An Evening with Joshua Roman, Cello Broadcast: October 23, 2020 7:30 Pm Goodwood Museum and Garden

An Evening with Joshua Roman, Cello Broadcast: October 23, 2020 7:30 pm Goodwood Museum and Garden Holdberg Suite, Op. 40 (written 1884) Edvard Grieg I. Praeludium (1843-1907) IV. Air V. Rigaudon Cello Concerto in A minor, H. 432 (written 1750) C.P.E. Bach I. Allegro Assai (1714-1788) Méditation from Thaïs (written 1894) Jules Massenet (1842-1912) Fandango – Grave assai from Guitar Quintet No. 4 in G Major, G. 448 Luigi Boccherini (written 1798) (1743-1805) Limestone and Felt (written 2012) Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) Stolen (written 2016) Alison Loggins-Hull (b. 1982) Zapatos de Chincha (written 2011) Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972) Offshoot* Joshua Roman (b. 1983) Musical Journal Joshua Roman Un Amour Lointain* ** (b. 1983) Drive* *Digital Premiere, **Commissioned by the ProtoStar Group Concerto for 2 Cellos in G minor, RV 531 Antonio Vivaldi I. Allegro (moderato) (1678-1741) II. Largo III. Allegro ______________________________________________________________________________ Personnel Violin I Shannon Thomas Petra Bubanja Violin II Lee Taylor Edward Charity Viola Greg Perrin Miriam Tellechea Cello Greg Sauer Zlatina Staykova Holden Bitner Bass George Speed Percussion Mike Glaze Harpsichord Charles Brewer ______________________________________________________________________________ Program Notes Grieg: Holberg Suite. The Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg ranks as the preeminent Scandinavian musical voice of his generation. His music demonstrates an especial gift for lyricism and a keen ear for folk song, which animate the span of his oeuvre, from the famous Peer Gynt Suite and Piano Concerto to his songs and exquisitely crafted piano miniatures (short, evocative pieces). Grieg composed his Holberg Suite—properly known as Fra Holbergs tid (From Holberg’s Time)— in 1884. The suite is one of two works, along with a cantata for men’s voices, that Grieg composed to commemorate the Norwegian playwright Ludvig Holberg’s bicentenary. Though Holberg, celebrated as a founding figure in Norwegian and Danish literature, spent most of his life in Denmark, Norway was nevertheless eager to celebrate its native son. Grieg was especially so: the composer had previously contributed a portion of his publishing fees towards the construction of a statue of Holberg in their shared birthplace of Bergen. The Holberg Suite was originally composed for piano; Grieg scored the suite for string orchestra the following year. Subtitled “Suite in the Olden Style,” the work draws on eighteenth-century dance forms that the composer supposed would have been familiar to Holberg. Thirty-five years before Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, the work credited with heralding the neoclassical movement, the Holberg Suite reveals Grieg, ahead of his time, looking to the past. The suite comprises five movements in the style of a Baroque dance suite. The opening Praeludium, a bright, open-armed overture, impresses with its textural clarity and expert handling of string sonorities. Grieg voices full ensemble chords with a masterful touch, achieving limpid delicacy here, majestic splendor a moment later. The fourth movement Air, given the tempo marking Andante religioso, begins with a mournful arioso. Its middle section again deploys solo cello to heartrending effect, in amorous dialogue with the full ensemble. The final movement takes the form of a Rigaudon, a French folk dance, and Grieg’s finale is accordingly brimming with folk character. Solo violin and viola kick things off with country fiddling fit for a hoedown. A slower middle section interrupts the fête only briefly before a reprise of the opening festivities. Drawn from https://musicatmenlo.org/files/2018_CPI.pdf ••• C.P.E. Bach: Cello Concerto in A minor, H.432. “We have only one Bach, whose manner is entirely original and peculiar to him alone.” To us this could only mean Johann Sebastian. But not in 1774, when the composer J.F. Reichardt penned these words. A quarter of a century after his death, Johann Sebastian’s music, while not quite forgotten, seemed marginal or irrelevant. And except perhaps in England, where Sebastian’s youngest son, Johann Christian, held sway, the ‘great Bach’ invariably denoted J.S.’s second son Carl Philipp Emanuel, revered by Haydn and Mozart and widely acknowledged as one of the supreme composers of the age. In his lifetime Emanuel Bach presented something of a contradictory figure: harpsichordist to the flute-loving Frederick the Great who was perfectly capable of turning out French-galant trifles (flute “ditties,” in other words), yet in the works written for his own pleasure quickly acquired a reputation for ‘bizarrerie’; and, later in life, Kantor in Hamburg who produced ephemeral odes and cantatas to order while allowing his genius free rein in some of the century’s most original symphonies and keyboard works. Emanuel Bach’s most personal music represents the pinnacle of Empfindsamkeit, the cult of ‘heightened sensibility’ practiced by a group of North German composers in reaction to the rational, empirical strain in Enlightenment thinking. This celebration of pure feeling was related to a whole aesthetic movement whose literary manifestations included the novels of Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne (to whose antic prose C P E’s music was often compared) and Jean- Jacques Rousseau. The credo of Empfindsamkeit was that music should ‘touch the heart’ and ‘awaken the passions’. In lesser hands this could lead to cloying sentimentality. But in Bach’s finest sonatas and orchestral works, halting, sighing phrases, explosive disruptions and disorienting harmonies combine to produce music unlike anything else composed in the eighteenth century. Born in Weimar, Emanuel grew up in the musically rich atmosphere of Leipzig, where, as he noted in his autobiography of 1773: “I had from an early age the special good fortune of hearing the most excellent music of all kinds all around me.” He quickly excelled on the harpsichord; and by the age of eleven he could apparently play any of his father’s keyboard pieces at sight. Like Handel and his own godfather Telemann, Emanuel initially studied law. Then, after graduating in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1738, he received what he termed “an unexpected and gracious summons … from the then crown prince of Prussia,” the future Frederick the Great. Frederick, who succeeded his father, Frederick William I, in 1740, was the eighteenth century’s most paradoxical monarch: on the one hand a ruthless potentate whose military adventures became the model for later German expansionism; on the other a Francophile son of the Enlightenment, an avid social reformer, and a musician who made the pastoral flute the must-play instrument of the European gentleman amateur. Emanuel Bach would remain in his service for nearly thirty years. Together with the mellifluous concertos of his half-brother, Johann Christian, Emanuel Bach’s concertos form a crucial link between the Baroque-Era composers, such as Vivaldi (and his own father, J.S.), and the Classical composers, notably W.A. Mozart. Following the examples of his father’s concertos, many of which were transcribed for different instruments, Emanuel’s three cello concertos also exist in versions for harpsichord and flute. In the A minor (1750) concerto for cello, Emanuel imaginatively exploits the instrument’s middle and lower registers (Emanuel had surely learned a thing or two from his father’s cello suites— music which you’ll hear tonight). The A major concerto of 1753 is more overtly virtuosic in style, specializing in wide leaps and rapid string crossings. Cast in the unusual metre of 3/2, the Allegro assai you will hear tonight is Bach in impetuous, proto-Sturm und Drang (reflecting turbulent emotion or stress) mode. The movement combines fierily striding sequences, quirky rhythmic irregularities and sudden discontinuities. Instead, the work’s popularity, longevity and wide appeal are down not to anything particularly operatic, but to a six-minute instrumental section that is heard during a scene change. In that sense, the beautiful 'Meditation' for solo violin and orchestra is officially an intermezzo in opera- speak; but far from being filler music, it’s a captivating and pure performance piece in its own right. Drawn from https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA68112 ••• Massenet: Méditation from Thaïs. This beautiful solo is drawn from Massenet’s relatively unknown opera Thaïs. Originally written for violin and orchestra, for the TSO’s performance you will hear a version for solo cello and small ensemble. French Romantic music is often distinctive for its particularly delicate qualities and nowhere is this more evident than in this Meditation. The indulgent cello solo, cushioned by dream-like harmonies from the ensemble perfectly embodies the sound of French music at the time. Given the innocent and predominantly optimistic sound-world the Meditation inhabits, it’s something of a shock when heard in the context of the full opera of Thaïs. Rather than signifying a happy conclusion, it precedes the final, tragic section culminating in the death of protagonist Thaïs. But then, this wouldn’t be opera if it all ended happily ever after! Drawn from https://www.classicfm.com/composers/massenet/music/jules-massenet-thais ••• Boccherini: Grave assai – Fandango. Luigi Boccherini was not only one of the most prolific Italian composers of the 18th century, he was a virtuoso cellist as well. His father was a cellist and double bass player that sent Luigi to Rome for study. Father and son traveled to Vienna in 1757 where they were employed in the court orchestra. Boccherini became so proficient on his instrument that he could play much of the repertoire of the violin on the cello at pitch, a skill he learned when he substituted for an ailing or absent violinist in the orchestra. In 1770 he traveled to Madrid, Spain and was in the employ of a brother of the King of Spain. He stayed in Spain for the rest of his life, and died there in 1805.

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