A CHARGED EMBRACE Program Notes The Harpsichord Resuscitated Bach was so completely out of fashion when he died William Kraft: Quillery for harpsichord (2013) that it wasn’t until a teenaged Felix Mendelsohn re- Gloria Cheng, harpsichord discovered the Saint Matthew Passion through the activities of his aunt, Sarah Levy, an influential sing- Bruce Broughton: Sonata for Cello & Piano (2012) er in Berlin’s most important choral society. She was Andrew Shulman, cello; Robert Thies, piano also a harpsichordist trained by Bach’s eldest son, Veronika Krausas: Sillages for 4 double basses (2013) Wilhelm Friedemann. After a century of neglect and Nico Abondolo, Steve Dress, Christian Kollgaard & Denis five years of editorial and preparational effort, the Trembly, double basses twenty-year-old Mendelsohn conducted the redis- covered work in 1829 with a vast and historically Broughton: Concerto for Cello & Ten Instruments (2015) incorrect chorus nearing 400. According to con- Andrew Shulman, cello; Sara Andon, flute; Keve Wilson, oboe; temporary accounts, the German King and his Eric Jacobs, clarinet; Anthony Parnther, bassoon; Daniel Rosen- boom, trumpet; Allen Fogle, horn; Noah Gladstone, bass trom- entire court attended, and a thousand people were bone; Aron Kallay, piano; Sidney Hopson, percussion; Thomas turned away. That night the direction of music his- Harte, double bass; conducted by Benjamin Wallfisch tory changed: the floodgates opened to the past. In 1924, when Man Ray painted “f” holes on a nude In 1850, the Bach Society (Gesellschaft) was founded photograph of his inamorata Kiki de Montparnasse, to publish all of his known works. That enterprise who was posed to resemble a stringed instrument, was finally completed in 1900. The next phase of the photographer paid homage to his favorite artist rediscovering and performing Bach would be the Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1770-1867). This reintroduction of lost or “obsolete” instruments and painter of elongated nudes and commanding port- pursuing the forensics of performance practice. Harp- raits, notably a huge canvas of Napoleon at his peak sichords were often fragile and nearly superseded of power, had a secondary passion for playing the by evolving generations of pianos. In Paris, many of violin. Ingres’ ability on the instrument became fa- the large harpsichords were destroyed in the mous not for his virtuosity, but because his willing French Revolution, leaving behind the smaller ones chamber music partners were major celebrities – associated later with the “authenticity” movement. Franz Liszt and Niccolò Paganini. On the street, it soon became cool to call someone’s hobby his Between the wars, the enterprising keyboard artist violon d’Ingres. By making that persistent vulgarism Wanda Landowska, a Polish Jew, single-handedly the name of the altered photograph he re-photogra- revived the manufacture of harpsichords by travel- phed, Ray suggested that the painter’s real hobby ing to museums and libraries, taking measurements. was voluptuous women (as was his own) and so Harpsichords never attained any level of standard- visually established a potent musical metaphor for ization, so the instruments Landowska encounter- a charged embrace. ed varied greatly. She wanted a harpsichord loud and bright enough to be heard in modern concert Ray’s homage coincided with Stravinsky’s 1923 land- halls and suitable for concerto commissions from mark “neoclassical” Octet for Winds, a jazz-infused living composers such as Francis Poulenc and Man- deconstruction of the Mozartian wind serenade, and uel de Falla. She pressed Pleyel, the reigning French the very first “surrealist” exhibition – in which Ray was piano builder, to reinvent a large instrument with a included. After the late-romantic emotion of Mahler 16-foot stop. The Grand Modèle de Concert, with and Strauss, the heated expressionism of Schoen- the weight and sturdiness of a small piano, was loose- berg and Berg, the hyper-sensuality of Debussy and ly fashioned after surviving large German and British Ravel, lurid colors of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, as instruments, particularly one owned by G. F. Handel. well as the no-holds-barred savagery of Stravin- sky’s Rite of Spring, better-mannered serenades, Another pinnacle moment for Bach arrived in 1933 suites, and concerti grossi became the post WWI when Landowska recorded the complete Goldberg vogue. Variations for the first time. Her School of Ancient Music in Paris, founded in 1927, was abandoned Between the wars, the public mood favored clarity after the German invasion in 1940. She arrived in and economy of means. While Johann Sebastian New York the same days as the Japanese invasion Bach was a model for some, Domenico Scarlatti, and of Pearl Harbor. The jazz great Artie Shaw is likely Francois Couperin also prevailed as the ideal har- to have heard Landowska’s recording because he bingers of balance, restraint and invention. incorporated a harpsichord player into his band, Gramercy Five, from 1940 until the end of the war. writing devices from the moulted wing feathers of a goose or swan. However, for a harpsichord the cen- By the middle of the 20th century, with access to tral shaft of a crow feather was preferred. facsimiles of the original manuscripts, scholars and artists were beginning to engage with the 19th cen- Instead of striking a taut string from below, as with tury editions of Bach’s music and to question com- a piano, the quill plucks with action from above the monly-held assumptions. They set about to decipher string. Given the challenges needed to maintain an what was actually intended by Bach and to imagine organic plectrum, the plastic known as delrin emer- how modern players and audiences could come to ged with enough theoretical superiority to become terms with a lost era of performance practice. Over the preferred material for quills in the late 20th cen- time, the “authenticity” movement emerged to dis- tury. Now, as the amount of scholarly experience tance new performance standards from “romantic” and numbers of practitioners and viable instruments conceptions inherited from the embryonic stages of (many built from kits) grows, a movement to recon- musicology. What also emerged was a fascination sider organic quills has surfaced, if not definitively. on the part of composers with the harpsichord’s bright timbre, the fleetness of its keyboard action, The opportunity for the Piano Spheres commission and sense of historic rootedness. The brilliant 1952 arose due to the determination of Lefteris Padavos, Sonata for flute, oboe, cello and harpsichord crow- Cheng’s enterprising husband, to build a large ned composer Elliott Carter’s neo-classic phase. French-style transposing harpsichord when an at- tractive kit became available. With a push of a peg, While substantial scholarship on Baroque perform- the instrument can play at both historically correct ance was brought to public attention, the inherent and contemporary tuning. Kraft’s interest in the chal- subjectivity of performing could not eviscerate the lenge, plus his extraordinary history of writing for tastes and expectations of the times. As recordings solo instruments, and his close friendship with the multiplied and musician/scholars engaged in turf artist, made Quillery an ideal commission. battles defending their surpassing correctness, the realization of a “historically informed” performance While paying brief homage to Scarlatti, during its that furthers an endless continuum of discovery is seven minutes, Quillery employs some techniques all that could, and can, be realistically hoped for. associated with György Ligeti’s 1968 harpsichord “Authenticity” was a phantom. masterpiece Continuum. Ligeti recognized that the instrument’s capacity for speed is so close to the Quillery number of notes-per-second needed to achieve a John Elliott Gardiner, in his highly acclaimed book continuous sonic patina that the “ancient” instru- Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, (Alfred A. Knopf, ment gained a space age currency in his hands. 2013), shares new knowledge about the composition- “Bill's piece references Ligeti in the opening,” says al nitty gritty, as it were, of paper, inkpots, quills, Cheng, “references Scarlatti later on, but above all sand, pencils and knives. Bach used a five-nibbed is a very characterful piece, that's by turns playful, pen called a rastrum for drawing the staves on the eloquent, ‘percussive,’ and whimsical just like Bill.” extra heavy paper he preferred. “On his desk,” writes Gardiner “were inkpots filled with black, sepia, red At age 96, Kraft is the distinguished dean of Amer- tints and a supply of copper-gallic ink powder ready ican composers universally admired for his idiom- for mixing with water. It was the acidity in this ink atic approach to instrumental character. Born in Chi- that was eventually responsible for its bleeding cago, he studied with two great America pioneers through the manuscript pages and, over time, sev- Henry Cowell and Henry Brant. He came to Los erely damaging the paper on which he wrote.” Angeles and became a fixture with the legendary Monday Evening concerts founded by Peter Yates. Quillery was written by William Kraft for keyboardist Gloria Cheng’s 2013 Piano Spheres concert of new Kraft served as Stravinsky’s timpanist and perc- harpsichord music. The sharpness of a quill point on usssionist for all of the composer’s Los Angeles the barrel of feather pen, the spicy aroma of tightly performances and recordings for Columbia (Sony). rolled cinnamon bark, a place where hedgehogs are As a percussion soloist, he performed in the Amer- bred and nurtured, and plectra plucking the strings ican premieres of Zyklus by Stockhausen, Le of a harpsichord – such are the associations with Marteau sans Maître by Boulez, and in addition to the fanciful word quillery. The art of quilling a harpsi- recording Histoire du Soldat under Stravinsky’s chord was related to the common practice of making direction.