Our 2011/2012 Season

In the latter part of his life, Castelnuovo-Tedesco immigrated to the United States from Italy, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, and found himself as a film composer in Hollywood. This style of music writing would influence Tedesco’s later works, including his Quintet for Guitar, written in 1950. Through all four movements of the Quintet, one hears a strong melodic drive that is supported by rich harmonic textures. As each movement develops, members of the quintet trade back and forth melodies, and even perform them in canon, allowing everyone a chance to shine. The animation of the first and third movement bookend the beautiful, contrasting slow second movement, while the piece closes with a fiery Finale. One can hear Hollywood’s influence throughout the whole work, but perhaps most conspicuously in the third movement, that includes a familiar melody from a cartoon dating back to the 40’s and 50’s.

Mauro Giuliani is one of the most celebrated guitarist-composers of the nineteenth century, born in Bisceglie, Italy, in 1783. He began his studies on the cello, soon moved to guitar, and in 1806 he was drawn to the musical city of Vienna, where he became friends with Beethoven. Although a younger contemporary and colleague of his, Giuliani followed the more strictly classical principles of Mozart and Haydn, as illustrated perfectly in his Grand Overture, which consists of a brief, slow, minor-mode introduction, then followed by a fully developed major-mode sonata-allegro structure.

Boccherini was reputed for his facility as a composer, leaving about 467 compositions, most of them designed to exploit the resources of the cello, in concertos, sonatas, and, particularly, in chamber music for a various number of instruments. Eight quintets for guitar and string quartet have survived, arrangements made by the composer of works written for pianoforte quintet in the late 1790s. They do not highlight the guitar as solo instrument in the way Baroque works frame, and focus upon, their respective solo instruments. Rather, the guitar insinuates itself into a group of strings and plays along, sometimes providing a steady background and occasionally emerging as a conventional soloist. The initial Andantino pausato theme in Quintet No. 5 in D major reappears in the fourth movement, serving as a prologue to eight variations bearing features of both Italian and Spanish music, as clearly marked in the eighth variation. The light and syncopated theme abounding in the third movement, also winds up the series of variations by a brief unexpected repetition. As for the Menuetto Allegro, it appears to anticipate Schubert's style.

Verdi’s String Quartet in E minor was written as an exercise and was never really intended for publication. It comprises four substantial and technically demanding movements, and is widely admired for the forcefulness of its musical ideas and its structural cohesion. It opens with a powerful Allegro, with an urgently sculpted first group giving way to a somewhat more relaxed second subject. The slow movement, marked Andantino, brings the most vocally expansive and lyrical material, though even here one would hardly credit the work to a master of the opera stage with little prior experience of writing chamber music. Next comes a Prestissimo, unsettled and vehement in mood, while the last movement contains a massive fugue illustrating Verdi's mastery of contrapuntal techniques.

The Concerto In C Major, RV 425 is the only one out of the hundreds of concertos Vivaldi composed, that was written for solo mandolin, and heard here for guitar. The solo part is not technically difficult, but the composer efficiently uses melodic profile to draw a contrast between the strings and the serenading guitar, as in the orchestral ritornello of the first movement, consisting of little more than open octaves and fifths, while the guitar has sprightly melodic material. In one of those clever touches of which Vivaldi's concertos are full, the two textures are linked together: the ritornello ends in a short cadence in broken thirds, and the soloist begins by repeating the same music. The minor-key Largo is a fine example of minimalist melancholy, and the simple Allegro finale lets the soloist unpack the rudimentary melodic inversion upon which the ritornello is set. One of the solo passages seems to refer back to the concerto's first movement — an instance of cyclical technique that would place Vivaldi well ahead of his time, in this as in so many other things.