O N E   O F   T H E   most beloved concert pianists on the stage today, Emanuel Ax returns to Cleveland to perform a charming concerto by Haydn. This delightful work is paired with a mesmerizingly soulful piece by Béla Bartók from a century and a half later.

       Haydn’s “Hungarian” concerto was among his most popular works during the composer’s lifetime. In the tuneful finale, he offers up local rhythms and stylings from Hungary's countryside.  It was published in 1784 in Vienna, with editions across Europe issued almost immediately — a sure sign of success.

       Like the more famous Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Bartók’s Divertimento was written as a commission for the Basel Chamber Orchestra and conductor Paul Sacher. Its three movements are strongly in the Bartókian vein, unfolding as a marvelous mixing together of Modern and Romantic, but with an underlying Hungarian spirit — blending chamber-like intimacy with orchestral strength, caustic bite with yearning restraint, lyricism with argumentative thrust.
    

PIANO CONCERTO in D major
(Keyboard Concerto No. 11, Hob.XVIII:11)
by F. Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Composed:  circa 1779-1785

Scored for:  2 oboes, 2 horns, strings, and solo piano; it is sometimes played with strings only (plus soloist), as is being done with these Cleveland performances.

Duration:  about 20 minutes

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THIS CONCERTO was among Haydn’s most popular works during his lifetime, although today it is inevitably overshadowed by Mozart’s great keyboard concertos. Haydn’s work was published in Vienna in 1784, followed immediately by editions in London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Mainz — an unmistakable mark of public success.

       Perhaps the secret lay in its finale, in which Haydn evokes the colorful dances of Hungarian gypsies. At the time, such music had not been heard outside its own land before. From this, we understand that Haydn relished gypsy folk music as much as Hungarian cuisine, of which he was quite fond. For both, he was very well located at Esterháza (which, though close to Vienna, is in Hungary, not Austria) to see and hear gypsies (or Romas) who provided regular entertainment for all levels of society, including, on occasion, at the invitation of Haydn’s employer, Prince Esterházy, at the palace itself.

       Haydn had put some gypsy music, a “Menuet alla Zingarese,” into his String Quartet Opus 20 No. 4 in 1772, and he later composed the “Gypsy Rondo” Piano Trio. Like other “exotic” imports — such as Chinese porcelain or Turkish percussion — this fascinating music was to grab the public imagination, especially in England and France.

       (It is a challenge today to decide what word/s to use in this discussion. The word gypsy was accepted and embraced and understood in Haydn’s time, and for many years thereafter. Only more recently, as our worldview has enlarged, has there been a rightful questioning as to whether this term is derogatory and/or appropriate recognition of the particular culture of a disparate peoples. A similar, ongoing discussion continues over the New World’s populations of . . . Indians, Native Americans, First Nations, etc.)
   

THE MUSIC

       The concerto’s first two movements display the purest classical content — clearly stated themes (usually soft at first, then loud), brisk orchestration, conscientious working out, and balanced form. The interplay between soloist and orchestra is exemplary, and the sense of orderly music-making is especially evident in the opening movement.

       The start of the slow movement is unusually forthright, but the appearance of triplet figurations and the entry of the soloist quickly soften the tone. It develops into a superbly wrought movement with a cadenza before the chirruping repeated triplets bring the movement to a close.

       Trills, grace notes, runs, angular leaps, drones, and a lively dance pace define the finale’s “gypsy” style, put together with unmistakable delight. By slipping into the minor for a middle musical episode, Haydn seems to be parodying himself. It may not have been his music, strictly speaking, but he composes it as if it were.

—program note by Hugh Macdonald © 2020

DIVERTIMENTO FOR STRINGS
by Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

Composed:  August 1939

Created:  on a commission from Swiss conductor Paul Sacher

Scored for:  string orchestra

Duration:  about 25 minutes

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20th CENTURY COMPOSERS had abundant reason to be grateful to the Swiss conductor Paul Sacher, a generous patron of music, who devoted some of the Roche Pharmaceutical millions to commissioning works from so many of the major composers of the time.  He also established an archive in Basel, which is today a major center for the study of 20th-century music.

In 1936, Sacher commissioned from Bartók the awkwardly titled Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and gave the first performance with his Basel Chamber orchestra the following year. Bartók's connections with Basel continued in 1938 with the Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion, written for the Basel branch of the International Society for Contemporary Music and also premiered by Sacher's forces.  Then, in August 1939, came the Divertimento for Strings, a commission that confirmed Sacher's view that Bartók was at the height of his powers.

       At the time, Bartók had arrived at a point of full maturity — between his gritty, aggressive music of the 1920s and the calmer, more consonant music of his last years in America. Today, it can be difficult to believe how unremittingly scathing were the critics’ attacks on Bartók’s music between the world wars. More than Stravinsky, more even than Schoenberg (whose music was generally not regarded as playable at all), Bartók suffered the constant sting of reviews that treated him as a wild savage lacking any kind of humanity or musicality. As a pianist appearing frequently in public to play his own works, with conductors who had faith in his music and wanted to program it, Bartók was particularly exposed to ignorant attack.

       The irony is that there was no composer more sensitive to his surroundings or more precisely aware of the tiniest nuances in music; Bartók was intensely shy and had a profound feeling for nature, for the integrity of musical expression, and for beauty. His attachment to his native land was so strong that he based his style on the melodies and rhythms of Hungarian folk music and wrote with a musical voice that translated age-old musical utterances into the sophisticated language of the 20th century.

       To compose the Divertimento for Strings, Sacher set Bartók up in a chalet near Basel with a piano and a cook. Bartók wrote to his son: "Somehow I feel like a musician of olden times — the invited guest of a patron of the arts. I am living alone in an ethnographic object, a genuine peasant cottage. The furnishings are not in character, but so much the better, because they are the last word in comfort. The weather has been favoring me, but I can't take advantage of the weather to make excursions. I have to work. Luckily the work has gone well, and I finshed the commission for Sacher in fifteen days. I just finished it yesterday."

       It would be hard to find a work with a wider range of moods and techniques than the Divertimento, between, at its widest, the lugubrious Adagio middle movement and the unbuttoned playfulness of the finale. The first movement steers a course between these two states, with strong contrasts of dynamics and rhythm and a serious concern for musical argument as each section of the string body passes snatches of melody around, sometimes featuring solo players from each. The second subject is as sweetly comfortable as the furniture he was sitting in, while the ferocity of dissonance that later invades the movement is extreme.

       The slow movement is built in separate sections. Painfully gloomy at first, it comes to life with jagged rhythms in a second section, then conveys the image of a lumbering cart under infectious trills. Then finally the first section returns in an emaciated form.

       If the finale does not "drive away all care," nothing will. And to think that it was written under the shadow of war, when Bartók was close to despair in his view of a disintegrating world!

—program note by Hugh Macdonald © 2020