PROGRAM NOTES
Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805)
String Quintet No. 60 in C Major, Op. 30, G. 324, “Night Music of the Streets of Madrid” ARR. CLOUD
Most people are introduced to the music of Luigi Boccherini through the minuet movement of his String Quartet Op. 11, No. 5. It has become the standard Baroque piece for everything from movies to music boxes, but Boccherini was far more than a belated one-hit-wonder. His talent was cultivated early on in the context of an astonishingly talented family. His father Leopoldo was a singer and double bass player, his sisters became professional performers in dance and opera, and his brother wrote librettos for Antonio Salieri and Franz Joseph Haydn. Biographical details are spotty during some years, but records indicate that after initial lessons with his father, Boccherini began formal schooling, eventually studying cello in Rome. Still only 13-years-old, Boccherini soon returned to his hometown, Lucca, where he was encouraged by Giacomo Puccini (great-great-grandfather of the opera composer!)
Entering his professional career, Boccherini sought opportunities wherever he could find them, working in Vienna, Genoa, and Paris, where he gave his only recorded public performance at the Concert Spiritual in 1768 at the age of 25. By the fall of 1770, he was appointed as “compositore e virtuoso di camera” for Don Luis, brother of King Charles III of Spain, and would remain in Madrid for the rest of his life. Seeking to stay connected with the continent to ensure his works spread beyond the Spanish court, Boccherini sought the advice of Haydn regarding publication with the esteemed publishing firm of Artaria in Vienna. The scheme seems to have worked, as he later secured a position with Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia in an arrangement where he was able to send finished works to the Prussian court from Madrid. His works also found an audience in Paris, in particular with a gentleman who amassed a collection of 110 of Boccherini’s pieces before dying in the French Revolution.
The String Quintet No. 60 is nicknamed, “Night Music of the Streets of Madrid” for its evocative portrayal of a public space from sundown through the night. This includes everything from the tolling of church bells to the drums of the military night watch as they proceed through the streets. We also pass by prayers of the Rosary and hear the exuberant strumming of guitars with accompanying songs. Eventually, we hear again the percussive tremble of the military watch again with the sound fading into the distance as they depart.
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)
Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, SV 153
Known most famously for his 1607 opera, L’Orfeo and lauded as a pinnacle and standard setting achievement in the nascent days of the genre, Claudio Monteverdi’s true legacy to music rests in his steadfast pursuit of expressing the full emotional experience of being human. As he stepped into the 17th century, he led a movement that strove toward defining and demonstrating the idea of a “second practice,” that would inject a heightened sense of drama into the old forms. This ideal is touched upon in Monteverdi’s preface to his Eighth Book of Madrigals. In the volume, Monteverdi gathered together for publication works written during different points in his life, for different purposes, and noted their common subject matter in the title, Madrigals of Love and War. Its centerpiece is The Combat of Tancredi and Clorinda, which provided a framework for Monteverdi to explicitly gesture toward the values of the second practice by announcing his intention of constructing a methodology to depict anger in the music, which he posits had not truly been explored. For the text, he used an excerpt from a poem by Torquato Tasso. He noted, “I found his description of the combat between Tancredi and Clorinda, giving me two opposing passions to turn into song: war, that is, supplication and death. In the year 1624, this work was performed before the finest citizens of the noble city of Venice...It was greeted with great praise and applause. Having seen the success of my first depiction of anger, I continued my studies into this idea.”
Though the work is included in the book of madrigals, it defies easy categorization. It stretches well beyond the container of a madrigal, even by the evolving standards of the genre as it developed from a multi-voice work for a cappella voices to be accompanied by instruments. Yet, it is also not an opera, not a cantata, and not a play. Structurally, there is a narrator and two characters, but they barely speak and instead are primarily tasked with depicting their battle. It is the narrator who almost exclusively leads us through the scene (even to the point of interjecting “he replies” in the middle of an exchange). Musically, what Monteverdi accomplished with the orchestration is by all accounts, astonishing. In his score he manifests a visceral representation of clashing swords and the clatter of armor, delivers an arresting expression of human bodies exerted and exhausted in brutal violence, and offers heart-wrenching empathy for the complicated fate of the two main characters.
Kareem Roustom (b. 1971)
Clorinda Agonistes (Concert Suite excerpts) for mezzo-soprano and string quartet (2021, excerpts made in 2024)
Clorinda Agonistes (Clorinda the warrior) was commissioned by London based Shobana Jeyasingh Dance and co-produced by Sadler’s Wells Theatre in partnership with the Royal Philharmonic Society with funding from the RPS Drummond Fund. Inspired by the heroine of Claudio Monteverdi’s celebrated work Il Combattimento, the proud and fiery Muslim warrior Clorinda who defiantly refuses to reveal her name, Clorinda Agonistes weaves contemporary dance, film, and baroque and new music to create a story that explores violence, resilience and revelation across the boundaries of culture and time. Roustom has translated to Arabic the Italian poetry used by Monteverdi to give Clorinda voice in her ‘native tongue’. The world premiere of Clorinda Agonistes took place at the Grange Festival (U.K.) on July 13, 2022. This performance at Jordan Hall features the world-premiere of the Clorinda Agonistes Concert Suite excerpts.
- Program Note by Kareem Roustom
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
String Sextet in D Minor, Op. 70, “Souvenir de Florence” ARR. POPPER-KEIZER
In June and July of 1890, shortly after returning from Florence, Tchaikovsky dug into working on a chamber piece he had promised to write for the Saint Petersburg Chamber Music Society. It was slow-going and in a letter to his younger brother, Modest, he lamented the challenges he faced: “I began it three days ago and am writing with difficulty, not for want of new ideas, but because of the novelty of the form. One requires six independent yet homogeneous voices. This is unimaginably difficult.”
Tchaikovsky also wrote to violinist Eugen Albrecht about numerous worries. Showing how thoroughly he considered each aspect, he discussed whether or not the six-part fugue he envisioned for the finale would sound dissonant when played rapidly, textures for specific passages (legato or detaché), bow markings, and a desire for an “improbable pppp,” or extremely quiet sound that “should be just discernible, like summer lightning.”
Agitated and hurting from the end of his long-running friendship with Madame von Meck (who was also an important patron), the composer continued to tinker and revise large portions of the work for another two years, during which time he traveled to the United States to conduct the inaugural concert for Carnegie Hall in May 1891. When he finally completed the revisions in 1892, it became one of his last works before his death the following year.
The finished product reveals Tchaikovsky’s ultimate mastery of the sextet form. He playfully maximizes the presence of additional parts to create both a complex and lush texture as well as entertain with sonic effects. For example, in the opening movement we hear lines handed off, relay-style, through each part up and back down again. In the second movement, the composer’s otherworldly ability to draft a lilting and gorgeous melodic line is on full display. Here, a conversation develops between the upper and lower voices, while the middle voices provide accompaniment. Against this backdrop, sections where the ensemble plays together stand out dramatically. A mysterious mood pervades the third movement. Here again the composer finds remarkable variations in texture for a relatively small motivic feature and displays his ability to immediately shift into an entirely different emotional terrain, returning with equal imperceptibility. In the finale we discover that Tchaikovsky kept the idea of integrating fugues, and that he added two. Amidst all this, a quotation from Swan Lake emerges, then quickly dissipates. Toward the end, the composer’s unique ability to build momentum reaches full throttle, stretching out over multiple bars until the leap-to-your-feet conclusion.
Kathryn J. Allwine Bacasmot is a pianist/harpsichordist, musicologist, music and cultural critic, and freelance writer. A graduate of New England Conservatory, she writes program annotations for ensembles nationwide.
