Classical

As the title implies, the work is in the form of a free fantasia. The fanfare which opens the Capriccio was the bugle-call of the Italian Royal Cuirassiers, whose barracks adjoined the hotel where Tchaikovsky stayed in Rome; each morning he was awakened by this splendid sound. During the course of the piece no less than five separate tunes are introduced, the first two of which are heard more than once. The Capriccio, a masterpiece of orchestration, is scored for more than the usual complement of instruments:a third flute, cor anglais and two cornets are called for, and also harp and an array of percussion instruments. The work, dedicated to K. J.Davidov, was first performed on 18th December, 1880, at Moscow under the direction of Nicholas Rubinstein.

SIDE TWO It was in 1887, during a break in his joint task with Glazunov of completing and orchestrating Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, that Rimsky-Korsakov composed his Capriccio Espagnol. His original idea had been to write a virtuoso fantasy on Spanish themes for violin and orchestra, and indeed traces of this design are abundant in the many solo passages, not only for the leading violin (including harmonics, triple stops, flying arpeggios and all the other tricks of the virtuoso) but also for various wind instruments. The work fully lives up to the composer’s desire that it should “glitter with dazzling orchestral colour”, though the orchestral effect is “the very essence of the com-position, not mere ornamentation”; and having spent a mere three days in Spain as a youth, he admitted readily enough that, for all the attraction of Spanish melodic and rhythmic figures, the Capriccio was a “purely external” work. It has five movements, but the first three are linked, forming an ebullient Alborada into which are introduced variants of a slower lyrical phrase first given out by the horns: then, after a resounding fanfare and some elaborate cadenzas, follows a fiery Canto gitano (including some guitar imitations), leading into a Fandango asturiano, which whirls to a finish with a return of the Alborada subject.

“Jack of all trades, master of none* This old adage was exploded and negated long ago by Stanley Black. The world of music has very few stars who shine in so many varied fields with such consistent and complete success as this artist. Pianist, arranger, composer, conductor, Stanley Black has triumphed in each of these exacting roles.

At twenty-three he broke into the highly competitive world of film music with the the score for a documentary film – about prefabricated houses! entitled The Ten Year Plan. This association with the world of film music continues right up to the present with scores for over ninety films to his credit. In 1962 he was one of the joint recipients of the Ivor Novello Award for the best film score of the year, Summer Holiday.

Stanley Black visited South America in 1938, a trip which laid the perfect foundation for his subsequently frequent excursions into the realms of authentic Latin music. Today he is considered one: of the country’s leading authorities on the music of the Latin American countries For eight and a half years he guided the fortunes of the BBC Dance Orchestra, during which time he appeared in the 1951 Royal Command Performance.

In 1961 he was awarded a Life Fellowship of the International Institute of Arts and Letters, an academic body which includes amongst its Fellows names such as Antal Dorati, Aldous Huxley and Jean Cocteau.

Broadcasting, television, films, records, composing, conducting, playing piano – all these are at his finger tips and in each he is top of his profession, always moving with the times but ruthlessly discarding any new craze which he considers merely gimmicky or musically worthless. Not only in this country, but in America as well, he is one of the most popular and respected figures in the world of music.
©1964, The Decca Record Company Limited, London

Produced by Tony D’Amato
Recording Engineer: Arthur Lilley

By 1815, with the end of the Napoleonic wars, the demand for dance music reached fantastic proportions. The Council of Vienna while shrewdly, behind the seen., trying to restore a conservative “order” throughout Europe, had the atmosphere of an uninterrupted ball. The famous Apollo Halls for which J. N. Hummel and others wrote dances every year, had As enormous halls, 44 rooms, four large greenhouses and 13 kitchens. A fabulous blossoming of dance music took place between 1815 and 1848. In the arena that opened up for new talent, resources were disclosed among the common people. Writers of dance tunes and fiddler-composers like Pamer, Faistenberger, Pfister, Wilde and others paved the way for the Strausses and Lanners, who likewise came up from below, and whose achievement to win critical respect for what had previously been considered the lowly art of writing dances. And their successors established the connection to art without any further question. Thus today we have complete editions of our Waltz Kings, although in this as in other musical areas, the “best sellers” are played excessively and many pearls remain to be rediscovered.

Rarely was the music of Lanher and Strauss, in their lifetime, played by a full orchestra. The instrumental group was most often a small one. Similarly, Mozart’s and Haydn’s dances were publish., aside from a piano version, in arrangement for two violins and a double bass, with wind instruments to be added as needed. These small bands achieve astonishingly rich sonorities. Aside from being a tribute to the fine taste of the settings, the appeal this music has in small band form is also a testament to the composer’s rich melodic invention. Like their great prototypes, Lanner and Strauss were never at a loss for inspiration; indeed, they seemed to be wasteful of thematic material. In this “chamber music” of dance, as in more exalted chamber music forms, it is through the small instrumental framework that the master is made manifest.

The programme starts with a typical witty and sparkling dance by Johann Strauss the Elder (180449), the Girana Galopp, Op. 108. It hints at what might have been his own fiery and dashing violin style. The tune he uses is a Gypsy melody that Vienna at the time knew from a ballet “Gitana”, in which the famous Fanny Elssler danced. An enchanting novelty follows; the languorous, Schubertian Schnollerrans by the almost unknown Johann Mayer Mayer was one of the crop of composers (others being Stelzmilller, who is also represented on this programme, Schmutzer, Haberlandtner and Debusy) who appeared in Vienna at about the mid century, and wrote dance music to be listened to rather than for dancing. People would nod their head, tap their feet and sway their bodies to the changing rhythms. A new form was born, as we see here; a sustained cantilena followed by a faster second section.

In his youth, the peasant-born Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) wrote dances of a robust folk quality. In his ripe old age, he wrote more courtly dances, but the earthy folk style remained, and motifs of it can be heard in the opening and closing movements of some of his most exalted symphonies and string quartets. An example of his love for the rough-hewn folk style may be found in his Zingarese, or Hungarian Gypsy dances from his native Burgenland. With their skilful recreation of Oriental colour, their strange scales and harmonies, they prove to us how varied were the influences that met and fertilized one another in Imperial Vienna.

The noblest master of the Viennese dance was, of course, Franz Schubert (1797-1828). The occasion for which he would invent these sublime yet intimate and unpretentious waltzzes and kindkr was often the “Schubertiad”, the frolicking evening spent with his friends, with its fiery discussions, earnest music making, and at the end, gay dancing. The group of Schubert dances presented here provide a cross-section of his rich and contrasting dance moods. They move from simple, genial high spirits and bacchantic jubilation to intimate and deeply poignant feelings, combining “laughing and weeping”, to quote the title of one of his much-cherished songs. We now go back to the elder Strauss, whose Annen Polka, Op. 137, titled in honour of Vienna’s traditional Feast of St. Anne, is the most brilliant and inventive of his treatments of the polka form. The polka was born in Bohemia early in the century. In 1837 the first polka was printed, in Prague. The dance became the rage in Europe, and was especially popular at the Vienna Mardi Gras of 1842, which is the year Strauss wrote this work. Joseph Lanner’s (1803-43) Abendsterne, Op. 180 or “Evening Stars”, which follows, is the waltz masterpiece of his late years. It exhibits Lanner’s sweet, gentle and lovely lyricism, and tasteful harmonies.

Even in the waltz, the elder Strauss was a composer of not only melodic beauty but Aso a fine wit and love for tricky rhythmic patterns, as we hear in the delightful Hofball-Tonne, Op. 51 or “Court Ball Dances”. They were composed in’ 1832 and adorned a splendid occasion, a marriage in the imperial family. The setting here, for three violins and double bass, with soaring violin solos, gives us something of the effect that must have been made when Strauss himself I. a band with violin in hand. Vinunz Stelsmaller-Tani’ is in the same vein as the dance by Mayer, above. It is followed by the light-hearted and frothy Seufzer Galopp, Op. 9 or “Sighing galop”, which is one of the elder Strauss’ early works, composed in 1828. And again there follows an engaging contrast to the style of the elder Strauss’ partner and, later competitor, Lanner. For more than Strauss, Lanner prized not only the waltz and galop but also the gentler, folk-style predecessor of the waltz, the kindle, We hear how perfectly Lanner could capture the gentle fragrance of this music in his first published work, the Neue Wiener or “New Vienna” kindkr, Op. 1.

Schubert’s Ecossaisen, Op. 49, date from about 1822. The ecossaise, a dance of Scottish origin in 3/4 time, developed in Europe along the lines of a contredanse in either double or triple time, and in the classical period throngs of people happily hopped to its measures. Beethoven wrote such “country dances” and put one of them in the finale of his “Eroica” Symphony. Schubert’s also represent, as these examples show, an artistically stylized dance form.

Haydn’s Katherinen-Tanze are a selection from a series of twelve minuets that he wrote in 1792 for a grand ball in the Imperial and Royal Redoutensaal, and soon thereafter published in piano arrangement. A lively copyist industry soon got hold of them and provided arrangements for even the smallest bands, as the market required. The sonorities such arrangements are capable of are illustrated by the present performance, which uses the string group typical of old Vienna practise reinforced by two woodwinds and two brass.

Notes from the German of Dr. Alexander Weinman

THE BOSKOVSKY ENSEMBLE

Willi Boskovsky, violin soloist and director of the Ensemble, is the leader of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and is also renowned for the exquisite musicianship of his sonata recitals and chamber music performances. The other members of the ensemble are first desk men of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. They include Wilhelm Hubner, second violin; Rudolf Streng, third violin and viola; Otto Ruhm, double-bass; Josef Niedermayr, flute; Rudolf Jettel, clarinet; Otto Nitsch and Roland Berger, horns. Karl Scheit, who plays in the works by Mayer and Stelzmuller, is one of the most renowned scholars and masters of the classical guitar in Europe, and is Professor at the Vienna Academy of Music. Alois Pistor plays the guitar in Haydn\’s Zingarese.

Why, if it comes to that, does his music repeatedly attracted the kleptomaniacal attention of pop hit-makers on Broadway and Tin Pan Alley? Two full-scale musical comedies were based on Tchaikovsky’s composition, and at least half a dozen Hit Parade tunes were blithely lifted from his classical pages. “Tonight We Love” (otherwise known as the Piano Concerto No.1.) is probably the best known of these, but not too far behind in popularity came “The Story of a Starry Night” (from the Sixth Symphony), the equally celestial “Moon Love” (from the Fifth), “On the Isle of May” (Andante Cantabile), “Our Love.. (Romeo and Juliet) and “The Things I Love” (Romance in F Minor).

We are not going to come up with a nice, neat explanation for this phenomenon, of course, but it seems likely that beyond the obvious reasons Tchaikovsky’s glowing gift for melody, his instinctive feeling for instrumental colors, and so on lies his conception of music as a grand and glorious emotional explosion. He admitted that he would probably go to his grave without ever being able to compose a piece in perfect form, but he exulted in his ability to let music speak from and to the heart, rather than the intellect. “Composing”, he confided to his benefactress Mme. von Meek “is a purely lyrical process, a sort of confession of the soul in music, an accumulation of material flowing forth in notes, just as the lyric poet pours himself out in verse.” Here then would seem to be at least part of the secret of Tchaikovsky’s communicative success: his music is frankly. openly, unabashedly emotional, and it touches us accordingly.

Tchaikovsky’s personal life was a morass of fears, psychoses and traumas. “He was as brittle as porcelain”, his governess wrote about the boy, then aged five or six: “a trifle wounded him deeply, and the least criticism or reproof would upset him alarmingly. I also observed that music had a great effect upon his nervous system, and after a lesson, he was invariably overwrought and excited. Once I found him sitting up in bed with bright, feverish eyes, crying to himself. ‘Oh, this music, this music’, he said. ‘save me from it, it will not give me any peace.”

Nor was Tchaikovsky to find inner peace as he grew up. He remained moody, tense and inordinately shy: he added a collection of morbid fears and superstitions to his blossoming list of psychological ailments: and he soon became the proud possessor of the world’s most highly developed inferiority complex. He destroyed several operas and all manner of lesser pieces because he considered them unworthy, and even when his inspiration ran highest and public enthusiasm was at its peak, he tortured himself with totally unfounded fears that his creative powers had fled. He had several nervous breakdowns, attempted suicide (by standing up to his neck in the icy waters of the Neva River), and gave up conducting for a ten-year period because he was terrified that the exertion might make his head roll off his shoulders. “A worm continually gnaws in secret at my heart”, reads one entry in his diary: “the greater reason I have to be happy, the more discontented I become”

How fortunate for us all that Tchaikovsky never allowed the turmoil of his everyday affairs to interfere with his musical destiny. He worked steadily, in good times and bad, making notes in a little book he always carried with him (a la Beethoven), and carefully setting aside a specific number of hours every day for composition. When he became deeply involved with a particular piece, he would plunge into it, skipping meals and working right through sleepless nights. “It is the duty of an artist never to submit to laziness”, he wrote Mme. von Mack; “one cannot afford to sit and wait for inspiration she, a guest who comes only to those who call her.”

The divorce of his creative and personal lives was as complete as he could make it. We have an unequivocal statement from Tchaikovsky to the effect that the emotions expressed in his music did not well out of his frame of mind at the time of composition, but rather were always and invariably retrospective.”With no particular reasons for rejoicing.., he wrote. “I can experience a happy creative mood, and on the other hand, in the happiest of circumstance might write music filled with darkness an despair. The important thing is to rid oneself of the troubles of worldly existence, and to surrender oneself unconditionally to the artistic life.”

The fruits of this unconditional surrender comprise the immortal legacy of Peter Tchaikovsky the perennially popular ballets, the dramatic tone poems, the mighty symphonies, the beautiful operas, the scintillating concertos. What if his music does wear its heart on its sleeve? It’s a marvellously handsome sleeve and an ingratiatingly warm heart. Even the most familiar of his pieces never sound trite or shopworn their melodic freshness carries the day every time.

A dozen of these Tchaikovsky favorites have been tapped by Camarata and fashioned into a resonant orchestral fantasia. Included are excerpts from the Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty ballets, the last three Symphonies, the First Piano Concerto, the Overtures 1812 and Romeo and Juliet, an aria from the opera “Pique Dame”, and the lovely Song Without Words (originally one of three piano miniatures in the suite “Souvenir of Hapsal”).

The unexpected thematic juxtapositions make this a rather unconventional approach to the music, one that will likely outrage the purist end delight the layman in approximately equal measure. With Tchaikovsky, that’s just about the way it ought to be.

Robert Sherman

As it happened, the “Trout. Quintet was never offered by Schubert to the “hucksters”. A wealthy musical amateur, Sylvester Paumgartncr, of the town of Steyr, commissioned it in 1819. Schubert left it in manuscript. In 1829, a year after the composer’s death, the music publisher Josef Czcrny announced that among “numerous manuscripts which the favourite tone-poet, Franz Schubert, left.” he had purchased “a grand Quintet for pianoforte, violin, violincello and double bass,” which had “been performed in several circles at the publisher’s instigation, and declared to be a masterpiece by the musical connoisseurs present… He brought it out as Op. 114, and also transcribed and published it as a piano duct.

The five-movement form of the “Trout” Quintet, with a theme and variations movement inserted between the Scherzo and Finale, suggests a source in the late 18th century Divertimento. But what had in the previous century tended to be an out-going, witty and galant form, with a touch of sentiment, takes on in Schubert an added inwardness of feeling announcing the stirring of musical romanticism. The instrumental combination has no counterpart in Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven. It may have been suggested in Schubert’s mind by a Quintet Op. 87 for similar forces by Johann N. Hummel, a Hungarian composer and piano virtuoso who had taken lessons with Mozart. and whose works, rarely performed today, were much admired in the 1820’s. But what stamps the “Trout” Quintet as wholly Schubert’s voice is that it is built from beginning to end with his songful lyricism, cash melody foliating into equally beautiful variants. And this accounts perhaps for the -easy” structural methods which have caused a few condescending eyebrows to be raised, such as the fact that the recapitulations in the first, second and last movements arc an almost note for note repetition (but in different keys) of the expositions. Schubert here was striking out on his own path, reworking the classic sonata form he had inherited. His long-breathed melodies, varied and expanded almost upon the heels of their first appearance, now replaced the Beethoven-style declamatory motifs. And so he had to begin to reconsider every aspect of the form as a whole. Certainly a kind of repetition which would have been amiss after a stormy, dramatic development section like Beethoven’s these demand a psychological change in the recapitulation and coda falls gratefully on the car in the genial lyrical flow of the – Forellee Quintet. The tams problem is raised in Schubert’s songs, where in some he builds with a cumulative intensity, and constant transformations, while in others equally great the close repeats the opening.

The first movement, Allegro Virace (4/4, A major), opens with a “curtain raiser” chord and piano arpeggio, introducing Al the instrumental dramatis personae. Fora while it moves hesitatingly, as if Schubert were slowly shaping his first theme. This emerges finally (bar 27) as a lively song from the violin, with piano arpeggio answers. We seem to have been listening to a slow introduction, but actually Schubert’s opening measures have given us a foretaste of the development section. The exposition is a lavish outpouring of subtly connected melodies. T. development makes no effort at working up all this material, and is more in the nature of a reflective episode, based on the hesitant, opening version of the first theme and taking it for an imaginative harmonic journey. It is climaxed in a dialogue between violin and piano, accompanied by the other strings. Then comes the rehearing of the melodic chain of the exposition.

The Andante (3/4, F major) is a spun-out “song without words”, reminding us of Schumann, phrase, “gentle, deep ethereal melancholy”, with its second melody, sung by the viola and cello in F sharp minor, especially stiffing the heart as only Schubert can. The Scherzo, Presto (A major. 3/4), is a lusty dance with an Austrian folk touch in the trio. Then comes the theme and variations movement, Andantino, 2/4, based on the song Die Fore. or `Me Trout’, which Schubert had composed two years before, and which is now transposed from D 011 17 D. During the course of the variations, each instrumentalist, including the double bass, gets his opportunity to shine. In the first three variations, the tune is easily recognizable under the ornamentation. With the fourth variation (D minor), dramatic turbulence enters, and a sweet pathos with the fifth (gravitating between B flat major and B 131 17/4741. Like the mock-stormy episode in the song Die Fore., the mood is not real tragedy but a kind of whimsical play-acting. The closing variation goes back to the melody of the song, but the tempo is now Allegretto, and the piano makes a sparkling show with the lilting runs that in the accompanimento the original song had evoked the image of a rippling stream. The Finale, Allegro giusto (A major, 2/4) starts with an unpretentious dancing melody, tossed from the upper strings to the piano and back again. But then the melody throws of its simple cloak to emerge as an exhilarating booty in D major, sung by violin and viola, with the piano commenting excitedly in dotted rhythms and triplet runs. The entire exposition is a chain of free melodic associations, with little rippling figures near its close indicating that the song Die Fore. is still in Schubert’s mind. A touch of drama hints at a coming development section, but this is only Schubert jokingly teasing the listener, for there is no development but only a transposed repetition of the exposition. An easy way out? Perhaps. But Schubert wrote this work with no other purpose than the pleasure it gave him and his friends to play it, and what pleasure it gives us today!