107: Brandenburg II

  Having started our Brandenburg series yesterday with a bit of musical and personal history, let’s continue our journey through the set by looking at the second concerto today. Just like yesterday I told you to pay attention to one instrument in particular, I’m going to do the same today. In fact, it’s so crucial that you see it, that I’m actually going to show a screenshot: 

This instrument I’ve circled is the piccolo trumpet, which is a trumpet that is pitched an octave higher than “normal” trumpets would be. Whenever you hear very high, ornamented brass lines throughout Brandenburg II, this is the instrument that will be playing it. Essentially, Brandenburg II’s modus operandi is “show off the piccolo trumpet, and everyone else can come along for the ride.” For this reason, Brandenburg II is notorious among (piccolo) trumpeters for being fiendishly difficult, and as you’ll see from the style of the opening, the trumpet writing in I vs in II are in completely different styles (for completely different instruments, no less). The piccolo trumpet is everywhere in the first movement; essentially, the vast majority of the movement is one of three things: 1) piccolo trumpet solo, 2) piccolo trumpet + oboe duet, 3) piccolo trumpet + strings. (For an interesting genre crossover, listen to the Beatles’ “Penny Lane.” (As another aside; as I'm writing this, the Artemis II crew have just come home. Keeping with the theme of deep-space exploration, this concerto is as far into the universe as we've ever sent anything, carried there onboard the record sent out with the Voyager probes which launched in the late 1970s and are still flying today, ever deeper into space.) When, in the music video, you see them riding horses at about the 1:10 mark and the immediately hear a much higher brass sound than before, that new sound is the piccolo trumpet; it returns throughout the song. Listen for it!) Also bear in mind that this is the first of three concerti which is written as a concerto grosso; the others are concerto IV and concerto V. I will bring this point up again when we get to those in a few days. Of the three, II is the clearest example of this style.

If piccolo trumpet + oboe was the star combination of the first movement, then oboe + flute is the star combination of the second. Recall from yesterday how I mentioned that the combination of an oboe and a bassoon is particularly good at writing deeply sorrowful music? The second movement of Brandenburg II—which has the 3 traditioanl movements, unlike its predecessor—is another one of those quintessential oboe-heavy minor pieces, but this time swapping a flute instead of a bassoon to be the oboe’s companion in melancholy. To that, add a violin part played almost exclusively on the E string, the violin’s highest, in higher positions (that is, very high in the violin’s range, for the Baroque period, anyway), and you have a textbook expression of Baroque melancholy in this gorgeous middle movement. Notice, however, that all is not “completely and utterly sad” at the ending, which does employ the Picardy Third to finish the movement in D major rather than minor, giving a faint glimmer of hope.

The third and final movement returns to—and takes to the extreme—the idea I started with in the first movement: that the strings and continuo are there just along for the ride, just to be able to say that this concerto is not purely a 10-ish-minute piccolo trumpet solo. This third movement is the quintessential fast, major, bubbly showpiece for one instrument: of course, the piccolo trumpet. The oboe occasionally gets to duet with it, but compared to the first movement, and especially relative to the first concerto, the involvement of the strings is rather minimal.

Here are some great recordings:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC24gV1o7XQ (the whole concerto, applause, and then the third movement again as an encore)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haRanlw9eSg (with the score, so you can appreciate how much the piccolo trumpet is asked to do)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8rYzpC-d44 (from the Netherlands Baroque Society in black and white—but this is a very recent recording, do not be fooled)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui6Nq96cZX8 (this is just audio; the video is a still image of Karajan)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

54: Trills in the Baroque vs. Classical Periods

Image
Baroque music is known for its incredibly technical and ornamented style. The most common and fundamental of those ornaments is our focus today: the trill. Most simply, a trill is a very fast, repeated alternation of two notes. In the vast majority of cases, those notes are adjacent, but that is not a requirement. Given how fast and common they are, regardless of what you play—whether it’s a string, wind, or keyboard instrument, or your voice—they have a reputation for being quite tiring to play. The period matters when considering a trill. Classical and later composers treat trills, in a sense, in the opposite manner than Baroque composers do. Let me show you two examples: First, the Baroque way of thinking. This is a PAC:   and especially in the Baroque era, when the plucked harpsichord dominated over the hammered piano, it was hard to sustain sounds for long since the sound of the plucking decays quickly. The trill was developed in response, out of a need both to ornam...
Read more

35: Figured Bass

Image
  There’s a system of notating harmonies that’s rather unique to the Baroque era, but which is so frequently used there, and so important to it, that no discussion of theory would ever be complete if we did not cover it. This is the notation of figured bass: “figured,” in the sense of using figures (numbers) to notate the bass. Figured bass was, in a sense, its own notation completely separate from the five lines and four spaces of the staff, which was nearly exclusively the purview of cellists, bassists, harpsichords, and organists.  Figured bass, fair warning, can be intimidating at first. But, just as with anything else we’ve covered so far, the more you practice reading it, the better you’ll get.  In this system, we use numbers to indicate intervals above the bass. We stack them, and this is how we build chords. If you can’t stack them, nowadays, it’s perfectly fine to use slashes and write the numbers horizontally.  Let’s start with the easiest figured bass nota...
Read more

102: Wagner (who was terrible, in case you didn't know), Tristan, and French Sixths

Image
 Let’s turn our attention to one chord—yes, one literal chord, not one class: F-B-D#-A. The original context that made this “The Chord” that everyone talks about—the reason this opera is as famous as it is—is its inclusion in Richard Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde.” The whole opera lasts just shy of four hours, but it’s most remembered for this one chord. Here it is, in red, from the Wikipedia article about the opera, during which a hugely significant amount of time is spent just talking about this single chord. It almost cannot be overstated how important this chord was to the development of music in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Some have said—again, referring to quotes in the Wikipedia article—that the power of this one chord in the late 1800s was the same as the transformative power of Beethoven 3 or 9 in the first part of the 1800s; I don’t think that’s hyperbole in the slightest. Deplorable as his personal politics were (he was violently antisemitic and the favorite com...
Read more