Hadelich Plays Bartók

In the music world, the term “prodigy” immediately calls to mind young instrumentalists delivering fiery feats of virtuosity that belie their young age. Less frequently is the term applied to composers, but it’s a fitting one for Dalit Warshaw.

Warshaw’s first orchestral work, composed when she was just 8 years old, won the prestigious BMI Award for Student Composers in 1984, making her the youngest recipient in the award’s history. By age 17, her compositions had been performed by major orchestras in New York, Cleveland, Boston, and Houston. As her career progressed, the orchestra became as much Warshaw’s primary instrument as her first love, the piano.

But Warshaw sees the piano as more than a tool for artistic expression — it’s also her refuge, an oasis of calm when she’s flush with the creative heat of composing. In these moments, she often turns specifically to the music of Brahms, writing, “As early as I can remember, I have gravitated toward the piano music of Brahms, and the act of playing through his intermezzi during intense periods of writing always provided me both emotional fulfillment and compositional guidance.”

Unlike the German composer-pianist’s towering sonatas and intricately laced variations marrying Classical form with Romantic sensibility, the intermezzi are short, profoundly personal works — melancholy meditations on life, overflowing with consoling melodies and radiant harmonies. These intermezzi — collected in Brahms’s catalogue of works as Opp. 76 and 116–119 — allowed him to reconnect with the roots of his creative spirit after working in large-scale mediums.

Similarly, Warshaw’s Responses, composed in 2013 for solo piano, came to life during a period of self-rediscovery after a prolonged period composing chamber music and art songs. Feeling an intense pull back to the keyboard, Warshaw began to imagine her own work in direct conversation with Brahms and his emotionally vulnerable intermezzi.

Taking inspiration from figures of the past is a recurring thread in Warshaw’s music, in which she’s conjured the spirit of sculptor Camille Claudel, the sirens of ancient mythology, and the writing of Thomas Mann. But in Responses, she focuses solely on the work of a fellow composer, transforming the raw material of three Brahms intermezzi into captivating, introspective miniatures of her own.

Through Warshaw’s lens, the “slow tears” Brahms described in his Op. 119, No. 1, are reimagined as an avalanche of powerful, profound emotions. The fairytale enchantment she’s always heard in Op. 116, No. 5, becomes a macabre dance driven forward by the restless, ominous rhythm Brahms threads throughout the intermezzo. And finally, in Op. 76, No. 3, in which Warshaw hears the “nostalgic clanging of bells,” she calms mind and body alike with a lullaby of luminescent beauty that gently fades into silence.

Just as Responses took form as a conversation between composers, Warshaw’s orchestral version of the work, composed in 2016, offers interlocking conversations among the orchestral voices that echo across the stage. The hushed quality of Brahms’s intermezzi is amplified by the full breadth of the orchestra’s power, transforming moments of bittersweet tenderness into seismic eruptions of rage and sorrow. All the while, our ears are tickled by the kaleidoscope of musical colors Warshaw conjures in every bar of her score, from trembling violins and chirping flutes to celestial ripples in the harp.

One might assume creating such a rich orchestral sound world would have required Warshaw to completely rethink her original piano score. But that’s not the case, as she shared: “Whenever I address the piano in my writing, I always hear it three-dimensionally, as an orchestra. To orchestrate this work was, therefore, simply a matter of enabling sounds that had long been in my ear, which I always strive to reveal through my own performances of the piano version.”

Such an approach to orchestration adds a layer of meta-narrative to Responses, as we witness Warshaw immersed in two conversations across time — one with Brahms, and another with her former self.

— Michael Cirigliano II

Michael Cirigliano II is a freelance writer who has worked with The Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Lincoln Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His newsletter, Shades of Blue, explores the human stories behind classical music’s most melancholy moments as a means to cultivate calm, connection, and healing.

COMPOSER’S NOTE

Originally composed for solo piano, Responses is a set of three intermezzi written as complements to the three intermezzi of Brahms (Op. 119, No. 1; Op. 116, No. 5; and Op. 76, No. 3). As early as I can remember, I have gravitated toward the piano music of Brahms, and the act of playing through his intermezzi during intense periods of writing always provided me both emotional fulfillment and compositional guidance. Each “Response” capitalizes upon selected characteristics from the original intermezzo. The “slow tears” of Op. 119, No. 1, for example, becomes an avalanche, the three-sixteenth-note motive of the middle section transformed into a bird call, the final prolonged unfolding of the original B minor tonic leading to an abrupt surprise resolution. Op. 116, No. 5 struck me as a fairytale gone awry, its persistent heartbeat-like main rhythmic motive somewhat relentless, its eighth-note rests stark and alarming; I therefore enhanced its ominous quality by adding rhythmic irregularity and using registral extremes to create a demonic danse macabre. As in the original intermezzo, after a vulnerable and plaintive middle section, the original material returns on a false tonic. The final “Response” is an homage to Op. 76, No. 3, whose pianissimo arpeggios on an A-flat pedal tone suggested to me an eerie transparency and nostalgic clanging of bells, and the potential for temporal expansiveness.

Just over a decade after his death in 1945, it came to light that Béla Bartók had composed a violin concerto in 1907–08 for a young violinist, Stefi Geyer, with whom he had been in love. He had given her the manuscript, but she did not play it — and it remained unknown until her death in 1956.

Until that revelation, the only known Bartók violin concerto was a mature masterpiece written for the great Hungarian violinist Zoltán Székely in 1937–38, and now designated as No. 2. The friendship between these two musicians is one of the most fascinating partnerships of 20th-century music. It began in 1921, when Bartok’s colleague Zoltán Kodály arranged a meeting between the 39-year-old composer and the 17-year-old violinist. Even after Bartók’s death, Szekeiy continued to interpret and promote the composer’s music until his own death in 2001, at the age of 97.

The Second Violin Concerto is just one of the remarkable pieces produced by this collaboration and came as a direct request from Székely. Bartók was at first reluctant — wary of his friend’s request for exclusive performance rights in exchange for a set honorarium — but he eventually agreed. Having finished his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta in 1936, Bartók turned his attention to creating the concerto. At first, he had in mind merely a set of variations, but it soon grew into a conventional three-movement work.

Living in his villa in Budapest, Bartók was thoroughly disturbed throughout this time by the deterioration of the political situation, wondering when and how he should emigrate, and where. He was also negotiating to replace his Austrian publisher (Universal Edition) with a London one (Boosey & Hawkes). “Neither while I am alive nor after my death,” he wrote, “do I want any German publisher to have any of my work, even if it means that no work of mine will ever be published again. This is fixed and final.”

The concerto was finished at the end of 1938 and quickly scheduled into the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s season. Composer and soloist met in Paris to work through it together, then parted, not knowing whether they would meet again. Bartók and his wife had an engagement in Budapest on the day of the premiere, March 23, and although the concerto was repeated that year in a number of Dutch cities, he never heard Székely play it.

Bartók eventually emigrated to America in 1940, and the arrangements for the exclusive rights to the concerto had to be abandoned so that other violinists could play it. Thus it was that Tossy Spivakovsky, Concertmaster of The Cleveland Orchestra, gave the concerto its US debut at Severance under Music Director Artur Rodzińki’s baton in January 1943. When Spivakovsky played it at Carnegie Hall later that year with the New York Philharmonic, Bartók heard his concerto for the first and only time. “The performance was really marvelous,” he wrote (in English). “All the three factors (soloist, conductor, orchestra) were the best a composer could wish for his work.”

The most striking feature of this concerto is the kaleidoscopic range of moods and language it encompasses. The pure, puslating chords laid down by the harp at the opening of the first movement prepare us perhaps for the lovely, wide-ranging theme with which the soloist opens, but not for the squealing and snorting that occasionally intrude. Yet the mood is predominantly lyrical, alternating with the vigorous brilliance that marks Bartók’s music. There are some remarkable sounds, including glissandi, quarter-tones, and wild chromaticism. But the harp’s quiet chords keep returning to remind us of a gentler mood. The violinist’s solo cadenza precedes a forceful ending, as in the great concertos of Beethoven and Brahms.

The central second movement is a set of six variations on a short, beautiful theme, each variation clearly distinguishable from the next. The orchestra’s closing echo at the end of the first statement of the theme is vintage Bartók, a preview of the kind of haunting phrases that will recur in his final works. The theme is restated at the end in the soloist’s upper register, and this time the closing echo is quiet and enclosed.

The finale contains a sprightly version of the theme from the very beginning of the concerto. The brisk pace is broken by a central slow section in which the soloist alternates between its upper and lower registers.

As in the Concerto for Orchestra, Bartók’s last major work, the printed score includes two versions of the closing measures. Székely described the ending, as he first saw it, as a “big fortissimo orchestral apotheosis, more like the conclusion of a symphony” than of a solo concerto. He wrote to Bartók about this and was astonished when the composer capitulated, rewriting the end of the concerto with a more favorable role for the soloist, while still incorporating the orchestral effects he didn’t want to lose. “Now everyone plays it in the version he corrected,” said Székely, with some satisfaction.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.

The association of music and images is a fundamental characteristic of Claude Debussy’s works. In addition to the many specific physical references on which he based compositions — from the ocean in La mer to all kinds of landscapes and portraits in his piano Préludes — the word Images appeared in an early set of piano pieces (1894) and in two better-known sets for piano (1905–08), before this title was used again for his orchestral triptych Images.

It was natural for Debussy to think in musical images. He was a great lover of art and counted many painters among his friends (even though he despised the term “impressionist” when it was applied to his music). But his artistic vision went beyond mere musical representation of a subject. For Debussy, his images were seen or dreamed by the mind’s eye and then realized in his colorful soundworld.

In the case of Images, the three tableaux primarily capture motion combined with the senses of sight, hearing, and even smell. As Charles Baudelaire, one of Debussy’s favorite poets, put it: “Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent ...” (The fragrances, the colors, and the sounds answer one another ...).

The melody of the first movement, Gigues, is derived from an English country dance, or jig, related to but different from the Baroque gigue. Debussy had visited England on many occasions, and he may have come across this melody on one of his trips, or he may have borrowed it from the song “Dansons la gigue” (Let’s dance the jig) by his contemporary Charles Bordes. Debussy had also originally planned to append the adjective “triste” (sad) to the title, according to a letter to his publisher Durand from 1905. No doubt, the idea of turning a cheerful dance into a melancholy melody was already present in his mind years before the composition was written.

After a brief introduction with a typically Debussian combination of harp, celesta, and woodwinds, the jig melody is played by unaccompanied oboe d’amore (pitched between the oboe and the English horn). The other woodwinds and the horns play a faster rhythmic variant of this tune while the oboe d’amore keeps repeating its own, more soulful version. The music gets more and more agitated as the rhythmic pattern of the faster-moving material is developed in a powerful orchestral crescendo that suddenly breaks off. The sad jig tune returns, gradually slowing, before the music finally fades into silence.

Iberia, the second movement of the triptych, follows a long tradition of French musicians drawing inspiration from the melodies and rhythms of Spain — perhaps the greatest example being Bizet’s opera Carmen. Aside from one short trip across the border, Debussy never visited Spain, but he was familiar with works by composers on the other side of the Pyrenees including Manuel de Falla and Isaac Albéniz. Falla later praised Debussy’s Ibéria, saying it had “a considerable and decisive influence on young Spanish composers.”

Ibéria is divided into three sections. The first, “Par les rues et par les chemins” (In the streets and in the byways), immediately creates a Spanish atmosphere with the sound of castanets. A whole town floods the streets on a warm summer evening, talking, singing, and dancing. The clarinets play a tune marked “elegant and rhythmic” and harmonized with parallel chords (one of Debussy’s recurrent techniques). Later, the horns and clarinets intone an equally cheerful second theme, soon combined with a third melody which, in contrast, is more lyrical and expressive. The first theme finally returns (now played by the oboes instead of the clarinets), before the noisy parade is over and the section quiets down to a pianissimo.

The second section is called “Les parfums de la nuit” (The aromas of the night). Falla perceived here “the intoxicating spell of Andalusian nights,” which he recalled from his youth. Several factors contribute to the magic of this movement, including special string techniques (glissandi and harmonics), sparkling celesta lines, and the return of Debussy’s parallel chords. As a result, the music seems to hover in the air, never touching the ground.

The third section of Ibéria, “Le matin d’un jour de fête” (“The morning of a festival day”) follows without interruption. As the day begins to break, we hear the distant sound of a drum with some softly plucked string pizzicatos. The night music returns for a moment in the form of a flute solo. The violins and violas imitate guitars (and Debussy even instructs half the players to hold their instruments like guitars). The clarinets are instructed to play “very cheerfully, exaggerating the accents”; a violin solo, full of double stops, must be “free and whimsical”; the oboe and English horn parts “merry and whimsical."

The final movement of Images, translated as “Round Dances of Spring,” opens with an atmosphere of warmth and serenity. Following the introduction, Debussy quotes a French folk song: “Nous n’irons plus au bois” (We won’t go to the woods anymore). This melody — which also appears in his piano piece Jardins sous la pluie (Gardens in the Rain) — is transformed in various ways. This is also the only movement of Images to bear a dedication, to Debussy’s second wife, Emma. After undergoing various rhythmic transformations, the folk song is played in long and strongly accented notes by the clarinets and the English horn, only to crumble away to tiny motives, suddenly cut short by a powerful glissando by the harp and celesta that brings the piece to a close.

According to Debussy’s correspondence with his publisher, he was torn between three potential endings. “Shall I toss up between them,” he wrote, “or try to find a fourth solution?” He finally opted for a big crescendo, “brisk and vigorous.” The last word belongs to the trombones, which cap the piece with a stupendous three-part glissando.

— adapted from a note by Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.