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I'm surprised you even ask. Here's the theme.
Hello there, I'm Peter Shickley, and this is Shickley Mix. A program dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal. Or as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good.
And it's always a good idea to thank the hand that feeds you. And in our case, the hand consists of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts.
With additional support from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and from this forward-thinking radio station, which provides me with this county of the arts,
and once the program has been perpetrated, it is distributed far and wide by PRI, Public Radio International.
Soloists can sometimes be a picky lot. An orchestra manager once told me, as he was driving us to the concert, about how different various soloists were in their preference for arrival time.
Some liked to be at the hall an hour before the concert, whereas others liked to get there just as the concert started, and some, he said, didn't want to get there before their piece was ready to start.
If they arrived at the hall earlier than planned, the manager would have to drive them around until it was time for their particular piece on the program. Otherwise, they'd get too nervous waiting backstage.
A practice fraught, it seems to me, with peril. All it would take is a little traffic jam or something. But sometimes it isn't the soloist's fault. One well-known violinist was hung up by bad weather,
airports closed down. He missed the rehearsal completely, but it was one of the standard violin concertos, so the orchestra rehearsed without him. But he wasn't even there when the concert started. But finally his plane came in,
and the manager got him to the hall with only minutes to spare. He changed into his tails as the first piece finished, tuned up his violin, and walked out on the stage with the conductor, breathless but in time.
As they bowed, the violinist thought to himself, thank goodness it's the Brahms concerto. I've got a couple of minutes worth of orchestra time. I've got to get an orchestral introduction to catch my breath and collect myself.
He nods to the conductor and begins to relax. But when the orchestra begins, he instinctively whips his fiddle up to his chin
because he realizes with horror that it's not the Brahms, it's the Mendelssohn, in which the soloist enters about two and a half seconds after the beginning.
Heart attack time in the life of a soloist. There's a famous story, and as with conductor stories, I've heard the same story told about different pairs of artists. It's the Schumann piano concerto,
which opens like this.
But in this performance, the conductor forgets to check that the soloist is ready. Which, as a matter of fact, he isn't. He's adjusting the height of his piano bench when he hears that first chord
and has to scramble like mad to play the opening passage. So, when the first movement is over, and the conductor has taken his handkerchief out of his pocket and is in the middle of mopping his brow,
the pianist starts the second movement, giving the conductor about one second to drop his handkerchief and bring the orchestra in.
Hostile hijinks in the concert hall. But I think that the height of hostility must have been a performance of one of the Brahms piano concertos. Glenn Gould was the soloist, and Leonard Bernstein the conductor.
And Bernstein disagreed so much, so virulently with the way Gould played it, that before they started, he turned around, this is in the concert, he turned around and publicly disassociated himself
from the interpretation. I gotta say, unless there were mitigating circumstances that I don't know about, I don't think Bernstein's action was defensible.
But it is true that some soloists act as if they're on a higher plane than that occupied by mere musicians. Gould was a real eccentric,
but there are some soloists who feel like they're walking on the clouds. Today's show is about concertos, and the name of today's show comes from the old Latin phrase
primus inter pares et non oblivisque sodalis. First among equals, and don't you forget it, Buster. Now of course we could, and maybe will,
do a whole bunch of programs about concertos. But today, let's look at their relationship to echo music, and quasi-antiphonal music, by which I mean pieces that don't involve spatial separation,
but do involve two opposing musical groups, or sizes of group. Here's a pair of pieces. The first one, though stylized, makes a pretense of actually imitating the physical phenomenon of echo.
The ends of phrases are repeated by a smaller group, much softer. In the second piece, there's no pretense of natural echo, but it's still an echo principle,
whole long sections are repeated by a smaller group more softly. Listen especially to the middle section of the second piece. The full string complement is contrasted with solo strings.
I guess you could call these two pieces examples of romantic echo and platonic echo.
What I've called the romantic echo piece was from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.
The witches sang, In our deep vaulted cell, that's where the echo comes in, the charm we'll prepare, followed by the echo dance of furies. The English concert under Trevor Pinnock.
Then the platonic echo was the minuet movement from Bach's first orchestral suite with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields under Sir Neville Mariner.
Now two things that happened were that the solo group, doing the echoing, the solo group got more independent, having its own material rather than just echoing that of the larger group.
And also, within the solo group, the first violin became more prominent. In this next piece, the solo group is two violins, viola and continuo,
but all you pay attention to is the first violin. He's definitely primus inter pares.
The beginning of the second movement of Corelli's Opus 6, No. 12. Trevor Pinnock in the English concert, with Simon Standage on first violin. The piece is called a concerto grosso,
but it's easy to see how this developed into the solo violin concerto. The other evolutionary branch of the concerto grosso, distinctive small group versus large group,
continued to flourish well into the 18th century, Bach's Brandenburg concertos being the most famous example. You know, my maternal grandmother was a Brandenburg,
but I'm just plain old Peter Schickely, and the program is Schickely Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International. Today's show is about the solo concerto,
and it's called First Among Equals, and don't you forget it, Buster. It wasn't always like that, you know. Soloists weren't always such prima donnas. They really were first among equals.
In the beginning, the soloist was one of the gang, quite literally. He was a member of the orchestra. A violin soloist didn't cool his heels during the orchestral introduction. He played along with the other first violins.
But that doesn't mean that the level of virtuosity wasn't high. The history of the violin concerto begins in the 17th century, and already by the end of that century, those fiddle players were burning up the fingerboard.
But what happened during the next couple of centuries is that the orchestra got bigger and bigger, which made the contrast between the solo violin and the orchestra greater and greater. Here's a composite concerto,
that illustrates this development. The first movement is from the early 18th century, the second from the late 18th century, and the third from the early 20th century.
The inter-era violin concerto lasts about 13 minutes. I'll see you then.
The first movement of the inter-era violin concerto was from Vivaldi's Concerto in A Major for violin, strings, and continuo, RV 346.
That catalog number, RV 346, indicates that it was one of the Vivaldi manuscripts found in a motorhome in Naples, Florida, when Frank Buddy Boyd, the son of Roy Vivaldi,
died of unnatural causes in 1978. That was Paul Peabody on lead violin with the Philharmonia Virtuosi under Richard Capp. The slow movement of our concerto
was from Mozart's Serenade in D, K 185. K 185 is a mountain in the Himalayas about 100 miles west of K2. You never know where you're going to find manuscripts.
Kenneth Sillitoe was the soloist in that, and Mariner was conductor. And finally, as a finale, we heard the scherzo from Prokofiev's
Violin Concerto No. 1, Opus 19. Opus, of course, is a penguin. That was David Oistrakh with the State Radio Orchestra, conducted by Kirill Kondrashin.
There's a couple of weird things there in the fidelity of the recording, but that's the way it is on the recording. You know, not that anyone's ever going to ask me, but if someone did ask me
what my favorite violin concerto is, I think I'd have to pick that one, Prokofiev's first. I love that piece. Actually, the very word concerto is interesting,
partly because of the confusion in English concerning the word and the prefix con, con. It can mean against, as in pro and con, or contrariness. Or, on the other hand,
it can mean together, as in conflate. Uh, what's the noun form of conflate? Conflatulence, I guess. To con can mean to commit to memory or to study closely.
And then, uh, like an area ruled by a king is a kingdom, and the area ruled by a prison inmate is a condom. And then there's con in the sense of scam, and it used to be slang for consumption.
Whole lot of things. Well, here's what Grove's dictionary says. I find this very interesting. Concerto probably comes from the Latin concertare, to contend. Dispute, debate.
But the primary Italian meaning of concertare is to arrange, agree, get together. And this seems to have been the case both generally and musically
since at least the early 16th century. That's very interesting to me because you often read about the soloists in concertos being pitted against the orchestra. And I think that that sense of
opposition, as in a battle, is greatly exaggerated in some writings on the concerto. I guess it's part of the romantic notion about the individual against society, maybe.
But the fact of the matter is that in most concertos, the soloist and the orchestra share material, comment on each other's material, complement each other's material. Hey listen,
Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto, perhaps the epitome of the romantic concerto, begins with the piano accompanying the orchestra.
Well, I guess the individual always ends up serving society, right? Seriously, folks, in spite of occasional ego clashes between soloists and conductors,
concertos are not, or shouldn't be, a form of warfare. In fact... Oh man, I hate it when this happens. Excuse me, just a second. Hello?
What kind of a survey? Well, I'm... Yeah, I'm kind of busy, but... Well, okay, if it's only three questions, go ahead. Uh, creamy.
Smooth, or creamy, whatever they call it. I used to like crunchy better, but now I prefer creamy. Um... Tennis, I guess. You mean to play or to watch? Okay, tennis.
This is the last one, right? Oh, that's easy. Prokofiev's first one. Right, the concerto number one in D, opus 19. Okay, you're welcome. What? What's that?
No, I'm sorry, I'm not going to tell you my name and address. I get enough junk mail as it is. Goodbye. Hey, I've got more catalogs at home than Methuselah Head children. No way I'm going to tell them that my name is Peter Shickley
and the show is Shickley Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. We're talking about concertos here, with the emphasis on solo concertos.
One of the interesting things about this genre is that composers write concertos for instruments that they would never use in the orchestra, or otherwise. Or, at least, never use
in such spectacular soloistic fashion. I mentioned on another show that the Harmonicats recorded Peg of My Heart during a musician's strike, and the reason they were allowed
to do it was that the harmonica was not considered a musical instrument. Well, that's about the situation in the pieces we're about to hear. If these soloists are playing musical instruments, well, they're
certainly from a lower class of instrument. They're simply not the kind of instruments you would invite to dinner. Or, if you were forced to do so, you wouldn't bring out the good silverware.
I call this the There Goes the Neighborhood Concerto. All three movements were written in the 18th century, and together they last about ten minutes.
The There Goes the Neighborhood Concerto began with the first movement of a concerto for Jews Harp, Mandora, and Orchestra in F Major by Johann Georg Albrechtsberger.
The mandora is a lute-like instrument, but certainly the Jews harp is what grabs your attention. Albrechtsberger, who was later one of Beethoven's teachers, apparently wrote at least seven of these puppies.
Albrechtsberger. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen letters. Can anybody think of a composer with a longer name than that? I can't.
Hyphenated names don't count. Castelnuovo Tedesco, or the Womanizer's automobile, Wolf Ferrari. They don't count. That was Fritz Mayer on Jews Harp, Dieter Kirsch on Mandora,
and the Munich Chamber Orchestra under Hans Stadelmayr. Then we heard Jonathan Haas as the soloist in the slow movement of Johann Fischer's Symphony for Eight count them eight,
timpani and orchestra, with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta under the direction of Harold Farberman. And then our finale was the last movement of the Sinfonia Pastorella
by Wolfi Mozart's daddy, Leopold Mozart. And that was not a French horn, you heard. It was an alphorn. Alphorn and strings. You know, that's one of those big
long, straight, not coiled natural horns that alpenherdsmen used to use. You know, when you're playing the French horn, you can get extra notes by stopping, by sticking your hand
in the bell to change notes. But to do that on an alphorn, you'd have to have an arm about eight feet long. Jabba Gall was the soloist with the Capella Savaria, conducted by
Paul Nemet. And now it's tidbit time. Here in Concerto World, it's not often that our tidbit is the exact same piece that we just heard, but I thought that you might be interested in hearing
what that Leopold Mozart movement sounds like played not on an alphorn, but on a garden hose.
The last movement of Leopold Mozart's Sinfonia Pastorella, here called Concerto for Hose Pipe and Orchestra, played here on a garden hose by the late, great
French hornist, Denis Braine. Now he did put a French horn mouthpiece into the hose, folks. It's not a 100% hardware store rendition. That's from the first Hoffnung Festival recording.
We're going to go out with a piece by one of the greatest virtuosi of all time, Niccolo Paganini. He lived from 1782 to 1840, and he accomplished such incredible feats
on the violin that some people thought he must have made a pact with the devil. The 19th century was the heyday of super virtuosi, and Paganini didn't publish a lot of his music during his lifetime
because he didn't want other violinists figuring out how he did some of the things he did. Those were the days when at least one piano virtuoso played concerts with the piano placed in such a way that
the soloist faced the audience full on so that nobody could see his hands and learn his secrets. Paganini, like most virtuosi, was also a composer. And we're going to hear as much as we can
of the last movement of his first violin concerto. Almost two minutes into this movement, there's an amazing passage in double harmonics. Harmonics are those flute-like tones.
And here, every melody note consists of two notes. Now let me tell you about what are called artificial harmonics. To play them, you say you depress the string with your index finger,
and then you use your pinky to just touch the string. Not push it all the way down, just touch it a fourth higher. And because of the way strings vibrate, that produces a note two octaves higher.
Now violinists only have four fingers. That's one of the many reasons we pianists are better than violinists. Violinists have to use their thumb to keep the violin in position. So they only have four fingers. So if each note is a double note,
and both of them are artificial harmonics, you have to use all four fingers to play each melody note. Your pinky, your index finger, your ring
finger, and your... well, your finger finger. They all have to be used, and you have to slide your hand around, but the relationship among those fingers is not the same for every note. It's incredibly difficult.
Okay, Salvatore Accardo is the violin soloist. And Charles Dutoit conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the Rondo Allegro Spirituoso from Paganini's
Concerto No. 1 in D.
And that's
Sickly Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the National Endowment for the Arts with additional support from the
National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and from this radio station and its members. Our program is distributed by PRI Public Radio International. We'll tell you in a moment how you can
get an official playlist of all the music on today's program with album numbers and everything. Just refer to the program number. This is program number 131. And this is Peter Schickele
saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi. You're looking good. See you next week.
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned, send a stamped self-addressed envelope to Schickele Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E Schickele Mix. Care of public
radio international. 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403
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