About the Program
Notes by John Henken
During the years that Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was the court organist in Weimar, he made extensive study of Italian music from Frescobaldi to Vivaldi. He made solo organ transcriptions of several of Vivaldi’s concertos, but he also created works fusing the Italian concerto style with the North German organ music in which he had been raised, a fusion that is the basis of most of his subsequent music.
Among these works is the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C major, BWV 564, the three main sections of which mirror the standard Italian concerto form. It begins as a bravura toccata in the manner of Buxtehude, but with the kind of spectacular pedal solo that was a hallmark of Bach’s organ music. This toccata, however, soon develops the regular rhythmic energy and motivic definition of the Italian style, albeit delivered in a North German polyphonic framework. The Adagio is a concerto-style slow movement, one of Bach’s gorgeously long-limbed melodies arching over a continuo-like accompaniment, connected to the following fugue by a short, intense, chromatic Grave interlude. The Fugue is, well, a fugue of typical brilliance. But it is at the same time a dancing finale, a leaping jig for the fingers and feet, with comic hesitations and an enigmatic, understated ending.
We know Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was a piano prodigy, but it is worth remembering that he also wowed Europe on the organ during all those Wunderkind tours with his father, who claimed that his son played the organ even better than he did the harpsichord and piano. It was Mozart who dubbed the organ the “King of Instruments,” and his final post with Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg was as court organist.
Mozart’s three principal organ compositions, however, were created in the last year of his life for the mechanical organs of the Müller Wax Museum and Art Gallery in Vienna. Mozart accepted the commission for the money, and complained about how bored he was with the work in a letter to his wife in October 1790. He completed the first piece in December that year, and the Fantasia in F minor, K. 608 — “An Organ Piece for a Clock” in the composer’s catalog — in March 1791. Although only about ten minutes long, it is quite a substantial miniature, if that is not an oxymoron. Complaints notwithstanding, Mozart lavished considerable contrapuntal ingenuity and his inimitable melodic grace on this piece. After a richly characterized introduction, Mozart launches an Allegro fugato. There is an elegant Andante diversion in the relative major, and then an even fierier fugato picks up where the first section left off to intensify the finale of this small masterpiece.
Organist/composer Jean Guillou (b. 1930) studied at the Paris Conservatoire, principally with Marcel Dupré, but also with Maurice Duruflé, and Olivier Messiaen, and his own music is very much in that distinguished line. He effectively exploits the colors and sonorities of the organ (he also collaborates with organ builders in designing instruments), and rhythm, whether in insistent ostinatos or in demanding cross-patterns, is another characteristic of his style. “If I had to provide a definition, I would say that the musical instrument is a form of transport between thought and its rhythm (just as rhetoric is a form of transport between thought and poetic works),” Guillou has said, and his music certainly bears out that understanding.
Scènes d’enfants, Guillou’s Op. 28, was composed in 1974. It is not, however, anything as innocent or purely reflective as its title suggests. “The childhood described here is carrying the seed, in all its purity, of all positive and negative qualities to be found in fully-grown men: a childhood both angelic and diabolical, and indeed very close to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, which was the direct inspiration for this monodrama,” according to the description on its publisher’s website. The music of the work — 18 minutes in Guillou’s recording — is tranquil and turbulent in turns, but with an emphasis on the macabre and eerie befitting James’ classic psychological ghost story. Ideas tumble over themselves impulsively, seldom developed but occasionally recalled, like stream-of-consciousness memories. In this context, the passionate and aggressive finale may be as open to Freudian (and other) interpretations as the James novella.
The legend of Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) already alive at the composer’s death held that he was a wild, original, but untutored genius, much in need of technical correction. Certainly Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov believed that, and gave himself unstintingly to his friend’s work, completing, editing, and arranging many of Mussorgsky’s works.
Among these was Pictures at an Exhibition, ironically a piece that Mussorgsky ostensibly finalized himself. Mussorgsky composed Pictures in the summer of 1874 as a suite of solo piano pieces inspired by a retrospective exhibit of watercolors, drawings, and designs by his friend Viktor Hartmann, who had died the previous year. Each of the character pieces captures something of the whimsy and fantasy of a specific Hartmann work, introduced and linked by a “Promenade” that depicts Mussorgsky (or the listener) strolling through the exhibit. (Mussorgsky brings the “Promenade” music into the “Catacombs,” effectively drawing the viewer/listener into the picture itself; he also transforms the “Promenade” theme for the “Great Gate of Kiev” finale.)
Rimsky actually made relatively few changes to the solo piano edition of Pictures that he prepared in 1886. He gave the work to his pupil Mikhail Tushmalov, however, to orchestrate for a concert Rimsky conducted in St. Petersburg in 1891. Many others have been inspired by Mussorgsky’s vigorous music, so colorful in its own right. The orchestration by Maurice Ravel is probably the adaptation best known in classical circles, but everyone from marimba duos to prog-rock groups have tried to express something new out of Mussorgsky’s inspired original.
“However, a transcription is only justified insofar as it makes us forget that it is a transcription, causing the new instrument and the musical work to meld together as one body,” Guillou wrote (in Lucien Gerber’s translation) in the program note for his recording of his arrangement. “Since the original opus was composed for the piano, I took great care in preparing my transcription to avoid the danger of making the piece sound like a score for the piano played on an organ. Passages specifically written to take advantage of the inherent qualities of the piano would have sounded unbearable. For that reason, those passages had to be altered to bring out an organistic color in the fullest sense of that term. Here, I am thinking particularly of the grandiose transition between ‘Baba Yaga’ and ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’ and in the latter, of the great chorale whose counterpoint I have embellished in order to avoid triteness which otherwise would have resulted from the rigidity of the sustained chords of the organ.”
John Henken is Director of Publications for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. [Summary]
