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SOLO REPERTOIRE FOR LUTE BY BACH AND WEISS WITH PAUL BEIER & ROBERT BARTO
Tuesday July 28, 2015 | 7:30pm
Paul Beier, lutenist; Robert Barto, lutenist
Pre-concert chat at 6:45 PM with Paul Beier, Lucas Harris, and Matthew White
Solo works for lute by Johann Sebastian Bach and Leopold Weiss, including two Bach Suites for harpsichord transcribed for lute by Paul Beier.
PROGRAMME
ROBERT BARTO:
German Lute Music of the 17th and 18th Centuries
Suite in G minor Esaias Reusner (1636-1679)
Allemande
Courante
Sarabande
Aria I
Aria II
Gigue
Chaconne Count Anton Logy (1645-1721)
Sonata in D minor (no.36) Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750)
Allemande
Courante
Bourree
Sarabande
Menuet
Allegro
Variations on a theme of Locatelli Bernhard Joachim Hagen (1720-1787)
INTERVAL
PAUL BEIER:
Johann Sebastian Bach – Transformations for Baroque Lute
French Suite No. 1, BWV 812
Allemande
Courante
Sarabande
Menuet I – II
Gigue
French Suite No. 2, BWV 813
Allemande
Courante
Sarabande
Air
Menuet
Gigue
PROGRAMME NOTES
German Lute Music of the 17th and 18th Centuries
This program shows the the development of what we today call the “baroque lute” in Germany between the years of about 1650 until 1760. The four lutenist/composers on the program were all the leading players of their generations with Sylvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750) standing out as one of the greatest lutenists of all time.
In the early 17th century, French lutenists began experimenting with different lute tunings in an attempt to increase the resonance of the instrument. Although many variants of the old “G” tuning were tried, a tuning based on a d minor chord was eventually adopted and became the basis for both the French and German lute schools. This tuning was used throughout northern Europe until the lute’s eventual demise around 1800.
Esaias Reusner (1636-1679) learned the lute from his father. A child prodigy, he performed for the queen (of Poland) at the age of ten. He was then given the opportunity to learn the new French style in d minor tuning with an unnamed French lutenist. All of his works were written in this tuning and serve as a basis for the German baroque lute tradition. One of the first composers to adopt the dance suite form, Reusner also arranged 100 sacred melodies to be played in the new lute tuning, just as his father had done in the old tuning,
Count Johann Anton Logy was a very wealthy aristocrat who dedicated his life to music and the lute in particular. He is credited with bringing a more melodic orCantabile Italian style to the French lute style. Upon the news of Logy’s death in 1721, Sylvius Weiss composed one of his most beautiful, complex pieces in his honor, an indication of the esteem in which Logy was held. This Tombeau sur la mort de M. Comte de Losyis one of Weiss’s best known works today.
Sylvius Weiss is the outstanding figure in the German baroque lute. Mentioned by his contemporaries along with Telemann, Händel and Bach as one of the best German musicians, it was also said that he “was the first to show that one could do more on the lute than previously thought possible.”
When writing for solo lute, Weiss used almost exclusively the dance suite form ( although he called them sonatas or partitas). Although on a smaller scale than many of his late works (several last over 35 minutes), the Sonata no. 36 on this program shows Weiss’s expressive use of complex harmonies and almost playful handling of the dance forms. As often in his later works, he substitutes an allegro for the more usual gigue.
When Bernhard Joachim Hagen composed his works for lute at the court of Bayreuth in the 1760s, the lute had all but died out in the rest of Europe. The interest for the lute had so waned that Hagen himself, although a virtuoso lutenist and very inventive composer, had to work primarily as a violinist. The work presented here is Hagen’s arrangement for lute of Locatelli’s variations on a minuet-like theme
Robert Barto
Johann Sebastian Bach – Transformations for Baroque Lute
From an early age, ever since hearing Julian Bream play the first two Bach lute suites in the early 1960s, it has been my lifelong ambition to play the lute works of J. S. Bach. When I finally did acquire a real baroque lute my project was given further impetus, and by the late 1990s I had recorded the complete solo lute works on two CDs published by Stradivarius. Since then I have returned to these works often, and they still provide me great pleasure, but lately I have been on the lookout for some new material from the pen of the Cantor of St. Thomas. The obvious choice, of course, is to arrange the solo works for ‘cello or violin for the lute. This can work very well but it requires some adjustment, the baroque lute being a chordal instrument characterized by its set of deep bass notes, and the violin and ‘cello being mostly capable of playing single melodic lines. So the arranger has to fill out the texture by adding harmony and bass notes. The alternative is to look at Bach’s copious output for keyboard, but here the problem is the opposite, the musical texture is too thick – think of the harpsichordist’s ten fingers producing sound on a keyboard, as opposed to the lutenist’s mere four fingers of the right hand that produce the sound on a lute. Bach’s French Suites occupy a middle ground. They seem to have been first conceived as a wedding gift to his second wife, Anna Magdalena, who was a singer and amateur harpsichordist, so they were written in a much lighter and more easily approachable manner than the six “English” suites that preceded them or the Partitas that followed in the chronology of Bach’s composition. Indeed they were called “French” (but never by Bach himself) because of their brevity and charm, to distinguish them from the more severe and academic style of the English suites. Yet in trying to set them on the lute I still encountered some major difficulties. For one thing, the musical texture often occupies a span of over four octaves, whereas the lute is only really capable of three. For another, Bach’s use of the left hand: it is always active with scales and arpeggios, or sustaining a middle voice as well as the bass. The single right hand thumb of the lutenist, which alone is responsible for the entire bass tessitura of the lute, could not possibly compete with this. So in arranging these suites for the lute, I was obliged to follow the opposite approach from that needed when arranging from the ‘cello or violin: instead of expanding the music to fit the instrument, I had to contract it – retaining the essential musical material but distilling it to a form that is coherent with the style of lute music in Bach’s day. I will let tonight’s audience be the judge as to whether or not the fruits of my labors can be considered successful.
Paul Beier