Karol Szymanowski has long been revered as one of Poland’s musical treasures, a worthy successor to Chopin and a beacon to avant-garde composers like Krzysztof Penderecki and Witold Lutosławski who came of age after World War II. In his best-known works—including the opera King Roger, the Third Symphony (“The Song of the Night”), Myths for violin and piano, and dozens of songs—Szymanowski coupled a strong lyrical sensibility with an impressive stylistic range. The pronounced strain of German Romanticism in his early music gave way to a colorfully impressionistic idiom nourished by the music of Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin, and later to a pithier, more nationalist style influenced by Bartók, Stravinsky, and Janáček. A distinguished concert pianist, Szymanowski traveled widely in the two decades before he became director of the Warsaw Conservatory in 1927. Although his administrative duties inevitably impinged on his work as composer and performer, he welcomed the opportunity to mold a new generation of Polish composers.
Seeking to broaden his musical horizons, the Ukrainian-born Szymanowski moved to Warsaw in 1901 to continue his studies. The spirit of Chopin still dominated musical life in the Polish metropolis, and the works he composed over the next few years—mostly piano pieces and art songs—owe an unconcealed debt to his predecessor. Szymanowski’s first and only violin sonata dates from 1904, the year before he and several other progressive-minded composers proclaimed their allegiance to the Young Poland movement, which aimed to chart a new direction for Polish art, literature, and music. The influence of impressionism and other turn-of-the-century styles soon began to be felt in Szymanowski’s music, and by the time Paweł Kochański and Artur Rubinstein premiered the D-Minor Sonata in Warsaw in 1909, he was well on his way to finding the strongly individual voice of his maturity.
If Szymanowski’s early piano music is conspicuously Chopinesque, the model for this turbulent, strenuously lyrical sonata was surely Franck’s great A-Major Sonata of 1886. The two works share an emotionally charged, declamatory idiom characterized by lush late-Romantic harmonies, soaring melodies, and free, recitative-like passages for the violin. The dramatic peroration that opens the Allegro moderato—marked patetico, “with feeling”—sets the impassioned tone for much of the music that follows. In the slow movement, the tranquil, long-breathed arioso is interrupted by a bumptious Scherzando that features gruff plucked chords in the violin. A series of pounding octaves in the piano heralds the beginning of the triple-time finale, which has been likened to a frenetic tarantella.
A native of Mexico City, Gabriela Ortiz cut her musical teeth playing charango and guitar with Los Folkloristas, the internationally popular Latin American folk band that her parents helped found in the 1960s. As a teenager, she studied piano with a teacher who introduced her to Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, an experience that she describes as transformative. “It was like a new window totally opened for me, and that’s when I decided to become a composer.” Further studies in London enabled the eclectically minded Ortiz to incorporate the rhythmic vibrancy of Bartók and Stravinsky into her music alongside influences from flamenco, jazz, and the musical cultures of Latin America, Africa, and India. “When something sparks my interest,” she says, “I take it, I absorb it, and I transform it into something very personal.” Ortiz’s works range from the colorful Concierto Candela for percussion to an opera about a Mexican drug smuggler, an orchestral tone poem inspired by efforts to restore coral reefs through sound, and a ballet commemorating the 2019 “Glitter Revolution” triggered by the epidemic of violence against women in Mexico.
De Cuerda y Madera (Of String and Wood) is one of six works that are receiving their premieres as part of Ortiz’s season-long residency at Carnegie Hall. It’s a chamber-sized pendant to her three-movement violin concerto entitled Altar de Cuerda (Altar of String), which María Dueñas and the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed at Carnegie Hall two years ago with Gustavo Dudamel, one of the composer’s most enthusiastic champions. Dueñas and Alexander Malofeev premiered De Cuerda y Madera on October 12 at the Angelika Kauffmann Concert Hall in Schwarzenberg, Germany.
After writing my first concerto for violin and orchestra, Altar de Cuerda, dedicated to the talented violinist María Dueñas, the idea arose at her request to write a new piece for violin and piano as a musical capriccio.
This is how De Cuerda y Madera was born, a playful and eclectic piece that develops in a free way using the violin and the piano in a constant dialogue of high musical virtuosity.
The work is divided into three sections: two of them (first and last) of a fast and lively nature, based on ideas that somehow arise from Afro-Caribbean or folk music. In the central part, there is a small section of a slower and more cantabile character that serves as a musical contrast and repose. In the third section, I decided to add a small cadenza for the violin, which is slightly accentuated with some piano interventions and which prepares the final coda.
The piece is dedicated to María Dueñas, who was the total inspiration for writing this music.
—Gabriela Ortiz
By his early 20s, César Franck had several widely acclaimed works under his belt, including a series of piano trios designed to showcase his prowess at the keyboard. Nonetheless, he was slow to win recognition as a leading figure of the French Romantic school. Not until his 50th year did he achieve the equivalent of a tenured position as professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire, where his pupils would include Debussy and Bizet. Among his best-known works are the majestic Prélude, fugue et variation for organ, the ebullient Variations symphoniques for piano and orchestra, and the Lisztian symphonic poem Le Chasseur maudit.
Although Franck wrote a mere handful of chamber works, clustered at the beginning and end of his career, they include some of his greatest and most characteristic creations. The A-Major Sonata of 1886, which many consider his masterpiece, was dedicated to Belgian violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe. Such was its éclat that it was soon taken up by cellists, violists, and flutists, making it one of the most frequently performed works in the recital repertoire. It figures memorably in literature as well: In John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, it is Irene’s playing of Franck’s “divine third movement” that triggers Young Jolyon’s fateful decision to tell his son about the tragedy that has loomed over their family since before his birth.
The Violin Sonata is deeply indebted to Ysaÿe’s purity of tone, liquid phrasing, and tasteful reticence. After hearing him play the opening movement, Franck adjusted the tempo marking to a livelier Allegretto ben moderato, imparting an undercurrent of urgency to the gently undulating principal theme. For all its rich chromaticism and quasi-symphonic textures, the sonata has a chaste, limpid quality that permeates even the restless, driving intensity of the second-movement Allegro. The work lacks a true slow movement. In its place, Franck injected an oasis of repose in the form of a spacious minor-mode meditation that revisits earlier thematic material. Freely declamatory in style, the Recitativo—Fantasia mediates between the muscular lyricism of the first two movements and the disciplined canonic writing of the final Allegretto poco mosso.
—Harry Haskell