Violin soloist Nicola Benedetti
"All the birds pay tribute to me
for today I wed a goddess.
And now we stand by the lake in crimson blossom
in flowing tears of joy, with rapture and fear,
burning in amorous conflagration."
-- Noc Majawa by Tadeusz Miciński.
Szymanowski may be a new name for some people here. He is more well known, revered, in Poland, where he is ranked among the most important Polish composers after Chopin.
The World War I era violin concerto we're going to hear today is a real treat. It has a gorgeous, otherworldly texture to it. More below...
Karol Szymanowski
Wikipedia quotes a musicologist describing Szymanowski's style:
"Szymanowski adopted no thorough-going alternatives to tonal organization [...] the harmonic tensions and relaxations and the melodic phraseology have clear origins in tonal procedure, but [...] an underpinning tonal framework has been almost or completely dissolved away."
I think the key phrase above is "no thorough-going." Szymanowski doesn't limit himself to only one method of organizing the textures he creates. His style is purposefully eclectic.
Szymanowski explained his independence thusly:
“It must be stressed that tonality, atonality or even polytonality cannot in substance serve as the starting-point for a critical evaluation of a musical work, the inner logic and formal elements of which will automatically become independent of all pre- conceived, imposed disciplines if they are to come to their fullest expression.”
I'm not going to get into a
deep explanation of what
all these technical terms mean. I've written other diaries on that. What I LIKE about this violin concerto is that I don't necessarily need to, because it's very accessible.
And it has sugar in it. In previous diaries on the twentieth century, I've let some of my disdain for modern composers seep out. Part of that is that it (I'm looking at you, serialists) too often take away ALL the sugar.
I've beat my head against a wall today, looking for a painting online. Years ago, I took a guided tour of the Smithsonian's Hirschhorn modern art museum in Washington D.C. We toured a series of paintings that were part of a twentieth century movement which sought to remove content from art in order to increase its abstraction. What that really means is that as we moved along, the paintings became more and more boring, until we reached one painting that I wish I could find for you. It was a series of brown lines, brown concentric squares, I think. The guide explained that this artist had chosen, eventually, to paint only in brown because bright colors were a distraction.
I had a powerful emotional reaction to it. I felt saddened. I tried to imagine being a trained artist who had devoted my life to art, painting concentric squares, and painting them baby shit brown because a touch of beautiful color might distract from the concentric squariness of it all.
But the tour had a happy ending, because as we moved along, the same artist said to hell with this, and his next series of paintings burst to life with the color that he eschewed.
So that's what I mean about taking away all the sugar. This is modern music, but it's music that has some sugar in it, and I, for one, appreciate it. Szymanowski throws us an anchor, once in a while. We get contrast.
As I was listening in preparation for this, I tried to think of what it reminded me of. It has elements similar to Debussy, similar to Scriabin. In fact, I would most compare it to Scriabin. Like Debussy and Scriabin, Szymanowski's main musical tool seems to be synthetic scales.
What that means is that he alters the normal do-re-mi scale, flattening or sharpening some of the notes, and then playing consistently that way for a while. The music is tonal, but it is slippery at times. Sometimes he eases up and gives us a beautiful lush chord that ambushes us. Other times it floats in its own tonal symmetry.
There isn't as much analysis of the concerto on the web as I would like, so I'm free to bloviate with my own analysis. Like Scriabin, Szymanowski uses a lot of tritone intervals in this work. (I explained tritones and other intervals in this past diary.) He often switches back and forth from whole tone scales to Lydian.
A few images to explain that in simple terms. Here is C major, your normal do-re-mi you learned in school
With a few tweaks of those notes, you get the whole tone scale:
The Whole Tone Scale
The whole tone scale is "broken machinery," in a way. You can't do normal tonal things with it. There's no anchor to it. Because it is symmetrical, it tends to create an eery, floating in the mist atmosphere. Szymanowski easily morphs his themes from that to the Lydian mode, though.
Lydian mode isn't "broken." In fact, it's a very old version of the musical scale, often used in medieval music and in ethnic folk music, including Polish folk music, which Szymanowski freely borrowed from. That one funny note that's different from C major that you see there makes the difference. Combined with the C note, it forms a tritone, an exotic dissonance. The transitions that Szymanowski makes from whole note scale to Lydian isn't that difficult, and that's where we get to hear some of the occasional "sugar" in the piece.
If you also get a "South Seas Islands" feel from the music, as I do, you can trace it to that funny note. It's the same funny note that gives Rodgers and Hammerstein's Bali Hai (from South Pacific) it's exotic flavor, the same note that Alfred Newman exploited in his film score for the classic 1937 filmHurricane.
Szymanowski was inspired for the concerto by a poem by the Polish poet Tadeusz Miciński.
All the birds pay tribute to me
for today I wed a goddess.
And now we stand by the lake in crimson blossom
in flowing tears of joy, with rapture and fear,
burning in amorous conflagration.
We hear those birds as the concerto begins with the chirping of the woodwinds. This is one of the recurring motifs of the concerto.
I'm not going to analyze it in detail because I'm running late. It's not in a traditional form, so its easier to just break it down into sections by the seams in the at the points where the violin breaks out or the orchestra breaks out. The whole concerto is in one movement, although it's broken up here into three clips for practical reasons. We will hear the very photogenic and talented Scottish soloist Nicola Benedetti (yup, Scottish, not Italian) perform the concerto in a live performance from the BBC Young Musician of the Year 2004 competition, which she won with this performance.
Szymanowski's Violin Concerto #1, Nicola Benedetti violin, BBC Symphony Orchestra, from the 2004 BBC Musician of the Year Competition
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
One last purely gratuitous pic of Nicola Benedetti:
NEXT WEEK: I'm not sure yet. I think we've given the Violin Concerto genre a good run. Next week might be one last concerto, but I'm leaning towards Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. If anybody else wants to put their own dibs on writing about that work, speak up now! I have plenty of other works I can write about instead.