Composer Michi Wiancko commissioned Jessie Montgomery to write the original version of Rhapsody No. 2 for solo violin. Also a violinist, Wiancko premiered the piece in 2020. Montgomery wrote of that version, “Rhapsody No. 2 is the second of a set of six intended solo violin works, each of which [is] dedicated to a different contemporary violinist and inspired by a historical composer. This virtuosic piece was commissioned by and written for composer and violinist Michi Wiancko and is inspired, in part, by Béla Bartók.”
It’s been a joy to reimagine and orchestrate Jessie Montgomery’s Rhapsody No. 2, originally a solo violin piece that I had the honor of commissioning and recording for my solo album, Planetary Candidate. Reimagining a piece that I’m already intimately acquainted with has been gratifying, and this short and brilliant work expanded into a larger instrumentation with ease.
One of my aims with this work was to have the orchestra explore various forms of relationship to the soloist, ranging from a respectful accompanist point of view to an egalitarian we-are-all-in-this-together vibe, to a more dramatic musical coup, to one lonely and vulnerable moment where our soloist stands alone.
From an arranger’s perspective, the colors and expressive multiplicity readily available via the source material of Montgomery’s original work are limitless, and the Zen-like presentness that she unapologetically weaves in with serious gotta-practice-five-hours-a-day virtuosity is nothing short of breathtaking.
—Michi Wiancko
Tucked away in the northernmost reaches of California sits the Bar 717 Ranch, which each summer is transformed into a sleep-away camp on 450 acres of wilderness, where in 1967, two 10-year-old kids named Martha and Jeffrey met. Within a couple of years, they were playing gigs back in Los Angeles in folk-rock bands with names like Wilderness and The American Revelation. They fell in love, broke up, and fell in love again.
By the time I was a child, my mom and dad had traded the guitars, flutes, and beaded jackets for careers in clinical psychology and classical music, respectively. But they remained devoted listeners of folk music. Growing up, it was routine for dad to put on a Joni Mitchell record when he took a break from practicing a concerto by Mozart or Brahms. That collision of musical worlds might help to explain the creative path I’ve followed, in which songs and storytelling share the road with the Austro-German musical tradition.
That tradition comes to me through the music I heard as a child, but also through ancestry. My paternal grandmother, Hannelore, escaped Germany at the tail end of 1938, arriving in Los Angeles in early 1939 after lengthy stops in Havana and New Orleans. For her, there was an unspeakable tension between, on the one hand, her love of German music and literature, and on the other, the horror of the Holocaust. In this piece, I ask, how does that complex set of emotions get transmitted across generations? What do we inherit, more broadly, from our forebears? And as a musician caught between two traditions, how do I bring my craft as a songwriter into the more formal setting of the concert hall?
The first movement, “Guitars in the Attic,” wrestles specifically with that last question, the challenge of bringing vernacular song into formal concert music. The two main themes begin on opposite shores: The first theme—poppy, effervescent, and direct—undergoes a series of transformations that render it increasingly unrecognizable as the movement progresses. Meanwhile, a lugubrious second tune, first introduced in disguise by the French horn and accompanied by a wayward English horn, reveals itself only in the coda to be a paraphrase of a song of mine called “Where Are the Arms.” That song, in turn, with its hymn-like chord progression, owes a debt to German sacred music. A feedback loop emerges: German art music informs pop song, which then gets fed back into the piano concerto.
“My Grandmother Knew Alban Berg” picks up the thread of intergenerational memory. Grandma didn’t actually know Alban Berg, but she did babysit the children of Arnold Schoenberg, another German-Jewish émigré, who, in addition to having codified the 12-tone system of composition, was Berg’s teacher. Why make something up when the truth is equally tantalizing? I suppose it has something to do with wanting to evoke the slipperiness of memory while getting at the ways in which cultural inheritance can occur indirectly. When, shortly after college, I began to study Berg’s Piano Sonata, his music—its marriage of lyricism and austerity; its supple, pungent harmonies; the elegiac quality that suffuses nearly every bar—felt eerily familiar to me, even though I was encountering it for the first time. Had a key to this musical language been buried deep in the recesses of my mind through some kind of ancestral magic, only to be unearthed when I sat at the piano and played those prophetic chords, which, to my mind, pointed toward the tragedy that would befall Europe half a dozen years after Berg’s death?
In this central movement, the main theme is introduced by a wounded-sounding trumpet, accompanied by a bed of chromatic harmony that wouldn’t be out of place in Berg’s musical universe. By movement’s end, time has run counterclockwise, and the same tune is heard in a nocturnal, Brahmsian mode, discomfited by interjections from the woodwinds, which inhabit a different, and perhaps less guileless, temporal plane.
To close, we have a kind of fiddle-tune rondo, an unabashed celebration of childhood innocence. In March 2020, my family and I were marooned in Portland, Oregon, as the world was brought to its knees by the coronavirus pandemic. Separated from our belongings—and thus all of our daughter’s toys, which were back in our apartment in Brooklyn—my ever-resourceful partner, Emma, fashioned a “vehicle” out of an empty diaper box, on which she majusculed the words VERA’S CHICKEN-POWERED TRANSIT MACHINE. (Vera had by that point developed a strong affinity for chicken and preferred to eat it in some form thrice daily.) We would push her around the floor in her transit machine, resulting in peals of laughter and squeals of delight. In this brief finale, laughter and joy are the prevailing modes, but not without a bit of mystery. I have some idea of what I have inherited from my ancestors. What I will hand down to my daughter remains, for the time being, a wondrous unknown. Heirloom is dedicated with love, admiration, gratitude, and awe to my father, Jeffrey Kahane.
—Gabriel Kahane
This song, springing from the heart and mind of singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane circa 2011, may rock one gently into a similar embrace as a Schubert song such as “Des Baches Wiegenlied” (“The Brook’s Lullaby”). With an undulating, repetitive guitar loop on the tonic and the fifth, harmonies shift in bittersweet relation to the loop, and like with Schubert, the surface can seem calm while by the end of the song you might be in tears and not know how you got there … We are lucky to be able to experience this song in its full original form today after hearing it paraphrased in the first movement of Gabriel’s piano concerto Heirloom.
—Colin Jacobsen
Shorthand takes its title from Leo Tolstoy’s comment that “Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.”
The piece references two themes from Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata for violin and piano (which inspired Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata): the opening theme, as well as a second theme that Janáček also incorporated in his own String Quartet No. 1, “Kreutzer Sonata” (also inspired by Tolstoy’s novella). That second Beethoven theme inspires the opening material for Shorthand.
Shorthand exists in two forms: for solo cello and string quintet, and for solo cello and string orchestra, and these are dedicated to my husband, Jody Elff.
—Anna Clyne
Composed in 1778, Symphony No. 31 in D Major was the fruit of Mozart’s peregrinations from September 1777 to January 1779, which included extended sojourns in Mannheim and Paris. He and his violinist father were chafing under the restrictions of musical life at the ecclesiastical court in Salzburg, and Wolfgang had been dispatched on a tour of European capitals in search of greener pastures under the watchful eye of his mother. After she died unexpectedly in Paris in the summer of 1778, he made his way back to Salzburg by slow stages and took up a new post there as court organist. But his predilection for operas, concertos, and other secular works set him increasingly at odds with his patron, Archbishop Colloredo, and in 1781, he moved to Vienna to pursue a freelance career.
Shortly after arriving in Paris, Mozart was appointed composer in residence to the Concert Spirituel, and it was under the auspices of the renowned concert series that the “Paris” Symphony was premiered on June 18, 1778—a fortnight before his mother’s death. The performance was repeatedly interrupted by applause and calls for encores, and afterwards the 22-year-old composer celebrated by taking himself out to the fashionable Palais Royal complex, “where I had a large ice, said the rosary as I had vowed to do, and went home.” Even the conductor’s retrospective criticism that the original slow movement was “too long” and had “too many modulations” failed to dampen Mozart’s high spirits: He obligingly supplied a simpler, more concise alternative that is, however, seldom heard today.
Taking his cue from his father’s observation that the Parisians seemed to be “fond of noisy music,” Mozart scored his D-Major Symphony for an exceptionally large and sonorous orchestra: pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, plus timpani and strings (40-strong at the premiere). Further catering to French taste, he laid the symphony out in three movements, instead of the conventional four, and larded it with trendy special effects associated with the celebrated court orchestra in Mannheim, such as the skyrocketing scales that punctuate the opening Allegro assai. The reduced orchestration of the Andante creates an interlude of greater delicacy and transparency, while the brilliantly propulsive finale is characterized by sudden dynamic contrasts and exhilarating “Mannheim crescendos.”
—Harry Haskell