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Confessions of an Offbeat Violist
Asdrubal Loredo, viola
Phil Roberts, piano
Andante e rondo ongarese, Op.35
Carl Maria von Weber
(1786-1826)
8 Pieces from Romeo and Juliette
(arranged by Vladim Borisovsky)
I. Introduction
V. Dance of the Knights
Sergei Prokofiev
(1891-1953)
~Intermission~
Suite No. 5, BWV 1011 (transcription)
I. Prelude
VI. Gigue
Johann Sebastian Bach
(1685-1750)
Sonata in D minor
I. Allegro Moderato
Mikhail Glinka
(1804–1857)
Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Music 647B
D.F. Cook Recital Hall
M.O. Morgan Building
Wednesday, 20 January 2016, at 7:00 pm
Program Notes
Carl Maria von Weber was a German composer and opera director during the transition
from Classical to Romantic music. Noted for his operas Der Freischütz (1821), Euryanthe
(1823), and Oberon (1826); Der Freischütz is considered one of the first German masterpieces in
the opera genre and established German Romantic opera. Andante e rondo ongarese (Andante
and Rondo Hungarian) was originally composed in 1809 for Weber’s violist brother Fritz, while
the bassoon transcription was made for the virtuoso player Georg Friedrich Brandt, in 1813, with
some inevitably consequent changes. Weber’s writing exploits fully the facility of the viola
demonstrating its agility through quick passages over a wide range of notes. The Rondo’s
rhythms emphasize the Hungarian flavour of the music as well as a comical element.
In 1934, Sergei Prokofiev received a commission for a full-length ballet from the
Leningrad’s Academic Theatre. He chose to set the ballet to Shakespeare’s play Romeo and
Juliet. By the end of that year, Sergei Kirov, the Party boss of Leningrad was assassinated—
undoubtedly at Stalin’s order—and the Soviet authorities renamed the Academic Theatre after
him. The Kirov Theatre backed out of the contract due to speculated political pressure to purge
“avant-garde” composers from their repertoire. Completed in 1935, the Bolshoi ballet picked up
the contract, but later backed out, claiming the music was impossible to dance to.
With the future of his Romeo and Juliet uncertain, Prokofiev created two orchestral suites
and ten piano works from the score which received enormous success both inside the Soviet
Union, and in Europe and the United States. The ballet finally premiered in Brno,
Czechoslovakia by a non-Soviet company in 1938, where the Kirov Ballet finally agreed to
produce it due to its continued success. In 1940, the Kirov Ballet put off the Prokofiev’s ballet
and helped secure its place in Russian repertoire and hailed Prokofiev as a worthy successor to
Tchaikovsky.
Johann Sebastian Bach composed the Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello around 1720
under the service of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. During this period, Bach composed many
of his famous secular works, including the Violin Sonatas and Partitas, the Brandenburg
Concertos and the Well-Tempered Clavier Book I. There are no surviving manuscripts of the
Cello Suites in Bach’s hand. Anna Magdalena, Bach’s second wife and a well-educated
musician, wrote down the suites with little indication of articulations or bowings. This was
common practice at the time where players were free to interpret and improvise many aspects of
the music. Each Suite starts of with a Prelude followed by a sequence of French dances-although the original intent was not to dance to the suites!
These pieces where lost with time until Pablo Casals’ 1890 discovery. Casals claimed
that, as a boy, he stumbled on an old Grützmacher edition in a second-hand shop in Barcelona.
He is said to have practiced the Suites for twelve years before performing them publicly and
ultimately recording them in the 1930s. Nowadays these Suites, along with the Partitas and
Sonatas for violin, have been transposed for various instruments and are a staple in the viola
repertoire.
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka is remembered as the “Father of Russian Music”, the “Father
of Russian Opera”, and the “First National Russian Composer". He was the first Russian
composer to gain recognition in his own country. He did not consciously use Russian folk music
in his compositions until his late twenties where the Western European school largely influenced
the majority of his early works. Sonata in D minor was written early in Glinka’s career, before
he travelled to Europe and 11 years before his famous opera Life of a Tsar. Glinka started the
Sonata in 1824, and took a break before starting the second movement in 1828. When the second
movement was completed, he took another break when his opera career took priority. At time of
his death, the Sonata had gone decades without any new development and resulted in an
unfinished work. In his memoirs, Glinka mentions a motif in a children’s polka as a possible
third movement rondo to his Sonata.
Glinka was a pianist as well as a violist. The sonata has a concerto-like piano part that is
virtuosic and technically demanding. The viola carries a lyrical heartfelt melody and plays
counterpoint to the piano’s interjections of melody. Glinka played both the viola and piano parts
at different times when working on the Sonata with Joseph Böhm (a well-known violinist and
professor at the Vienna Conservatory).
Upgrades to the D F Cook Recital Hall have been funded by the
Department of Canadian Heritage’s Cultural Spaces Canada Program with matching funds from Memorial University
and from friends and benefactors of the School of Music.