1900-1949 Cello & Piano Flashcards
Name 7 works for cello and piano ca.1900-1949.
- Sergei Rachmaninoff: Sonata in g for cello and piano (1901)
- Anton Webern: 3 Little Pieces for cello and piano, Op.11 (1914)
- Claude Debussy: Sonata for cello and piano in d (1915)
- Samuel Barber: Sonata in c for cello and piano, Op.6 (1932)
- Dmitri Shostakovich: Sonata in d, Op.40 for cello and piano (1934)
- Elliott Carter: Cello Sonata (1948)
- Sergei Prokofiev: Sonata for cello and piano (1949)
Piece: work for cello and piano by Rachmaninoff.
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Sonata in g for cello and piano (1901)
- Rachmaninoff dedicated his Cello Sonata to Anatoliy Brandukov, who premiered this piece with the composer. Brandukov was also best man at Rachmaninoff’s wedding in 1902.
- Rachmaninoff disliked calling it a cello sonata because he thought the two instruments were equal. Most of the themes are actually introduced by the piano, while they are embellished and expanded in the cello’s extended melodic lines which ensure that its voice will not be overpowered.
- In the first movement, motives are generated by the more active piano line are often transformed into long, arching melodies by the cello.
- The second movement is a scherzo which presents an even greater challenge to the pianist than the first movement.
- Like the Scherzando, the Andante third movement is ternary (A-B-A) in form. It suggests the influence of Russian Orthodox Church music, particularly in the repeated-note portions of the opening theme.
- The Allegro mosso Finale opens with a sprightly first theme which quickly gives way to a more typical Rachmaninov melody, full of passion and emotional substance. Traversing a wide variety of emotions, the movement settles at last on a brilliant Coda that lends an extraordinarily satisfying conclusion
Piece: work for cello and piano by Webern.
Anton Webern: 3 Little Pieces for cello and piano, Op.11 (1914)
- Common to Webern’s works, this music is extremely dense and compact. These three pieces last a little over two minutes total.
- These pieces are among Webern’s best known instrumental miniatures. Their extreme brevity is remarkable: Webern’s melodic cells are reduced to groups of two or three notes, and phrases are strikingly concise. The overall effect is one of meticulous craftsmanship. These pieces are also important precursors to the twelve-tone method of composition: although Webern’s teacher and mentor Arnold Schoenberg would not “officially” invent this method until 1921, in the Op. 11 pieces Webern is already using – albeit unsystematically – complete statements of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale as musical ideas.
- Many years after these pieces were completed, Webern still viewed them with fondness, however, he also regarded them as too experimental and felt that they should not be played. He was afraid that they were too difficult to understand and would be misunderstood by audiences, even decades after their first appearance.
- This piece is often subjected to analysis via set theory. Set theory provides concepts for categorizing musical objects and describing their relationships. The concepts of set theory are very general and can be applied to tonal and atonal styles in any equally tempered tuning system, and to some extent more generally than that. The methods of musical set theory are sometimes applied to the analysis of rhythm as well. The basic operations that may be performed on a set are transposition and inversion. Sets related by transposition or inversion are said to be transpositionally related or inversionally related, and to belong to the same set class. Since transposition and inversion are isometries of pitch-class space, they preserve the intervallic structure of a set, and hence its musical character.
- Set classes (014) and (015) can be heard on both the surface and the underlying structure of the first of these three pieces. The surface of Op. 11, No. 1 is saturated with set class (014). Some of the most salient uses of (014) occur in the final two measures. Webern uses rhythmic overlapping in a similar way to the technique of stretto, providing a mounting sense of energy that makes for a fitting conclusion. Set class (015) appears to play a secondary, and perhaps expansionary role in the piece.
Piece: work for cello and piano by Debussy.
Claude Debussy: Sonata for cello and piano in d (1915)
- The sonata is notable for its brevity, most performances not exceeding 11 minutes.
- The two final movements are joined by an attacca. Instead of sonata form, Debussy structures the piece in the style of the eighteenth-century monothematic sonata, and was particularly influenced by the music of François Couperin.
- The piece makes use of modes and whole-tone and pentatonic scales, as is typical of Debussy’s style. It also utilises many types of extended cello technique, including left-hand pizzicato, spiccato and flautando bowing, false harmonics and portamenti.
- The opening movement is only 51 measures long, but Debussy alters the tempo every few measures: the score is saturated with tempo changes and performance instructions.
- The second and third movements are performed without pause. The second is marked Sérénade, but this is unlike any serenade one has heard before: there is nothing lyric about this song. The cello snaps out grumbling pizzicatos; Debussy considered calling this movement ‘Pierrot Angry at the Moon’ - Pierrot Lunaire, that is. This serenade may have been influenced by Schoenberg’s cello Serenade movement in his melodrama Pierrot Lunaire, Op.12, written only a few years earlier (1912).
- The finale opens with abrupt pizzicatos. As in the first movement, there are frequent changes of tempo, a continuing refusal to announce or develop themes in traditional senses, sudden changes of mood, explosive pizzicatos. Such a description makes the sonata sound fierce, abstract even mocking. But beneath the surface austerity of this sonata lies music of haunting emotional power.
Piece: work for cello and piano by Barber.
Samuel Barber: Sonata in c for cello and piano, Op.6 (1932)
- The sonata was composed as Barber was finishing his studies at the Curtis Institute of Music. Though the sonata was originally dedicated to his composition teacher at Curtis, Barber made the following note in a copy of the published edition: “to Orlando (Cole), physician at the birth of this Sonata, in appreciation of his help and interest.” It was premiered with the composer at the piano and his friend and colleague Orlando Cole as cellist.
- Because of Cole’s involvement in the writing of this piece, the writing is very idiomatic, taking advantages of strong aspects of the cello as an instrument.
- The cello and piano frequently trade the lead, with the piano occasionally going on almost improvisational tangents.
- Complex rhythmic structures give the sonata a foothold in the 20th century literature for cello.
- The presto of the third movement is challenging because of the numerous shifts between duple and triple meters as well as conflicting rhythms between piano and cello that occur at brutally rapid tempos.
- Felix Salmond was also known to have performed the sonata with Barber at the piano. Salmond was Cole’s teacher, and was also the cellist who premiered several of Edward Elgar’s works (including the unfortunate premiere of the cello concerto).
- Until 1948 (when Elliott Carter’s cello sonata was composed), it was the only cello sonata in the standard repertoire written by an American composer.
Piece: work for cello and piano by Shostakovich.
Dmitri Shostakovich: Sonata in d, Op.40 for cello and piano (1934)
- One of Shostakovich’s early works, composed just prior to the censure by Soviet authorities of his music; notably, his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk was deemed too bourgeois and decadent for the Soviet people.
- Shostakovich gave its premiere with his close friend, the cellist Viktor Kubatsky, who was also the piece’s dedicatee. Shostakovich and Kubatsky toured as a duo, performing not only Shostakovich’s sonata but also the sonatas of Rachmaninov and Grieg. Shostakovich reportedly performed all the piano parts from memory.
- It was also a period of emotional turmoil in his life, as he had fallen in love with a young student at a Leningrad festival featuring his Lady Macbeth. Their affair resulted in a brief divorce from his wife Nina, and it was during their period of separation that he wrote the cello sonata. Soon after, Shostakovich and Nina had remarried, she being pregnant with their daughter.
- The sonatina form first movement contrasts a broad first theme in cello, accompanied by flowing piano arpeggios, developed by the piano. As tension abates, a ray of light appears with the tender second theme, with unusual tonal shifts, announced by the piano and imitated by the cello.
- The second movement (Allegro) has a perpetual motion energy, its thrusting repeated ostinato pattern relentlessly shared while a delicate first theme – almost incongruous – is presented by piano in widely spaced octaves, a sonority often used by Shostakovich. The cello’s more light-hearted theme is later imitated, Pierrot-like up in the piano’s brittle high register.
- The bleak expanses of Russia are evoked in the soulful slow movement (Largo), piano providing a dark backdrop for the cello’s rhapsodic, vocal theme. It is one of the earliest examples of a mood that was to feature in many of Shostakovich’s most powerful works, reflective introspection through icy dissonances that touch yet do not settle on warmer consonances, until the music eventually fades into the impressionistic twilight.
- The brief yet ebullient finale (Allegro) is a type of rondo in which the main playful theme appears three times, imitated by both instruments.
Piece: work for cello and piano by Prokofiev.
Sergei Prokofiev: Sonata for cello and piano (1949)
- The year before, Prokofiev was accused of formalism by the Zhdanov Decree and much of his music was banned. However, he continued to compose music, though he was not sure if his new works would ever be performed in public.
- In 1949, Prokofiev attended a concert in which Mstislav Rostropovich performed Nikolai Miaskovsky’s Cello Sonata No. 2 in A minor, Op. 81. Prokofiev was so impressed by Rostropovich’s performance that he was determined to write a Cello Sonata for him.
- The work was premiered with Rostropovich as soloist and with Sviatoslav Richter at the piano. (Richter) “Before playing it in concert, we had to perform it at the Composer’s Union, where these gentlemen decided the fate of all new works. During this period more than any other, they needed to work out whether Prokofiev had produced a new masterpiece or, conversely, a piece that was ‘hostile to the spirit of the people.’ Three months later, we had to play it again at a plenary session of all the composers who sat on the Radio Committee, and it wasn’t until the following year that we were able to perform it in public.”
- The first movement, marked Andante grave, opens with a resounding call by the cello, followed by a short call-and-response folk melody between the cello and piano. The movement unavoidably begs comparison with Rachmaninov-esque melodic lyricism, even though Prokofiev claimed that he himself could not write a good melody. Occasional pizzicato arpeggios serve as punctuations within the otherwise calm and expressive movement.
- The two subsequent movements continue in the same tranquil vein as the opening movement. A the second is a scherzo, the other a playful moderato.
- The final movement remains timid, with melodies and chordal structure based heavily on Russian folk music (though not quoted). Each climax, rather than developing in timbre and expressive nature, actually becomes more simplistic; sometimes diminishing down to a single note piano melody. The closing Coda features a restatement of the main theme of the initial Andante grave in a grand duet statement.
Did Shostakovich write sonatas for any other string instruments?
2 sonatas for other string instruments.
Op. 134: Sonata for violin and piano (1968)
Op. 147: Sonata for viola and piano (1975)
Piece: work for piano and cello by Carter.
Elliott Carter: Cello Sonata (1948)Elliott Carter: Cello Sonata (1948)
- The Sonata for Violoncello and Piano occupies a singularly important place in Carter’s output. It is radical and innovative, driven by a sense of fresh discovery. It represents a breakthrough in rhythmic technique and a new approach to chamber music.
- The Sonata is cast in four interrelated movements of roughly equal length.
- 1. Its first movement (Moderato) was in fact the last to be composed, and has been of some significance to Carter as the first instance of “stratification” of the musical elements in his music. The relationship between the cello and piano is here formalised so as to make them unusually distant from one another: the cello plays expressive, flowing lines which seem to exist for the most part in a completely different musical time from the piano’s inexorable, regular pulse. Carter has stated that this opening passage was suggested by the rhythmic freedom of the jazz improviser from his rhythm section, and one can certainly imagine the measured ticking of the piano as a kind of walking bass, with little pointillist additions forming the remainder of the texture.
This sense of rhythmic freedom is actually strongly controlled by means of careful rhythmic notation in the cello part – the cello part actually seems to avoid playing on the piano’s beat, thereby emphasising the difference between the two instruments and their modes of expression Following the movement’s definitive opening, the tension increases as the two instruments intensify their given materials independently, until a short cello solo at the movement’s mid-point gives way to flowing sixteenth-notes, first from the cello, then from the piano, and finally in unison as the two instruments reach a climactic point and work together for the first time. The movement ends with a thoughtful reprise of the initial relationship between the two protagonists.
- 2. In one sense the second movement (Vivace, molto leggiero) begins where the first left off, with a predominance of minor thirds; but where the first movement took its cue from jazz in an abstract sense, the second borrows the jaunty rhythms, offbeat accents and syncopations of jazz and pop music in a much more straightforward fashion. The two instruments flow freely through various rhythmic motifs together, imitating and reinforcing one another. By the central section this relationship has become more complex, with the cello’s impassioned lyrical lines and triple/quadruple-stops counterpointed by piano tremolos (written out in quintuplets) and emphatic chords. While the initial character does re-establish itself briefly, the movement ends in a general mood of turbulence and unrest.
- 3. The third movement (Adagio) is the emotional and expressive heart of the Sonata and also contains the first instance of arguably the most important technical innovation in Carter’s music: metric modulation. Essentially a device Carter uses to move seamlessly between different tempi while maintaining a consistent pulse through the music – thereby creating opportunities for completely new rhythmic relationships between instruments – metric modulation makes its first substantial appearance in the central section of this movement (although there is a brief instance in the first movement, there it is reversed after a few bars). The movement begins with the cello’s bold melodic re-interpretation of the piano tremolo figures from the previous movement. But this mood soon gives way to a more poised, reflective section in which the cello and piano exchange versions of a rhythmically characterised modal phrase. The rhythm that gradually emerges in the piano part is in fact a division of the bar into three and four equal durations simultaneously, and gives rise to an exquisite conjunction when the new rhythmic technique is caught in the moment of its discovery, transforming seamlessly a rhythmic embellishment of melody into a new structural direction. At this moment, paradoxically, musical time seems briefly to stand still, as if appraising a new territory before stretching out into it. As the music becomes more elaborate, more metric modulations crank up the tension, until a climactic re-statement of the cello’s opening theme over stark piano octaves. Like the previous movement, the third closes uneasily, this time with an impassioned cadenza-like flourish from the cello.
- 4. The final movement (Allegro) unleashes the massive tension built up in earlier movements with a torrent of activity: the complexities of successive metric modulations create a thrilling ebb-and-flow through the interplay of the two instruments’ melodic strands. The central section is a playful partita (game) between the increasingly flighty and whimsical gestures of the two instruments. However, the earlier frantic material soon resurfaces and catapults the music through further rhythmic complexities towards recollections of the first movement – some emphatic, some wistful – and finally subverts the original relationship between the two protagonists: for a moment the cello’s pizzicato forms the mechanical background to the piano’s free bass line, but almost as soon as this new terrain is glimpsed, it is gone, and the piece is at an end.
Who was Viktor Kubatsky?
Viktor Kubatsky (1891-1970)
- Premiered Shostakovich’s Sonata in d, Op.40 for cello and piano (1934) with the composer at the piano. He also received the dedication for the piece.
- Shostakovich and Kubatsky toured as a duo, performing not only Shostakovich’s sonata but also the sonatas of Rachmaninov and Grieg. Shostakovich reportedly performed all the piano parts from memory.
Who was Pierre Fournier?
Pierre Fournier (1906–1986) - Received the dedication of both Bohuslav Martinů's Cello Concerto No. 1 (1930, rev. 1939, 1955) and Francis Poulenc's Cello Sonata (1948).
Who was Orlando Cole?
Orlando Cole (1908-2010)
- Pupil of Felix Salmond.
- Cole was a classmate and friend of the composer Samuel Barber at the Curtis Institute of Music.
Was dedicatee and premiered Barber’s Sonata in c for cello and piano, Op.6 (1932) with the composer at the piano.
- Founding member of the Curtis String Quartet
Barber wrote his String Quartet, op. 11, with its famous adagio, for the Curtis Quartet.
Name Martinů and Poulenc’s cellist.
Pierre Fournier
Name 1 Bohemian composers of works for cello and piano ca.1900-1949.
David Popper: Hungarian Rhapsody for cello and piano (ca.1900)
Name 4 Russian composers of works for cello and piano ca.1900-1949.
- Sergei Rachmaninoff
- Sonata in g for cello and piano (1901)
- Vocalise, Op.34, No.14 for cello and piano (originally for voice and piano, 1912)
- Nikolai Myaskovsky: 2 sonatas for cello and piano (1911, 1948–49)
- Dmitri Shostakovich
- Three Pieces for cello and piano, Op.9 (1923–1924)
- Sonata in d, Op.40 for cello and piano (1934)
- Moderato for cello and piano Op. 40a (1934)
- Sergei Prokofiev: Sonata for cello and piano (1949)
