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About the Music July, 2000 A much-loved teacher of mine once advised me on programming, "Remember, audience coming in off street, don't start too intense." Good advice, indeed, and I've followed it often with success. But if there were ever an audience that could handle intensity 'coming in off street,' it is here. And so we begin intensely. Welcome to the Flentrop plenum, welcome to the pedal 32'. Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist Kyrie, God the Holy Ghost is the third Kyrie of the large chorale preludes from Clavierübung III. This is a 5-voice setting of the German adaptation of the Gregorian Kyrie fons bonitatis. The melody appears in the bass, over which one hears fragments of the tune and their inversions interwoven. Even before the first statement of the subject is complete, its inversion answers. Even more insistent is the sequence (7 repetitions!) of 4 eighths leading to a half note, and of course, the famed chromaticism of the last 6 measures. "It's Flentrop's answer to Aeolian Skinner," many a wag has said of this organ. And indeed, for an instrument whose mandate was to play Bach, this instrument sings its way through the French Romantics with quite some grace. I first heard Franck's Fantasie in A in organ class, the weekly gathering of undergrads where we played for one another as prelude to a truly public performance. It was my first such class, freshman year. An upperclassman named George Lamphere played this piece, and it riveted me. Such was his sense of timing, of arousing need in the listener, that at the point of the grand climax, I found myself suddenly in tears. In the 25 years since, I have not heard the equal of that performance. To George, in memoriam, with thanks. Hindemith was a very facile composer, and there is in his organ music a sense of nonchalance, even impishness. At the same time, he has a unique and well-defined harmonic vocabulary, and a commanding sense of coherence and craft. He juxtaposes gentle, lyrical writing with loud crashing dissonance, or grand cadence with a breezy loitering whistle on a street corner. As this sonata's thematic development wends its way through dramatic mood changes, one feels very much led through the looking-glass. For his recording of Hindemith's Sonatas at Harvard in the early 1970's, his good friend Anton Heiller wrote these words: "Hindemith used to say, "Every composer and musician writes and makes music in the very likeness of himself,' and in fact this was true of Hindemith and his music. It is impossible to describe in a few words what a wonderful person he was not only his commanding presence, his simplicity, his severe responsibility and honesty, but also his wonderful sense of humor and his serene goodness. All these qualities of his personality are to be discovered in his music. Hindemith was indeed a man who lived in music, through music and for music a true genius of the twentieth century.' " Pamela Decker's Rio abajo Rio was commissioned by the American Guild of Organists for this performance. The work is dedicated to the memory of William Albright. It is in three movements: Boliviana, Diferencias, and Fantasia. The first movement is based upon the hymn Venid, pastores (text by Villancico de Puerto Rico; the music is a Puerto Rican melody). The boliviana (or bailecito) is an Argentine dance-song in which the first section is a lively 6/8 dance. The middle section is slower and more lyrical. The final section is a somewhat transformed repetition of the original lively dance. The second movement, Diferencias, unfolds as a series of transformations of the hymn Á Hosanna en el cielo! (Revelation 4:8 and John 12:13). The composer of the melody is unknown. The third movement, Fantas’a, is based on original themes, with literal quotations and motivic derivations from the first and second movements. The form is a large, extended fantasy which contains a complete tango within the structure. The work is published by Wayne Leupold Editions, Inc. |
