his native land and then traveled to Europe for an extensive “post-graduate” education. In 1982 he returned to Puerto Rico to assume important positions at the University of Puerto Rico and the Conservatory of Music. Sierra rose to international prominence in 1987 when his orchestral work Júbilo was premiered at Carnegie Hall with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, who hired him two years later as their composer-in-residence. Since then, Sierra’s works have been performed by the orchestras of San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Detroit, San Antonio, and Phoenix, by the American Composers Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Kronos Quartet, Continuum, England’s BBC Symphony, and at Wolf Trap, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Festival Casals, France’s Festival de Lille, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, and Germany’s Neue Musik Bonn. In the autumn of 1992, Sierra joined the composition faculty at Cornell University. His music has been extensively recorded, and in 2003 Sierra was awarded the prestigious Award in Music by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Sierra’s music is colorful and rhythmic. His Pequeño Concierto of 1998 was written for David Tanenbaum, and is scored for guitar, flute, oboe, clarinet, violin, and cello. Here are Sierra’s own program notes, as printed in the Subito Music edition of the score:

When writing Pequeño Concierto I had in mind distant images flavored by the colors and sounds of the tropics, with each movement being a study in rhythm and color. The piece begins with a broken ostinato formed by the guitar and cello, evolving into a continuous pulse that produces different rhythmic figurations by uneven accentuation. The second movement also employs the ostinato idea, which this time becomes a fixed pattern of two dotted eighth-notes followed by one eighth-note (long-long-short). This pattern travels through the entire ensemble, with the guitar joining at the end. Next follows a cadenza-like movement, where the whole ensemble becomes a single virtuoso instrument. Finally the piece ends with a quick alternation of different musical ideas that creates the illusion of several musical layers simultaneously interrupting one another. [Robert Sierra]

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750)
Piano Concerto in F minor
Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major

For over two centuries, the Bach family produced successful town musicians; organists, cantors, choir directors, court musicians, band members, and teachers. Indeed, by 1700 the very name “Bach” was synonymous with “musician” over a wide area of Germany. Johann Sebastian was the genius of the clan, but lived the modest life of a musical craftsman in the tradition of his family.

Unlike his famous contemporaries Vivaldi, Handel, and Telemann, Bach was not a well-known composer during his lifetime. His music, considered too difficult to play and old-fashioned besides, was not widely distributed or published. Bach himself never traveled outside of Thuringia, the small German province where he was born. What fame he acquired was as an outstanding organist and teacher; his sons Carl Philip Emanuel and Johann Christian were much better known and widely influential in the early Classical era. But Bach himself knew his own worth. He was a remarkably emancipated and confident artist for his time, and famously self-deprecating; asked once how he managed to play the organ so miraculously well he replied “All you have to do is press the right keys at the right time, and the instrument plays itself!”

Bach’s earliest jobs were as a church and court organist, but in 1717 he got a “break” and was hired by the personable and musical Prince Leopold of Cöthen to oversee all the music at court. Bach’s six years in Cöthen were among the happiest of his life. Recently married to the beautiful and musically talented Anna Magdalena Wilken, he had an excellent orchestra at his disposal and time to write whatever music he wished. Most of Bach’s instrumental music was written at Cöthen: the six Brandenburg Concerti, the four Orchestral Suites, the incredible unaccompanied works for violin and cello, and most of his instrumental concerti.

A virtuoso at the keyboard, Bach’s excelled at the Baroque era’s three main instruments: the clavichord, harpsichord, and organ. The earliest pianos were in development as well, and Bach certainly had a chance to test these new instruments, which improved the clavichord by making it louder and the harpsichord by giving it a wider dynamic range. For which instrument did Bach compose his keyboard concerti? Let’s set aside that question and just say that they sound great on the modern-day piano!

A dark and dramatic work, the first movement (Allegro) of Bach’s Concerto in F minor features fleet triplet figurations in the solo part, contrasting with the duple rhythms of the orchestra. A heartfelt Largo is in the relative major of A-flat; this unusual key has a warmth and richness of its own, which Bach develops with great effectiveness with an improvisatory-sounding solo part over an extremely simple accompaniment. In the third movement, Presto, we’re back in F minor and a satisfying, if serious, dance to the end.

Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg, probably first heard Bach play during the latter’s visit to Berlin in 1719 to pick up a “large harpsichord” for Prince Leopold. By 1721, when Bach presented the beautifully calligraphed score of the “Six Concertos for Several Instruments” to the Margrave, Bach’s situation in Cöthen had begun to lose it’s luster. The score’s obsequious dedication to the Margrave may represent not so much a fulfilling of a commission than a thinly veiled application for employment. We know of no response by the Margrave to Bach, and he remained in Cöthen for another two years.

Each Brandenburg Concerto is written for a different set of instruments. Number two in F Major has four soloists: trumpet, flute (originally, recorder), oboe and violin. These represent four different methods of producing sound: brass, woodwind, double reed, and strings. Bach wrote this concerto as if these instruments were interchangeable - each one plays similar material at different times in a marvelous game of musical hide-and-seek.

The first movement, Allegro, alternates tutti (orchestra) and concertino (soloists) in a grand scheme of imitation, or canon. The second movement is a simple Andante in which a two bar phrase is repeated and developed by three of our soloists, flute oboe and violin. Then, our rested trumpet player gets to start the virtuosic third movement, a cheerful fugue (Allegro assai) that has our four soloists chasing each other in high spirits - and very high register for our brave Baroque trumpet player!

Program notes © Benjamin Simon 2008