Music is a mystery for people who play it, write it, listen to it, and write about it. The only thing I can really do when I try to say something about music is assume.
Mozart entered his 16th Piano Sonata into his catalog in 1788, and indicated that it was a piece for beginner pianists. It wasn't published until 1805, fourteen years after Mozart's death. I was really surprised to see how well its charms transfer to strings when transposed into the string-friendly key of D major. I hope my affection for this piece is contagious, and hope that someone might share a video of a performance online.
The IMSLP has a very nice autograph of George Philipp Telemann's 1735 Fantasias for violin. After spending years correcting the errors in the 1955 Barenreiter edition made by Günther Haußwald (which can be found in the above IMSLP entry), and years working with viola transcriptions that have those errors plus new errors that crop up when making new engravings, I have finally devoted the necessary time to making a transcription that works for me.
The people over at cellofun put engraving files in the IMSLP for their cello transcription. I adjusted those files to fit on letter-size paper, and made corrections and additions using Telemann's manuscript as a guide. Before beginning I compared Telemann's manuscript here with other autographs of Telemann, and became convinced that the manuscript in the IMSLP is indeed in his hand and not the hand of a copyist.
My transcription (which you can get on this page of the IMSLP) is not an "edition" because I haven't included fingering or bowing suggestions, but I have included all the dynamic markings that Telemann put in the manuscript, and I have included the articulations that he indicated.
I learned a great deal about the music while working on this transcription. I noticed, for example, that the end of Fantasia #8 doesn't resolve! Look at that elaborate double bar at the end. This was not an oversight. I consider it a window into Telemann's musical personality.
Another nifty moment is the end of Fantasia #10, which can function as an infinite loop:
(Notice the double bar at the end of this. That is a normal Telemann double bar.)
Now I can just play these on the viola and think about the music instead of thinking about making a version that is easy to read and (hopefully) free of errors. But if you happen to find an error (or two) I might have missed, please let me know, and I will correct it.
UPDATE: I uploaded a revised version already (with page numbers), and put a version for solo violin (the original) in the IMSLP.
In honor of the Beethoven 250th birthday year I made two new transcriptions of the Sonatine WoO 44a that the young Beethoven wrote for mandolin and harpsichord. I was surprised to see that Van Magazine listed it as number five on their list of Beethoven's ten worst pieces. While I agree with their other nine choices, this charming little Sonatine has always held a special place in my heart.
I made a transcription of it a couple of years ago for our Summer Strings orchestra, and it was a real favorite (people referred to it as "Woo"). Because of this recent ranking, I decided to re-work the Sonatine as a piano trio in two versions: one for typical piano trio (violin, cello, and piano), and one for violin, viola, and piano, so that non-mandolin-playing people who don't have a string orchestra at hand can play it as a piece of chamber music.
The music is available on this page of the IMSLP, and in the meanwhile you can listen to a computer-generated recording of the violin, viola, and piano version here.
This piece works so well for cello and strings! What a brilliant idea!
(I'm getting to work on a version to mirror this performance now.) You will find my arrangement for cello and strings on this page of the IMSLP.
It was performed by Yuri Karavayev and the Belarusian State Philharmonic with solo cellist Ivan Renansky playing the vocal part on January 21, 2018 in for their International Holocaust Remembrance Day concert:
The Vivaldi D major Sonata, now known as RV 10, is a much-loved recital piece that became popular in the twentieth century.
We don't have a Vivaldi manuscript, but we do have a copy made by Johann Georg Pisendel. Pisendel (1687-1755) was a great violin virtuoso and a good friend of Johnann Sebastian Bach. We can imagine Pisendel's copy to be (mostly) accurate since he was good friends with Vivaldi as well. He was also friends with Telemann, who was clearly inspired by the spirit and substance of this Vivaldi Sonata while writing his solo violin fantasias. I noticed this yesterday when I played through all twelve.
You can read about the Pisendel/Telemann friendship in this very good article in Classical Net, and you can see Pisendel's work as a composer, a copyist (work he copied for his personal and professional use, no doubt), an arranger, and an editor on this page of the IMSLP.
This is from the cover of Pisendel's copy of the Vivaldi:
This is the first page:
And here is a later page, one of three that are nearly impossible to read:
Ottorino Respighi made an edition of it in 1910, and Gian Francesco Malipiero edited a 1962 Ricordi publication of it, which you can see in the above video.
There are a few mistakes in the Respighi-Malipiero edition, particularly in the slow movement. I was able to correct these in my transcription by referring to the Pisendel copy (a big thanks to the IMSLP for all of this). Some of the last movement is unreadable in the Pisendel copy, so Respighi had to make some educated choices. He also added some original material to the end, which adds considerable excitement (I wonder if Malipiero knew).
Here's the first page of the product of my labors:
I used this lovely painting by my mother for the cover of my viola transcription of Dora Pejačević's Cello Sonata, and have loaded it into the IMSLP. I think my rebellious mother would have liked the (possibly) equally-rebellious Pejačević, so their work is now joined together in the unusual ether of an on-line music library that is freely accessible by all.
For people unfamiliar with Pejačević, here's a short biography cribbed from the program for our upcoming performance of this piece:
Maria Theodora Paulina Pejačević’s father came from a noble Croatian family. Her mother was a Hungarian countess. Pejačević was born in Budapest, spoke many languages (though not Croatian), and identified culturally as German. She played violin and piano, and began writing music at the age of twelve. She had considerable success as a composer in Germany, and after the First World War she reacted strongly against her class, and was left socially alienated. In 1921 Pejačević married Ottomar von Lumbe, a German military officer; two years later she died from kidney failure, just a few weeks after the birth of her only child. Nearly all of Pejačević’s fifty-eight known compositions (vocal works, chamber music, piano music, and orchestral music) are housed in the Croatian Music Institute in Zagreb, and some have been published by the Croatian Music Information Center.
Her music is catching on, and there is now more Pejačević on YouTube than is practical to link to in this post. Her Symphony in F sharp minor is a good place to start.
There's very little that is as rewarding for me as spending time with Bach. I tend to devote a lot of time in the summer months (for whatever reason) to making arrangements, and I'm spending this summer making string quartet arrangements of the preludes to the Bach Cello Suites. Several years ago I arranged the G major Prelude, BWV 1007, and a few days ago I finished an arrangement of the C major Prelude, BWV 1009. I just finished a first draft of the D major Prelude, BWV 1012, which is great fun to work on.
I'm putting them into the IMSLP as individual movements, but I'm planning to group them together as a set, which I will make available through my Thematic Catalog blog.
UPDATE: The project is finished! You can get all the links here.
I didn't think I would be able engrave the massive and complicated piano part of the Jaëll A minor Sonata when I wrote my last post about my viola transcription of the piece. But since I couldn't imagine anyone else taking the initiative to do it, and I feel that it is a substantial addition to the repertoire, I spent the past month facing (and solving) some serious engraving difficulties while I patiently entered the 76-page piano part into Finale. I finished it today, and to celebrate I uploaded the sonata into the IMSLP. It was truly a labor of love. I believe that the piece will win the hearts of other violists as well as the pianists they play with. When we performed it in March that audience liked it too.
Marie Jaëll was born Marie Trautman in Alsace. She studied piano with Ignaz Moscheles, and then with Henri Hertz at the Paris Conservatory, where at sixteen she won a first prize for piano performance. She married the pianist Alfred Jaëll, and the couple set up a salon in Paris. Marie Jaëll was the first pianist to perform all of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas in Paris. She wrote piano music, chamber music, vocal music, symphonic poems, concertos, and an opera, and studied composition with Cesar Franck and Camille Saint-Saëns. She was a close friend of Franz Liszt, and Saint-Säens considered her interpretations of Liszt’s music to be definitive. Jaëll wrote her A minor Cello Sonata in 1881, and it was published in Paris in 1886.
It's that time of year again. For our November concert John David and I have raided the coffers of Russian music written for instruments other than the viola, and our program is made totally of transcriptions.
We're playing my hot-and-not-quite-off-the-press transcription of the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata that will be published by the International Music Company in 2017, and my brand new transcriptions of three pieces from Reinhold Glière's Opus 35: the Chanson and Andante, written originally for oboe; and the Moment musical, written originally for cello. We are also playing two "Album Leaves" from his Opus 51, which is originally for cello, and the Romance, Opus 3, which is originally for violin.
I have put the transcribed viola parts for the Glière in the IMSLP, and you can have a look at them (and download them if you want) through the above links (you'll find them all under the "transcription" tabs. The piano parts are all unchanged.
For people in the neighborhood reading this, the concert will be at 4:00 on Saturday, November 12th at the Wesley Methodist Church on Fourth Street in Charleston, just south of the university on the west side of the street. There is ample parking, and admission is free.
Because the world of viola d'amore players is relatively small and rather scattered, I would like to share my self-initiation into this brother- and sisterhood here, with anyone who might be interested.
After about three weeks with the instrument, I finally mustered up the courage to try may hand at some Bach cello suites on the viola d'amore. On a lark I decided to try playing the C minor Suite (Number 5), one that really never sounds as good on the viola as I would like it to, in D minor. Then I discovered that the original version of Suite was actually for the lute, BWV 995 in the key of G minor. I have pretty much finished an urtext transcription (without slurs or dynamics) of the whole suite, which lies beautifully on the viola d'amore.
It was a wonderful experience to compare the cello version, BWV 1011, written for an instrument that has the ability to sustain, with the lute version, written for an instrument that does not have the ability to sustain. It is also interesting to compare J.S. Bach's handwriting to the more-familiar hand of his wife Anna Magdalena. I wonder if Bach, who did write music for the viola d'amore (he probably knew how to play the instrument, and may or may not have actually played the lute), might have used the viola d'amore to write this Lute Suite. (A special thanks to Harry Wimmer for putting these manuscripts on line!)
A PDF file of my viola d'amore transcription of the whole Suite is available on this page of the IMSLP.
Listening to a performance of the piece on the lute really helps to understand the tempo that Bach probably had in mind when he wrote the piece. I really admire Andrea Damiani's reading of the Prelude and the two Gavottes.
I am active as a composer, a violist, a violinist, a recorder player, and as a teacher. I have been keeping this space in the blogosphere alive with assumptions about music (and assorted other things) since 2005.
