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CONCERTO FOR VIOLIN AND STRINGS ©

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SOLOISTS; — CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

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cover we C WILLIAM 8. HARVEY

I HE ASTONISHING current renaissance of interest in baroque-era music —an interest apparently spontaneously generated by recordings and broadcasts —already has had ironical, perhaps revolutionary, consequences:

e It has exposed the fatal weakness of musica! aesthetics—while scholars can convincingly “prove” that the mighty Bach Mass in B minor, say, indeed a masterpiece, they somehow always fail miserably to account for the literally irresistible charm of such “little,” supposedly routine divertissements as the concertos of Vivaldi, Telemann, et al.

e In esiablishing more securely than ever before the greatness of Bach and Handel it has demonstrated the needlessness of stressing their grandeur negatively, by belittling the stature of their predecessors and contemporaries, many of whom were genuinely outstanding in their own right.

ə Thus, some of these “other” masters are finally escaping the irreversible fate of Humpty Dumpty after his great fall: honors, as well as new life itself, gradually are being restored to at least some of the victims of posthumous (mainly nineteenth-century) neglect and even denigration.

The prime example of such victimization long has been the once- mightiest-of-all,Georg Philipp Telemann. Bach’s and Handel’s senior by four years, he outlived them by 17 and 8 years respectively and out-produced them more remarkably still: his yet-to-be- fully -collected complete works will prob- ably equal those of Bach and Handel combined—and this despite a latish start. Prodigy enough to compose an opera (in the style of Lully) at 12, he was 23 before he abandoned legal studies to become a professional musician— organist and concert promoter at Leipzig in 1704; then (after some years in Sorau, Eisenach, and Frankfort-am-Main, from 1721 until his death at Ham- burg where, in addition to composing and teaching, ‘directing opera produc- tions and editing a music journal, he devoted his spare time to engraving some of his own works for publication, (There were indeed giants in those days!)

Ironically, Telemann's fabulous productivity and facility were to be the main indictments brought against him by later judges, conveniently forgetting that most great composers have been guilty of the first charge at least. As for facility, those who have equated genius with effort should be reminded of the candidly coarse young Mozart’s disdain for a musician he had met in Italy “who cannot write as I do, I mean, as sows piddle!”

But it was more likely a kind of perverse jealousy on the part of early Bach devotees which accounted for the active enmity toward Telemann. He was not only envied for his own fame but hated for that fame’s having over- shadowed Bach’s. It has never been forgotten—or by some, forgiven—that ‘Telemann was the first choice, and Bach only the third, to succeed Kuhnau at Leipzig in 1722-23. Yet how childishly silly such an attitude is! Bach well may have smarted from the rebuff at the time, but he surely held no grudge against the man he had chosen as godfather for his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, or the composer whose works he continued to copy or transcribe for his own and his pupils’ use.

In any case, as the late Madame Landowska always insisted, “masterpieces are not wolves and do not devour each other.” In the world of music, as in heaven, there is ample room for many mansions.

aay TELEMANN legacy, like that of all masters, includes works in

eno: mously varied forms and styles. In his own day, it probably was his writing for the church and the stage that was most highly esteemed.

Stylistically, he was notable as a “progressive” composer, an appreciative

transmitter of French influences, and a foreshadower of the immediately

following rococo and the slightly later romantic periods. To present-day ears, however, the lighter, more galant and “modern” attributes of Telemann’s music seem less prominent in his concertos—at least insofar as this repertory (which has been estimated to include some 170 items, not counting the many suites which are concertos in all but name) is gradually becoming known. To

our tastes, indeed, these works often seem to be his most solidly satisfying achievements, as well as those best representative (in the Telemann canon at last) of early eighteenth-century German traditions.

Yet that is net.to say that there is not extraordinary variety in these concertos—in the choice of solo instruments and in the nature of the idiomatic expressive purposes to which they are put; or that there is any lack of

conciseness in the writing. (Productivity and facility don’t necessarily mean longwindedness: none of the 15 movements recorded here runs over 6 minutes; only three run over 5, while eight run less than 3 minutes each.) There is no lack either of the delectably unexpected even in such terse and traditionally taut baroque music-making or even in so miniscule a cross-section of the Telemann concerto output as the present four diversified examples—only one of which (insofar as the current international discography can be checked) ever has been recorded before.

Indeed the very first concerto, that for two horns, is surprising straight from its richly sonorous Maestoso opening, which finds the golden-voiced soloists immediately in full chant rather than waiting to be conventionally introduced by an orchestral ritornello. Although the four-movement form harks back to that of the earlier concerto da chiesa (church concerto), the

spirit of the music itself is what we now think of as highly “romantic.” Note particularly (in the earnestly songful first section of the third, Grave, move- ment) the use of sustained horn tones for the obvious purpose of atmospheric invocation sclely. And although both the busy-ness of the Allegro second movement and the catchy swing of the Vivace fourth consistently involve characteristically baroque textures and formulae, there is a minor surprise in

appeared in three quarterly “productions, ás

tne relative absence of the immemorially conventional horn-part huntit., faufares- which are only hinted at here, even in the patently out-of-doorsy festivities of the finale.

This work also is uncommonly interesting for its provenance and for its having served as one of the known sources of Handelian “borrowings.” Although its romantic nature well might suggest a later date, the B flat Concerto appeared in print in 1733 as the third item in the third “production” (series) of one of Telemann's most celebrated publications. This was the Musique de Table (Tafelmusik; cr in English, “Dinner Music”) which

each of which comprised an orchestral suite, quartet, concerto, trio, solo sonata, and orchestral conclusion. Handel, a friend of Telemann’s from their boyhood and one of the many celebrity subscribers to this series, thriftily wrote off the cost of his subscrip- tion by exploiting some of its musical ideas for his own: (undoubtedly, hurriedly -prepared) organ concertos. Besides using part of the premiére production Flute Sonata in his Op. 7, No. 4, he adapted the Maestoso of the present Concerto for Two Horns to serve in the Pomposo first movement of his Concerto in B flat for Organ, Op. 7, No. 6—which dates from some time between 1740 and 1751, although it was not published (posthumously) until 1761. Here the surprise is perhaps not so much that Handel liked Telemann’s ideas well enough to borrow them, but that for once his metamorphosis did not represent a marked improvement—at least in the opinion of one listener who (fervent Handelian though he may be) finds the original in this case by far the more satisfying version.

The Trumpet Concerto in D, best known of several by Telemann in the same key, also is in the older four-movement form: here Adagio, Allegro, Grave, Allegro. Again the soloist, rhapsodically songful, appears at the very beginning; again the conventional solo-instrumental idioms (in this case, martial fanfares) are more often implied than explicit, even in the bracingly vigorous Allegros. Although the general feeling is much less romantic than that of the Concerto for Horns (except perhaps in the poetic Grave for strings alone, trumpet tacel), and although a number of Telemann trumpet concertos date from the 1730’s (mainly written in all likelihood for some now-forgotten Hamburg virtuoso), this one may be of later date if one is to judge by the apparent emancipation from baroque continuo orthodoxies, a freedom for which the composer was noted in his later years—and perhaps also by the relative lack of special exploitations of the trumpet’s highest (clarino) register, exploitations consistently characteristic of most earlier baroque-era writing for this instrument.

A typical harpsichord-cum-'cello realization of the continuo part is heard, however, in one of the exceedingly rare concertos ever written for the curious, slightly bigger brother of the familiar oboe—the oboe d’amore. Telemann is generally credited by historians as the first celebrity composer to weite for this instrument (invented c. 1720) in his Der Sieg der Schénheit of 1722, but it is of course best known nowadays for its frequent, and unforgettable, use in Bach’s choral works—if not for the leading role it was given by Richard Strauss in his Sinfonia Domestica.

The uniquely distinctive timbre of this bulbed-bell alto oboe, pitched a third below the regular oboe, has been described (by Philip Bate) as “more sombre than that of the treble, less weighty than that of the tenor” (i.e., the English horn). But infinitely superior to any attempted verbal description of its tonal coloring and expressive potentials is a single hearing of the present work in which it is so engagingly starred. The opening Siciliana begins with a ritornello for full string ensemble, to which the oboe d’amore soon adds its hauntingly bitter-sweet voice; the hearty second-movement Allegro features more solo floridity and some “Scotch snaps;” in the Largo a reneated broadly sonorous passage for full strings encloses a longer central section for lyrical soloist with continuo only; and the Vivace finale alternates scampering tuttis with perkily whirling solo/continuo passages.

Verbal descriptions are if anything even more futile for the last—and the most terse of all—of the present Concertos, that in G for Violin. One can note that it alone of the four is written in the newer three-movement form (here Presto, Andante, Allegro) favored by Vivaldi and of course by later classical and romantic composers. One can suggest that here Telemann may have been deliberately imitating many Vivaldian stylistic traits, not only in the concerto- grosso alternations of full- and small-ensemble passages but also in both the pounding drive of the outer movements and the fine-spun lyricism of. the Andante. Personally, I’m reminded immediately of my private, not entirely joking, criteria for the pure baroque style: “Music that keeps going; knows exactly where it's going; and when it gets there, promptly stops,” And perhaps its very lack of surprising features makes this particular work even more representative of the fascinating mystery of the baroque-era concerto-in- general.

Tu AT MYSTERY is a triple one: How is it that distinctive individuality of each work is somehow achieved regardiess of the degree to which it relies on seemingly “formula” patterns? (It’s only to/the uninitiated that all baroqte music ever seems to sound alike; just as it's only¿im the night that all cats are grey!) How did composers manage to concentrate so much provocative musical meaning into such short movements? And, finally, where ‘did ‘the. baroque- era masters ever find such surplus eneigy with which to fill even: their most “routine” creations to the very bursting point?

Happily, no answers are necessary for us to marvel at such miracles and. to draw freely on these inexhaustible reservoirs of sheer vitality, »

—R. D. DARRELL

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