A crossover artist par excellence, the late composer-pianist Claude Bolling is best known to American audiences for his collaborations with classically trained musicians like Jean-Pierre Rampal, Yo-Yo Ma, Alexander Lagoya, and Maurice André. But in his native France, he is revered alongside Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grapelli as one of the country’s jazz greats. The teenage wunderkind assembled his first small band in Paris just after World War II and began sharing the stage with such luminaries as Chippie Hill, Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton, and Kenny Clarke. As Bolling’s fame spread, he arranged songs for Juliette Gréco and Brigitte Bardot and composed soundtracks for dozens of films, including Borsalino and Co. and California Suite. The turning point of his career was the hit recording of his Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio that he and Rampal made in 1975; it stayed at or near the top of Billboard’s classical album chart for more than a decade and became a standard set piece in flute auditions and competitions. “At this time, when I thought about a concert in the US,” Bolling recalled, “I could only imagine something in a little jazz club in small-town America. Thanks to Jean-Pierre Rampal and this ‘Suite,’ my first concert was at Carnegie Hall!”
In blending the idioms of classical music and jazz, Bolling followed a well-worn path blazed in part by one of his heroes, Duke Ellington; his 1989 recording of Black, Brown and Beige helped win belated recognition for Ellington’s symphonic masterpiece. Bolling’s chops as a jazz pianist, combined with Rampal’s superstar virtuosity, made the Suite a surefire crowd pleaser. (Its sequel, the three-movement Suite No. 2 of 1986, proved less successful.) The secret of the work’s enduring popularity is Bolling’s happy-go-lucky blend of sophistication, bravura, and easy-listening appeal. It attracted listeners with diverse backgrounds and tastes but also consigned the Suite—somewhat unjustly—to the category of “light” music. The movements mimic the structure of a Baroque instrumental suite, with the piano, bass, and drums forming an updated continuo ensemble. Even the Suite’s improvisatory elements, largely confined to the piano trio “accompaniment,” have precedents in Baroque performance practice. The resulting mashup is at once entertaining and thoroughly engaging, offering what flutist Pamela Skar describes as “accessible palettes of happiness, excitement, innocence, pathos, playfulness, and sincerity.”
Upon arriving in Vienna from his native Bonn in 1792, Beethoven wasted no time in making his mark as both composer and virtuoso pianist. Boundlessly energetic, socially well connected, and self-confident to a fault, he made no secret of his impatience to step out of the long shadow cast by his revered mentor, Joseph Haydn. By 1800, his 30th year, the young tyro had an impressive clutch of masterpieces to his credit, including his First Symphony, three piano concertos, the six Op. 18 String Quartets, and the Op. 20 Septet for Winds and Strings. Beethoven recognized the Septet as a crowd pleaser and featured it on a concert he produced for his own benefit at the Imperial Court Theater in Vienna on April 2 of that year, featuring an ensemble led by the great violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh.
The Septet is scored for clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello, and bass—basically a seven-piece orchestra. In a note to his publisher, Beethoven emphasized that the parts were “tutti obbligati” (“all essential”), impishly adding that “I can write nothing non-obbligato, for I came into this world with an obbligato accompaniment.” Although Beethoven’s music could be extremely challenging, for players and listeners alike, at this stage of his career he was not insensitive to the public’s desire for lighter works tailored to the abilities of amateur musicians. Nor was he averse to earning money for his publishers (and himself): Witness his tongue-in-cheek suggestion that his brother, Carl, arrange the Septet for the benefit of amateur flutists, who “would swarm around and feed on it like hungry insects.” But the runaway success of the Septet, both in its original form and in subsequent incarnations as a string quintet and piano trio, eventually came to grate on Beethoven’s nerves. In later years, Carl Czerny recalled that “he could not endure his Septet and grew angry because of the universal applause with which it was received.”
After a stately introduction, enlivened by the violin’s graceful flourishes, the strings launch into a perky Allegro con brio, the winds trailing close on their heels. The mixed ensemble’s amiable repartee yields many an unexpected twist and turn, including a dramatic plunge into the minor mode in the development section. The roles are reversed in the broadly lyrical Adagio cantabile: This time the violin imitates the clarinet, with the bassoon and horn sharing the spotlight. The two middle movements pair to form a lighthearted centerpiece—a genial minuet (whose halting theme is borrowed from Beethoven’s G-Major Piano Sonata, Op. 49, No. 2, composed in the mid-1790s) and a set of five variations on a simple, folklike tune. Next comes a vivacious, triple-time Scherzo, with the cello stepping to the fore in the more relaxed Trio section. Another majestic introduction, harking back to the opening Adagio, leads to a rather frenetic Presto in which the violin again steals the show with its soloistic bravura.
An idealistic young violinist hungry for success succumbs to the blandishments of an unscrupulous record company executive who leads her down the primrose path to fame ... The resemblance between the protagonists of Wynton Marsalis’s Fiddler’s Tale and Igor Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale—the latter featuring a hapless soldier who sells his soul (in the form of his violin) to the devil—is entirely intentional. Fresh from winning the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his jazz oratorio, Blood on the Fields, Marsalis composed his contemporary take on Stravinsky’s 1918 theater piece at the behest of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. With new narration by jazz critic Stanley Crouch, A Fiddler’s Tale replicated the orchestration of The Soldier’s Tale, and the two works were performed side by side on the Society’s 1998 cross-country tour. The fact that Stravinsky’s knowledge of jazz was patchy didn’t bother Marsalis. “He’s not really using jazz,” the composer-trumpeter told The New York Times. “He’s just using the syncopations. But a lot of times, there’s a certain spirit in the age that permeates everybody, and this music is about all kinds of things from his age coming together. Man, with his level of musical intelligence, he didn’t need to have access to much jazz.”
Unlike Marsalis, Stravinsky’s motives in writing The Soldier’s Tale were mainly mercenary. During World War I, he and his friend C. F. Ramuz, who had previously written the French texts for Stravinsky’s “histoire burlesque” Renard and ballet Les noces, found themselves cut off from their usual sources of income in Switzerland. They hatched the idea of collaborating on a small-scale music theater piece that, as Ramuz wrote, could be “mounted without trouble anywhere, even in the open air.” Based on a Russian legend about a soldier-violinist who makes a pact with the devil and wins the hand of the king’s daughter, only to lose his soul, The Soldier’s Tale was economical both in its musical means and in its performing forces: a handful of actors and dancers and a seven-piece instrumental ensemble (violin, bass, clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, and percussion). Echoes of the raucous street-band music that Stravinsky heard in Spain during the war permeate the score, and the composer’s budding interest in African American popular music is reflected in the pièce de résistance, a brilliant and slightly tipsy-sounding medley of popular dances of the day: tango, waltz, and ragtime.
Marsalis faithfully evokes Stravinsky’s angular gestures, tangy dissonances, and shifting, jazz-inflected rhythmic patterns. But far from being what Variety magazine acidly dismissed as “little more than a scrambled paraphrase of one of the most invigorating pieces in the classical repertoire,” A Fiddler’s Tale is a work of marked originality that riffs on rhythms, melodic phrases, and other elements of Stravinsky’s score, while drawing on idioms as diverse as Dixieland jazz, folk fiddling, and 20th-century modernism. As Marsalis observed, The Soldier’s Tale “is caught between two worlds, Stravinsky’s existing sound and the sound of a small jazz band with trumpet and trombone and clarinet.” Much the same can be said of his smart-witted stylistic synthesis.
—Harry Haskell