Walton's Finest: His Viola Concerto

This piece was originally going to be a screed against Sir William Walton, whom I was planning to skewer at length. After gleefully indulging in that pastime for a few hundred words, I realized that it would be much more interesting to try to pinpoint what makes for a hit out of the oeuvre of a respectably good composer. So we come to Walton's Viola Concerto.

This piece is a true masterwork, rightly deserving its place in the Big Three (along with Bartok's strikingly soulful and not-quite-finished concerto and Hindemith's often marvelous and often execrable Der Schwanendreher) which occupy a central place in the practice rooms of high school prodigies and NY Philharmonic aspirants alike. It is a sad thing that, in the concerto programming category, the viola seems consigned in the popular imagination to play third violin to this and that flashy young Mendelssohn- or Tchaikovsky-playing phenom. [Not so in conservatories, where viola concerti get a decent amount of playtime.] This is especially inexplicable for an accessible piece which showcases the strengths of the instrument - its plangent, plaintive alto lyricism and capability for rhythmic propulsion - ably as any good concerto should do.

The first movement starts off in a haze of lower strings which turns out to be the ideal atmosphere from which the viola's theme may emerge. While everything is basically in aeolian minor mode, the shifting harmonies in the orchestra and 9/8 compound triple meter combine to create an almost pleasant disorientation - unlike so many concerti, this one doesn't tip its hand from the opening chords or flourish, somehow very fitting for the persona of the viola (and, often, its players). It also suggests a kinship to another 9/8 opening, that of the Elgar Cello Concerto, written in 1919, only ten years prior to the Walton. While the musical language and effect of the first movement of the Elgar is quite different from that of the Walton, the two are cousins in sadness, the Elgar a study in outright grief, the Walton a more muted melancholy, both filtered through a proper stiff-upper-lip stoicism. Walton himself cited Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto a strong influence, which I hear in terms of the slow-fast-slow larger form and overall flow of the music, but not too much else.

Walton spins out the theme for 32 bars and then introduces a second theme, first in 3/2 and then 7/4, which works across the barline - there is always a sense of pulse but rarely a sense of a definitive downbeat until the 7/4 speeds up into a bit of a tempest in a teapot, as the viola riffs sixteenths over the orchestra's "comped" eighth notes. The effect is quasi-improvisatory but one can always hear a deliberateness to the pitches and line. The agitation whips up the orchestra, which has its own tantrum and then eases back into the recap. at m. 143, where the viola appropriates the orchestral intro. in double stops and then plays filigree above the oboe, which borrows the viola's opening theme - this is a tip of the hat to Prokofiev's similar recap device.

If this opening is infused with a bit of Elgar's nostalgia (though always filtered through Walton's nascent modernism), the second movement is rollicking tale - I always think of a good swashbuckler. Even more so than in the first movement, Walton works across the barline, here often with blatant hemiolas, so that we are constantly up in the air and not sure where or when we might land. He also deploys the orchestra splendidly, sometimes pushing the solo line along, sometimes seeming to argue with it, comment on it, or obstruct it. The brass writing here is consistently fabulous and the winds get in on the fun too. In some ways, Walton outdoes the considerable sense of play and whimsy found in Prokofiev's scherzo. The two orchestral interludes are so entertaining and exhilarating that one almost (but not quite) hates to hear them understandably abbreviated when the piece is performed with piano.

The final third movement, for me the least satisfying, opens with a bassoon solo, an inspired choice given its hippity-hoppity nature, which is then passed off to the viola. The triplets from this theme demand a bit of their own attention, bridging into a second theme, which echoes the language of the first movement but without its consistent lyrical genius. All of these elements converge on an orchestral tour de force which is oft cited in program notes and academic writings but tends to leave me cold; it just seems to be spinning its contrapuntal wheels in a whole lot of sound and fury and not to much effect. This is where Walton's Bauhaus aesthetic of having the music wear its structure proudly and transparently - quite close to that of Paul Hindemith, who premiered the concerto - becomes a liability. Moreover, it seems to me that, at the crucial eleventh hour of the piece, Walton eschews its authenticity, choosing instead to exchange it for ingenious effect. As this dies down, strains of the first movement seep back in to guide the concerto to a more satisfyingly effective rest and conclusion.

To me, the trouble with Walton is that much of his other music is mired in this structural fetish and that, all too often, his melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic creativity have to play servant to it. At its best, it sounds pleasant; at its worst, downright plodding (though maybe never so much as Hindemith at his Teutonic worst). The violin concerto is a good example of this: a piece which has many moments of inspiration but never quite takes flight except for in the hands of a very able soloist, conductor, and orchestra. His other works tend to fall into the categories of wit (the apt writing for Dame Edith Sitwell's Gertrude Stein turn in Façade) or propriety (in many ways, Walton became the heritor of Elgar as England's official composer, writing Crown Imperial and other ceremonial music). Some of his other best music includes his Shakespearian film scores for As You Like It, Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III - something about the task of underscoring drama seems to have taken him out of his head and much of these scores soars across the silver screen admirably.

But, to be fair, I include this abbreviated version of my screed to reinforce how marvelously lucky we are that Walton rose above his failings to write that great Viola Concerto. Recordings by Yuri Bashmet, Nobuko Imai, and, more recently, Lawrence Power, show the work off to its full advantage. Many more audiences deserve to hear its wonderful mix of lyricism and modernism, live or recorded.

Aaron Copland's immaculate sense of rhythm

 

“Copland...parceled out his notes in time with the surety, precision, and often panache of a master sushi chef wielding a santoku knife.”




Rhythm is the most visceral element of music. A good beat lodges in our nervous system to the point that one can imagine the synapses firing dopamine doses in time with it. Percussionists conjure up works of astonishing complexity and efficacy using (nearly) only rhythm as a tool. And, with all due respect to my good friends melody and harmony, almost any tune one can think of loses a great deal of its influence if one tries to imagine it devoid of rhythm. Nor does much of contemporary music with its two-and-half chord vocabulary hold much power without a considered rhythmic use of those chords.

This is all a long-winded way of asserting rhythm's primacy - on a basic level, it requires no prior knowledge of convention (I'm talking about you, tonality) to grasp and it hooks us easily. Someone who would agree with me on this point is Aaron Copland, who lists rhythm first (followed by "melody, harmony, and tone color")  in the "four elements of music" chapter of his impressively concise and philosophical What to Listen For in Music. Copland himself was extremely gifted in his use of rhythm (and its associates: meter, pulse, tempo, etc.) and his achievements in it are overshadowed only by Stravinsky's traveling some of the same roads a few decades before and in a more revolutionary manner. But at the risk of being ethnocentric, I think these methods found a more rooted home in the "New World" of 1920's and 30's America, where Copland and his gang were devising a vernacular to finally break through the fetters of late European romanticism which had shackled previous generations of American composers (hey, they were fine with it). This propulsive rhythmic drive fueled Copland's ballet and film scores and we hear its echoes in so much contemporary music, minimalist or otherwise. (Some have termed Copland proto-minimalist, though I think this is overstating it, because he did not subscribe to minimalist philosophies or methods. But who knows, maybe he'd like Short Ride in a Fast Machine.)

It is interesting to hear Copland's early attempts at wedding his Stravinskian know-how, acquired through his fabled studies at Fontainebleau with Nadia Boulanger, with that rebellious music of the streets of Brooklyn, jazz. Specifically, his Piano Concerto (1926), originally billed as a "Jazz Concerto" when Copland premiered it in Boston with Koussevitsky, comes off as an awkward attempt in fusion, really just as uneasy in its expropriation of jazz tropes as Stravinsky's Piano-Rag-Music or Hindemith's appalling Suite ‘1922’. It generally comes off as a straight-laced, premeditated attempt to tame jazz for the concert hall, whereas Gershwin's Concerto in F (1925) benefits from an opposite approach of gently tweaking brilliant improvisations to fit a societally acceptable classical form.

Much more successful is 1925's Music for the Theatre, which benefits from a wink and a nudge. Here is Copland filtering the off-kilter beats of the city, whether traffic or Tin Pan Alley or the local burlesque joint, through his imagination. Even if it comes off as a bit trite, it paves the way for Copland's later, greater "filtered impressions of local life," Danzón Cubano and El Salón México. These two pieces exerted such a powerful sway that, to this day, modern wind ensemble pieces utilize Latin rhythms in a manner which very clearly (and often self-consciously) cribs from the pages of Copland and Bernstein, who for a little while played Robin to the elder's Batman. Music for the Theatre also sounds more than a bit like potential film music, a genre in which Copland's gifts in parsing time found fertile ground: his scores to The City, Of Mice and Men, Our Town (all 1939-40) gently rebuffed the Wagnerian excesses of Erich Korngold, Max Steiner, and Alfred Newman with a subtler language which underscored emotional and situational nuances, rather than trumpeting everything in boldface. A decade later, he came back for seconds with The Red Pony, and The Heiress (both 1949). Actually, listening to the enjoyable wackiness of the dream sequences in The Red Pony, one hears that it has more than a little in common with Music for the Theatre.

I fear I've gotten a bit away from rhythm, so let's pick up the trail with Copland's three attempts to make an aggressively modernist stamp: his towering Symphonic Ode (1929), athletically dissonant Piano Variations (1930), and ingenious Short Symphony (1931-33), which so flummoxed orchestras (or at least Carlos Chávez's orchestra, which premiered it) that a despairing Copland recast it for a Sextet consisting of piano, clarinet, and string quartet. All three of these works, possibly Copland's strongest non-programmatic music, share a few things: they did not and still do not receive nearly as much play time as they deserve; they all handle rhythm and pulse with an expert touch which shuns the bar-line, operating instead by an exquisite and elaborate internal logic; and they witness the full blooming of what became Copland's most durable compositional tool - a spinning out of music based on a few well-chosen pitch-rhythmic cells. One really hears it in the Short Symphony, which Copland once considered naming "The Bounding Line" because the melodic skips which permeate the writing seem to ramble, almost improvisationally, like a freakish bouncing ball.

To elaborate on that point, Copland's strong suit was never writing melodies. In fact, nearly every "tune" we think of as Copland's hallmark is not his own, whether the cantina ditties of El Salón México, cowboy songs of Billy the Kid, a Scottish reel ("Hoe-Down" from Rodeo), or a certain now-ubiquitous Shaker hymn ("Simple Gifts" from Appalachian Spring). In this, he was also in the good company of Stravinsky, whose brilliant pseudo-folk melodies of L'oiseau de feu, Petrushka, and Le sacre du printemps were unmasked as actual folk melodies by Richard Taruskin in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions.

But, like anyone determined to be excellent at a skill, Copland turned his weakness of not having a melodic font like Mozart's or Schubert's into a strength. The techniques he developed with the thorny quasi-tone-rows of the Piano Variations would go on to serve him well in spinning out the marvels of Appalachian Spring and even, in short form, the impressively taut and durable Fanfare for the Common Man, which one might call Copland's best tune, even if it's not especially singable. It is telling that, when writing the Piano Variations, Copland used as a touchstone the numerous variation sets of Beethoven, another composer who tended to come by melody indirectly through harmony and form and who spun great things out of frugal motives (cf. Beethoven's Fifth).

To me, the most impressive thing about Copland's compositional process is how much power, depth, and variety he mines out of so little. And if you look at his sketches on the Library of Congress' superb American Memory site, you will see that he rarely if ever is whittling down from more to less. Rather, he is playing with cells like a Tetris master, finding just the right permutation to make his development of the line work. Invariably, this is done with the same attention to transparency and clarity of line and texture which are hallmarks of French writing. I am not even going to attempt to talk about harmonies, but suffice it to say that Copland generally seems to come to harmony by way of counterpoint, setting intervals against each other in a rhythmic dance which create unexpectedly apt harmonies, without them ever seeming like the governing principle.

To me, those three works of 1929-1932 mark a high-watermark of Copland's modernism. And, while they are not as immediately graspable as toe-tapping Rodeo, I think any Copland fan needs to give them a listen. Because the techniques he developed there were what enabled him to write his masterful ballet scores in such a seemingly effortless, deceptively simple manner that many sell Copland's prowess as a composer short because, if he was that great, shouldn't there be more notes on the page? That said, I do think that, had Copland had a von Meck or Polignac of his own, he might have gone on writing amazing, abstract music like Symphonic Ode, which would have been great. And then most people would never have heard of him.

So let us give thanks that Copland's immaculate sense of rhythm found its way to its ideal soapbox, the dance. To watch the lithe steps of Rodeo or stylized poses of Appalachian Spring is to see these rhythms visualized in space. One can almost imagine even the brainy Martha Graham hearing Copland pound out the twists and turns of the "solo dance of the Bride" (to my ears, the culmination of Copland's rhythmic innovation), trying to figure out how in the world a human body could move sensibly to such noise. Happily, she found a way, just as Copland found a way to build on the Stravinskian ethos of rhythm, taking it exciting new places and creating a style which generations of American composers have aped, railed against, or at least reacted to. There is no denying the guy's savvy, ingenuity, and grace, as he puzzled out how to make his mark in time, both in the microscopic musical moment and more broadly in history.

After all, he did have a stated goal: “You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down...some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.” In this, he succeeded admirably. Bravo, Aaron!