A lifelong bachelor, Brahms took a lively interest in his friends’ marital affairs. When Joseph Joachim announced his engagement in early 1863, the composer congratulated the great violinist on having plucked “the ripest and most beautiful apple in Paradise.” Amalie Schneeweiss was an up-and-coming operatic contralto whose personality Brahms found as fetching as her voice. “I shall look forward,” he wrote, “to the time when I can come and see you and, as I have already done at the homes of many a faithless friend, bend over a cradle and forget everything in the contemplation of the laughing baby face.” The Joachims’ son, christened Johannes after his godfather, duly arrived the following year. To mark the occasion, Brahms presented the happy couple with a tender lullaby based on the old German carol “Josef lieber, Josef mein.” Its gently rocking strain consorts with a noble countermelody of Brahms’s own—the strong, passionate voice of a mother standing guard over her sleeping child. Some 20 years later, he revised “Geistliches Wiegenlied” (“Sacred Lullaby”) in the form we know today, with its yearning harmonies and dark, agitated midsection framed by the viola’s reassuring statements of the familiar carol tune.
By the early 1880s, the Joachims’ marriage was on the rocks. Brahms took Amalie’s side in the divorce trial, insisting that her husband’s allegations of infidelity were baseless. The ensuing rupture almost put an end to the two men’s friendship, but Brahms made amends by inviting Joachim to conduct the Berlin premiere of his Third Symphony in 1884. Around the same time, he composed a companion piece to the lullaby, also scored for voice and viola obbligato, and published the two songs together as Op. 91. If “Geistliches Wiegenlied” is a song of innocence, “Gestillte Sehnsucht” (“Satisfied Longing”) speaks the bittersweet language of experience. The lullaby’s menacing winds have given way to whispering breezes that soothe the lover’s raging breast. But the viola’s restless arpeggios belie the vision of tranquil maturity. Brahms’s longing would never be stilled: By 1884, he had fixed his eye on another attractive young contralto named Hermine Spies.
Schooled in the Western classical tradition and a longtime resident of North America, South African composer Bongani Ndodana-Breen has spent much of his career cultivating his roots in the musics of his native Xhosa and other indigenous peoples of southern and western Africa. “As part of my quest for an identity as an African,” he says, “I have been drawn more and more toward an ‘African aesthetic’ within my art form, which is still riddled with European conventions. In trying to make sense of a cultural paradox, a new musical language emerges.” Ndodana-Breen’s musical language blends Western elements (forms, genres, and harmonic practices) with complexly layered polyrhythms and motivic patterns derived from African folk musics. His catalog is similarly eclectic, ranging from an opera about Winnie Mandela to an oratorio based on South Africa’s Freedom Charter and a piano quintet titled Intlanzi Yase Mzantsi (The Fish from South Africa), inspired by Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet.
Rain Making, written in 2007 for the Toronto-based new-music ensemble Musicanoir, exemplifies Ndodana-Breen’s engagement with African subject matter and history as well as musical traditions. It was written as a memorial to Queen Modjadji V (1937–2001), the fifth in a two-century–long dynasty of “rain queens” of South Africa’s Balobedu tribe, whose powers are said to include the ability to make rain. Her status as South Africa’s only female tribal leader ensured that both President F. W. de Klerk and his post-apartheid successor, Nelson Mandela, visited her secluded compound in Limpopo Province. Repetitious, subtly changing patterns suggestive of raindrops characterize Rain Making, which is scored for flute, viola, harp, marimba, and percussion.
As he approached middle age, Ravel strove to prune away superfluous notes and gestures in search of the “definitive clarity” that was his professed ideal. His pursuit of simplicity entered a new phase in the mid-1920s in the linear transparency of the Sonata for Violin and Cello, the childlike artlessness of his opera L’enfant et les sortilèges, and the beguiling song cycle Chansons madécasses. These three “songs of Madagascar,” set to texts by 18th-century French poet Évariste-Désiré de Parny, draw from the same colorfully exotic vein that Ravel had mined in works like Shéhérazade and Daphnis et Chloé. Scored for voice, flute, cello, and piano, they were commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the American patron of the arts, and completed in April 1926. The soprano Jean Bathori, one of Ravel’s most dedicated interpreters, gave the first performance the following month at the American Academy in Rome. French critic Henry Prunières observed approvingly that Ravel “renews himself periodically, without ever ceasing to be himself. In recent years, Ravel’s art has become more linear, thinner in texture, more contrapuntal. He condenses his thought in forms of increasingly rigorous simplicity.”
Contrapuntal lucidity and a free-flowing, incantatory mood are the keynotes of the first song, “Nahandove.” The sensuous vocal line, with its hypnotically repeated intervals and rhythmic patterns, underscores the pungent eroticism of Parny’s verse. As the composer put it, the three songs “form a sort of quartet in which the voice plays the role of principal instrument.” By contrast, “Aoua!” chillingly evokes the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. The singer’s savage cries give way to gently rocking fifths, as in a lullaby, while an undertone of menace builds to a ferocious climax on the singer’s unaccompanied cry, “Méfiez-vous des blancs” (“Beware of the white men”). In the third song, “Il est doux,” the cello’s ethereal harmonics impart a surreal quality to the music. Ravel extends tonality to the limits, and at one point abandons it altogether, before dismissing us (and the servant women of the poem) with an airy command.
Born into a musical family, Matthijs van Dijk studied at the South African College of Music in his native Cape Town, where he won the Priaulx Rainier Prize for composition in 2003. Since then, he has amassed an extensive catalog of chamber and orchestral works—including a number of scores for film and television—that reflect his eclectic musical sensibility, which embraces everything from classical to rock and electronic dance music. He is a founding member of the Night Light Collective, which aims to create “a new platform for art and noise music, that is bound to stretch audience members’ ears.” A crucial turning point in van Dijk’s career came in 2009, when he took a master class in New York with Missy Mazzoli, then a rising star of the “indie classical” world. “You say that you include elements of rock and metal in your music, but I don’t hear it,” she told him. Van Dijk realized that he had been muting that side of his personality out of a perception that “popular music has often been looked down upon by many academics and classical musicians.” Disenchanted with “the art/classical music scene,” he veered off in a new direction, forging a compositional style that he once described as “the bastard love child of Mahler and Shostakovich, if they hooked up in a rock and roll bar.”
Moments in a Life is a chamber oratorio celebrating the late Denis Goldberg, a renowned white South African freedom fighter who was sentenced to life in prison by the apartheid regime. The spoken text—which the 83-year-old Goldberg read at the work’s 2016 premiere at Stellenbosch University—is drawn from his autobiography, A Life for Freedom. “While I’ve been involved in a few ‘high-stress’ projects,” van Dijk recalls, “I’ve never had to work on something so ‘charged’ before, firstly due to the content itself and having to delve into South Africa’s horrific past, but down to the fact that ... whatever I would do with this piece, there would be a different type of interest in it that none of my previous works has ever received. On top of all of this, it was arranged that Mr. Goldberg himself would narrate, which gave it all an extra layer of electricity.” The small instrumental ensemble (clarinet, string quintet, piano, and percussion) is supplemented by an overtone singer, whose otherworldly multiphonics are first heard after Goldberg laconically recounts his sentencing: “I was unavoidably detained for 22 years.” Subdued and lyrical, van Dijk’s score discreetly supports the narrative without overshadowing it. “Because the stories deal with a period from 1939 to the present day,” he explains, “I opted to use a very eclectic musical style, encompassing ideas that range from the cinematic to very banal 1980s glam rock / hair metal, combined with snippets of club music, representing the artificial ‘theatricism’ and perversity of the media circus surrounding the Rivonia Trial, as well as ‘free jazz’ and minimalist ideas in the prison years to convey a feeling of confinement.”
—Harry Haskell