ODYSSEY OF SOUND

Composed 1718, by J.S. Bach (1685-1750).

The legendary Brandenburg Concertos represent a quintessential part of the baroque repertoire and some of Bach’s best work. But while they all feature distinguishing instrumentations, No. 6 is especially notable as the only one to leave out violins entirely. Its original ensemble calls for two solo viole da braccio (“arm viola”), two viole da gamba (“leg viola”), cello, violone (double bass), and harpsichord. This peculiar arrangement presents a fascinating dynamic between old and new string families. Despite their similarities, the viola da gamba and violone belong to the historic (and fretted) viol family, while the viola da braccio and cello belong to the modern violin family, fundamentally separating them.

Favorable to the viola himself, Bach designed this concerto to feature the viola in a way rare for the time. While a viola soloist must often exert more effort to project over an orchestra, the thoughtful instrumentation and low overall register of this piece allows for a more relaxed approach when playing, bringing forth a brightness of sound that is carefully supported by the writing of the other parts.

It is worth nothing that the lower viola da gamba, played upright like the modern cello, was already antiquated when Bach composed the concerti. It is speculated that its inclusion was due to Prince Leopold’s, Bach’s employer at the time, interest in the instrument. Although other arrangements replace the two viole da gamba with celli, in this weekend’s performances these parts are skillfully performed on two additional modern violas.

The first movement features lively canonic writing that is passed throughout the viole da braccio, viole da gamba, and cello, supported along the running 8ths of the continuo players. The second movement allows the gamba players a respite while the two solo violists weave a more introverted line together with the continuo. The final movement, a spritely gigue, is in rondo form. The theme is played in unison among the two solo violists each time it returns, followed by cheerful dialogue throughout each of the episodes in between. While viola repertoire is often sourced from compositions for other instruments (like Bach’s Cello Suites), it is a joy to perform a piece that clearly expresses the composer’s love of the instrument.

Note by Thomas and Silvana Matthews.

Composed 2015, by John Mackey (b. 1973)

The cycle is inspired by a passage in the Odyssey in which Odysseus, shipwrecked and near death, washes up on the shore of an island belonging to the nymph Kalypso. Homer’s telling treats the ensuing interlude as just another bit of exotic travelogue, one of many adventures on Odysseus’ long journey home; these three songs imagine what it meant to Kalypso herself, and are sung in her voice.

I. A Long Time Alone: Kalypso’s island home is beautiful beyond imagining but remote beyond reach. Her immortality is thus an eternal solitude. The first song in the cycle, set before Odysseus’ arrival, is her lament of this loneliness. Standing on her shore, she remembers long-gone days when she could still delight in her paradise, and tells of the slow erosion of sensation and even sense after endless ages alone.

II. Raveling: The second movement begins after Odysseus has been with Kalypso for seven years. She sings as she moves back and forth with a golden shuttle at her loom, weaving a tapestry–the work of all that time–that tells their story. At one end, the luminous threads show the near-dead castaway washed ashore; nearby the nymph nurses him back to health. Flowers and fruit, ripe and radiant, tumble through images of the love they found together. But the simple happiness of the scene and the song curdles: Odysseus wants to return to his home, leaving Kalypso to her solitude; nothing she has given or can give means anything to him anymore. She is shattered, but he is cold. So Kalypso returns to her loom, singing again, but now unraveling the tapestry, unmaking the document of love.

III. At Sea: In the final song, Kalypso watches Odysseus sail away on a boat she has given him, born by a breeze she has called up to fill a sail she has fashioned from the unmade tapestry. Waves carry him toward the horizon, and her loneliness washes in again.

I. A long time alone
Dawn draws her rose-red fingers soft across the sleeping sky.
Another day unasked-for, light pinking flesh untouched.

Long ago I loved to watch the water wake
when first rays raced the waves.
Morning warm-born in a moment.

But the sweetest second sours in solitude.
Forever is a long time alone.

Summer murmurs memory of seasons sweet with cypress.
Seabirds basking idle as the fishes dare to doze.

I used to sing with the insects
answering slee slee whirrups with trilling airs.
But that was years ago,
before the buzzing buried cicada sounds inside
to rattle in the cluttered attic of never-spoken thoughts.

Even lovely liquid languor spoils.
Forever is a long time alone.

Wade into the wine-dark sea and leave the lonely island;
let salt swamp tears.
Waters hold you for a while.

Skin gleams warm. Long-fallow flesh awakens
but the ocean’s kiss consumes.
Soon there is no woman—only wave.

So the body brought back rushes out again,
tide and time-taken as all things are.
The sea is not a solace but a cell.

Forever is a long time alone.

II. Raveling

When I found you, or you found me,
both of us lost in the endless sea,
then I healed you, and you healed me,
two tattered souls stitched up lovingly.

Seven summers of sun,
seven winters of wanting,
seven springtimes as new as the dawn,
seven autumns of falling
deeper into your breath—
seven years you are warp to my weft.

Only now is this paradise paradise.
Only now is this living a life.
Only now is there greenness and sweetness and air—
lost and found ones, we two, what a pair.

As I lose you, and so lose me,
finding I never had what I thought was free—
how can you take what once you gave?
I asked only love for the life I saved.

Seven years you were warp to my weft.
Seven years, yet you leave me bereft.
Seven years and I have nothing left.

You and I, we were bound up together.
You and I wove a heaven from scars.
You and I turned the darkness and lostness and pain
into something worth living again.

Only you made this paradise paradise;
Only you made this living a life;
Only you gave me greenness and sweetness and air—
All unraveling now, past repair.

III. At sea

Again, alone.
Again, forever.
Solitude and I, once more, together.

And now—forget?
Or yet remember?
If I hold fast will I still surrender?

Shall I cling to memory, and polish thoughts like bright stones?
But every touch erodes them; to love their light is to lose it.
Remembering. Dismembering.

Forget, then. Forget him.

Forget him. Forget, yes.

And cast away the empty oyster shell.
Tide take him.
But watch—who knows what waters wash home?

Forget him? Forget, how?

This cruel moon brings ghosts in waves now, to haunt me.
Too-cruel moon brings ghosts to haunt me, to taunt me now.
This tide that gives and takes and tolls the time,
the time, the long and longing time alone.

I can’t forget;
I can’t remember.
The loss remains, so hard, so tender.

And all my rhymes are ravings,
my words the wailing of a lost one,
storm-tossed one.

The sea won’t hear.
The sky won’t care.
No different to them,
my silence or song.

No words, so. Unheard, so.

Why go on then? Why cry this silence?

Alone. Alone.

All cast away now.
Just ghosts to stay now.
Alone, all lost at sea.

Note & poetry by A. E. Jaques

Composed 1791, by Joseph Haydn (1732-1809).

‘Novelty of idea, agreeable caprice, and whim combined with all Haydn’s sublime and wonten grandeur, gave additional consequence to the soul and feelings of every individual present’, rhapsodized The Times after the premiere of No 93, on 17 February 1792. Haydn immediately evokes ‘the sublime’ in the slow introduction, when the music slips from a resounding fortissimo D major to a strange and secretive E-flat major. This ‘flatward’ tendency finds an echo in deflections to flat keys in each of the following movements. The Allegro assai is built on two symmetrical cantabile melodies of great charm—guarantors of the symphony’s popularity. The first subject was even appropriated as an American Protestant hymn! There is a typically intricate contrapuntal development, fuelled by a fragment of the waltz-like ‘second subject’. The Largo cantabile is one of Haydn’s original fusions of sonata, rondo and variations. It begins with a delicately soulful theme on solo strings and continues with a parody of a Handelian French overture. Towards the end, after a ruminative oboe solo, the music becomes becalmed, only for the mood to be punctured by a gigantic bassoon fart—a joke whose Till Eulenspiegel crudeness more than matches the ‘surprise’ in No 94.

The minuet, drawing maximum capital from its first three notes, is one of Haydn’s most muscular and theatrical, while its trio sets aggressive military tattoos on wind and brass against the strings’ mysterious excursions into distant keys. There is no trace here of the stylized rusticity found in all the other trios of the ‘London’ symphonies. After the premiere Haydn informed Frau von Genzinger that No 93’s finale was ‘too weak’ in relation to the opening movement and needed altering. Whether or not he ever did revise it, the finale as we know it is one of the wittiest and most powerful he ever wrote, culminating (after an ostentatiously self-important general pause) in a coda of rowdy hilarity. With a gleeful display of rhythmic and harmonic trickery, Haydn repeatedly thwarts expectation of a full recapitulation. He also plays his characteristic games with the main theme’s upbeat quavers, at one point setting the thunderous power of the full orchestra against a lone cello.

Note by Richard Wigmore.