The Grand Tour
It was an earlier era’s version of a gap year, a time for a young person to cut loose for a while and see something of the world. Practiced mostly by well-heeled European and American males, the idea was to soak up some culture and hopefully slough off a layer or two of provincialism. The route typically wound southwards through Germany and Austria; whether France was on the itinerary depended on the political winds. Americans usually spent a goodly time in England. For just about everybody, Italy was the ultimate destination and the overriding reason for the entire tour. Naturally, it wasn’t all museums and sightseeing and concerts and theater-going, although those played a part. A Grand Tour was really all about people—people with different notions or customs or traditions or opinions than one’s own, people to watch, people to meet, people to become friends or lovers, people to admire, people to emulate, people to avoid.

This program traces out a musical Grand Tour, mostly centered in Italy in the early 18th century, but with significant side trips to Germany, Austria, and France. More specifically, this is a violinist’s Grand Tour, emphasizing works by the finest violinists of the era.

Heinrich Biber
Violin Sonata No. 5 in E minor, C. 142
Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber doesn’t usually come immediately to mind when thinking about eminent mid-Baroque composers: one tends to gravitate towards Arcangelo Corelli or perhaps Henry Purcell. But Biber easily belongs in their company. An artist of the highest quality, he distinguished himself both as an über-virtuoso violinist and as a composer of extraordinary breadth and fertility. Nowadays, after several centuries of neglect, Biber has been receiving his due.

Biber’s violin sonatas are likely to surprise those who associate Baroque music with the elegant suavity of Corelli. He explored the violin’s technical capabilities at an unprecedented level and wrote accordingly. The sonatas tend towards the fantastical and showy; they are filled with flamboyant display and many require scordatura, unusual string tunings that make otherwise unplayable chords or passagework possible. This particular sonata eschews scordatura but imposes quite substantial technical demands on its performers.

After a luxuriantly improvisatory Praeludium, the sonata offers two sets of variations. The first of those is of the ground bass or ostinato stripe, in which a cyclically recurring bass line provides the underpinning for any amount of melodic fantasy above. It is followed by a second set of variations on an ornate melody that provides Biber with no end of possibilities for intriguing transformations and permutations.

Johann Sebastian Bach
Violin and Harpsichord Sonata in A major, BWV 1015
Bach’s six accompanied violin sonatas BWV 1014-1019 date from a particularly contented period in his life and career. As of 1717, he had settled in the bucolic principality of Anhalt-Cöthen, where a young and musically sophisticated Prince Leopold maintained a splendid kapelle staffed with first-rate performers. The Calvinism of Leopold’s Anhalt-Cöthen dictated the banishment of concerted church music, thus Bach devoted his Cöthen service to the prolific creation of secular works that would eventually confirm his posthumous reputation at the summit of musical Olympus. Bach might well have remained there indefinitely, but financial pressures from his ever-growing family, not to mention Leopold’s marriage to a young woman who disapproved of his musical enthusiasms, led to Bach’s seeking employment elsewhere. In 1723, Bach moved to Leipzig, where he spent 27 frustrating and under-compensated years that ended only with his death in 1750.

The Violin Sonata in A major, BWV 1015 is essentially a trio sonata, that two-violin-plus-continuo mainstay of Baroque cham­ber music. However, Bach provides a fully written-out keyboard part that does double duty as both second violin part and requisite harmonic support. Bach’s opening slow movement, marked only dolce, places the two melody instruments (violin and clavier right hand) in a canonic, or follow-the-leader, relationship: whatever one instrument states is likely to be picked up promptly by the other. It’s followed by an Allegro that bears all the hallmarks of Bach’s mature fugal style: a subject stated in the violin is then answered in the clavier’s right hand, then in the clavier’s left hand, creating a three-voice texture that treats its subject imitatively throughout and visits numerous key centers along the way.

The third-place Andante un poco, in the relative minor key, features a “walking” bass line of nearly-constant notes that that underpin a luxuriantly falling-then-rising melody. To conclude, Bach provides a jolly Presto, its dancelike character highlighted by foursquare rhythm and clearly-etched phrases.

Francesco Maria Veracini
Violin Sonata Accademiche in D minor, Op. 2, No. 12
Biographies of Baroque era composers can be frustratingly murky, in that only glimmers of personality can be discerned through the typically scant documentary evidence. But even the most academically opaque studies of Francesco Maria Veracini make one character trait quite abundantly clear.

Which is that Veracini was a diva. Arrogant and conceited, he was a preening braggart whose very sanity was a matter of opinion. In a multiply reported incident, he either jumped from, or perhaps was tossed from, a third-floor window in Dresden after an altercation with the composer Pisendel. Or maybe it was a gang of jealous orchestra players bent on killing him, according to Veracini himself. Or maybe he jumped in a fit of psychosis. He broke both a foot and his hip. Or maybe it was his leg. At any rate, he limped for the rest of his life.

He had a lousy reputation. But most sources describe him as an electrifying violinist. And he was a dazzling, if quirky, composer. That’s gloriously in evidence with Violin Sonata Accademiche in D minor, Op. 2, No. 12, all three of its movements built on the familiar descending chromatic bass line that’s probably best known via Dido’s dying lament in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. The opening Passagallo follows that line through both upper and lower lines, marked “Largo assai, e come sta, ma con grazia”—a downright Mahlerian directive that translates as “very broad, and (just) like that, but with grace.” Perhaps the implication is that it would come off as a bit stern without the grazia. In second place comes a jaunty Capriccio cromatico, made out of “two subjects and their true reversals (retrogrades).” To conclude, a lilting triple-meter Ciaccona applies a major-key gloss to that descending bass line, adroitly avoiding tedium via strategic brief interludes inserted hither and yon between repetitions of the bass-line pattern. At the very end comes a return to D minor and the bass line in its original form.

Giuseppe Tartini
Third movement from Violin Sonata in G minor, Bg. 5, Il trillo del Diavolo, arr. for solo violin
Among those composers whose posthumous fame rests primarily on one work, Giuseppe Tartini’s treatment at the hands of fate seems particularly myopic. He was no one-trick pony but a thoroughgoing professional: accomplished violinist, renowned teacher, influential music theoretician, and prolific composer of mostly violin music. Originally trained for the priesthood, then for the law, he settled on a career in music and spent most of his career in Padua, where he died in 1770.

That famous one work is, of course, the Devil’s Trill sonata. The name originated with Tartini himself, as reported by astronomer Jérôme Lalande in his Voyage d’un François en Italie:

One night I dreamt that I had made a bargain with the Devil for my soul. Everything went at my command—my novel servant anticipated every one of my wishes. Then the idea struck me to hand him my fiddle and to see what he could do with it. But how great was my astonishment when I heard him play with consummate skill a sonata of such exquisite beauty as surpassed the boldest flight of my imagination. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted; my breath was taken away; and I awoke. Seizing my violin I tried to retain the sounds that I had heard. But it was in vain. The piece I then composed, the Devil’s Sonata, although the best I ever wrote, how far below the one I heard in my dream!

In its original guise, the sonata is for solo violin with “continuo’—i.e., two players, one on cello and the other on keyboard, both providing a harmonic underpinning to the violin line. But it also makes a highly effective piece when arranged for solo violin, as in this performance.

Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer
La Marche des Scythes, for solo harpsichord
Two centuries before Serge Prokofiev peeled the paint off auditorium walls with his orchestral slugfest Scythian Suite, Pancrace Royer conjured up a rowdy “Scythian March” that has almost single-handedly sustained his posthumous reputation down the years. Royer, a contemporary (and competitor) of Rameau, was an accomplished musician who taught King Louis XV’s children while serving as the director of the famed Concerts Spirituels and writing six operas. Royer’s harpsichord music, like Rameau’s, reflects his distinctly theatrical orientation. Harpsichordist Jean Rondeau describes both Royer and Rameau as “two magicians, two master architects, amongst the most wildly imaginative and brilliant of their era… Two composers who also tried to capture echoes of grand theatre with the palette offered by their keyboard.”

Jean-Marie Leclair
Violin Sonata in D major, Op. 9, No. 3, Tambourin
“An overabundance of good taste,” they said, describing the poised precision of Jean-Marie Leclair’s violin playing. “Always perfect,” they added. All of which sounds like damning with faint praise, but in fact Leclair was one of the greatest of all French violinists, an exemplar of hyper-virtuosity in the service of lucid and sophisticated music-making. His career is one of steady rise through the ranks, including recognition by Louis XV and a lengthy stint in The Hague as a high-end maestro di cappella.

Which makes his having been murdered, by either his gardener, his nephew, or his ex-wife, all the more intriguing. He just doesn’t seem like the type to meet such an unsavory end.

The Violin Sonata in D major, Op. 9, No. 3, subtitled Tambourin after its final movement, encapsulates Leclair’s noble art at its best, a potent blend of Corellian elegance with the boisterous spectacle of French opera. Particularly interesting is its concluding Tambourin, a “drum” dance marked by stomping rhythms and a steady underlying drone.

Arcangelo Corelli
Violin Sonata in D minor, Op. 5, No. 12, La Folia
Life has never been easy for freelance musicians, but conditions in Rome during Corelli’s lifetime were especially precarious. The opera houses and theaters, usually reliable venues for steady employment, were closed more often than not, victims of ecclestiastical prudence in the face of political turmoil and natural disasters. Musical activity was largely private and confined to those patrons rich enough to afford it.

But Corelli never had anything to complain about. From the time he emerged from Bologna, where he had been admitted to the elite Accademia Filarmonica at age 17, Corelli was employed by the well-heeled and influential. The combination of steady income and discriminating listeners allowed Corelli the luxury of honing his works via frequent performances, so he never committed a piece to publication hastily or carelessly. Corelli was an exemplar of the “pure” musician—i.e., dedicated to the highest standards of playing and composition, even if those ideals mandated a sharply limited output.

La Folia wasn’t originally a tune, but rather a chord progression that provided Renaissance and Baroque musicians with a framework for improvisations, much as the “chart” of a song serves for jazz musicians today. However, over time a particular melody attached itself to that progression and came to be identified as La Folia. Corelli’s Violin Sonata in D minor, Op. 5, No. 12 dates from 1700. Unlike its multi-movement counterparts, the D minor sonata consists of a single movement: La Folia followed by 23 dazzling variations on that familiar melody and its underlying chord progression.

—Scott Foglesong