Piazzolla, Thompson, & Shostakovich
ASTOR PIAZZOLLA
L’Histoire du Tango
YooJin Jang, violin • June Han, harp
CHRIS P. THOMPSON
Launch Party
Claire Arias-Kim, violin • Amanda Chi, cello • Yang Guo • Luke Rinderknecht, marimba/vibraphone
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57
Mikhail Kopelman, Meg Freivogel, violin • Liz Freivogel, viola • Daniel McDonough, cello • Elinor Freer, piano
program notes
ASTOR PIAZZOLLA
L’Histoire du Tango (1985)
In 1985, after a long career devoted to infusing the dance genre of the tango with elements of style borrowed from jazz and modernism, the Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla wrote an Histoire du Tango or “History of the Tango” in four movements. He scored it for flute and guitar, but the work is regularly adapted for other combinations like the violin and harp heard in this concert. Piazzolla provided his own program note on the piece, printed below, which narrates the history of the genre. Contemporary scholars tell a slightly different story about the trajectory of the tango: the specific timeline Piazzolla provides is debatable, and he offers an oddly rose-tinted impression of the origins of the tango in Argentine bordellos — a depiction that comes across in the playful music found in the first number of the piece. Still, if Histoire du Tango doesn’t quite work as a history lesson, it is an exceptional display of the depths and variety that the genre of the tango can encompass and an appropriate capstone to the career of a composer who had a crucial role in the very history he is setting to music.
Histoire du Tango
Bordello, 1900: The tango originated in Buenos Aires in 1882. It was first played on the guitar and the flute. Arrangements then came to include the piano, and later, the concertina. This music is full of grace and liveliness. It paints a picture of the good natured chatter of the French, Italian, and Spanish women who peopled these bordellos as they teased the policemen, thieves, sailors, and riffraff who came to see them. This is a gay tango.
Continental Café, 1930: This is another age of the tango. People stopped dancing it as they did in 1900, preferring instead simply to listen to it. It became more musical, and more romantic. This tango has undergone total transformation: the movements are slower, with new and often melancholy harmonies. Tango orchestras come to consist of two violins, two concertinas, a piano, and a bass. The tango is sometimes sung as well.
Night Club, 1960: This is a time of rapidly expanding international exchange, and the tango evolves again as Brazil and Argentina come together in Buenos Aires. The bossa nova and the new tango are moving to the same beat. Audiences rush to night clubs to listen earnestly to the new tango. This marks a revolution and a profound alteration in some of the original tango forms.
Modern-day Concert: Certain concepts in tango music become intertwined with modern music. Bartók, Stravinsky, and other composers reminisce to the tune of tango music. This is today’s tango, and the tango of the future as well…
-Astor Piazzolla
Program Note by Nicky Swett
CHRIS P. THOMPSON
Launch Party (2022)
Chris has provided the following note to accompany Launch Party:
I had been waiting for an excuse to dive deep into the wonderful NASA audio archive when I was asked to write something for Rocket City New Music’s opening concert of 2022. Set in the aerospace hub of Huntsville, Alabama, I had a chance to write music for a curious and scientifically-minded audience who would likely be familiar with the sources of that material.
Browsing through the database, I asked myself: what rhythm and pitch material are contained in these sounds? Could any of them be, for example: time-stretched, pitch-shifted, looped, chopped into bits, processed, etc, in order to make them serve musical functions?
While I enjoy studying pure mathematics and thinking about how it might apply to sound and music, I have very little experience with astronomy, physics, or the applied sciences. Thus, I was very hesitant to just start grabbing things that sound cool and using them without understanding their sources. There is an inviting and playful openness to everything NASA does, and I wanted to learn as much as I could about the materials. I was thrilled to discover not only how vast their online offerings are, but also how approachable everything is. Learning about the sources of these sounds and the missions they came from was a pure joy, and I have tried to infuse that joy throughout the piece.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57 (1940)
In November 1940, composer and pianist Dmitri Shostakovich played in the first performance of his Piano Quintet in G Minor together with the Beethoven Quartet, one of the leading Russian ensembles of the era. From the start of the piece — a stark, dramatic introduction that transitions seamlessly into a sorrowful, Bach-inspired slow fugue — the slightly lethargic audience lit up. Shostakovich’s early biographer David Rabinovich, who was present, described the atmosphere in the room shifting as listeners recognized together that “something important was happening in the hall.”
The quintet was lauded by critics and the public alike, and Shostakovich won a Stalin Prize for Arts and Sciences for it when the awards began in 1941. This was quite an achievement, considering the official reprimand he received for the 1934 premiere of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtstensk District. Some musicians contested whether the quintet was sufficiently accessible to merit such high praise from the Soviet regime. Chamber music had a reputation for being an aristocratic domain, and this quintet, with its use of fugue and Baroque variation forms, was construed by some as verging on abstract or academic music. But as the late musicologist Richard Taruskin showed in a 2019 essay, the quintet was premiered during one of several periods in the volatile history of Soviet arts policies when a work could be understated and somewhat intellectually demanding and still be seen to satisfy the goal of writing music for the people. (Lest we find this moment of openness to abstraction overly admirable, Taruskin notes that it coincided with the Soviet Union’s alliance with Nazi Germany, where “pure” art music was upheld as a powerful ideal).
Most piano quintets, including those written by Johannes Brahms, César Franck, and the Russian Romantic Sergei Taneyev, are thickly orchestrated, with the symphonically unified strings competing with a thundering keyboard for the attention of the listener. In his quintet, Shostakovich instead has the pianist play at the extreme ends of the keyboard and focuses the strings in the middle ranges of their instruments, separating the voices to create a spare and delicate texture. The Intermezzo imitates the intricate intimacy of a Baroque Trio Sonata by George Frederic Handel and the finale is full of whimsy, a light approach to a closing movement that Shostakovich would reproduce in several of his symphonies.
Program Note by Nicky Swett