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Admission by programme on the door £15,Friends of the Music members £12, Children Free.
Programme - South to Vienna
A journey from Spanish keyboard music to the Viennese Classic Style through the work of a forgotten composer – Manuel Blasco de Nebra
The inspiration behind this programme is the forgotten music of Spanish composer from Sevilla, Manuel Blasco de Nebra (1750-1784). The heir to Scarlatti in many respects, he was moreover a composer well aware of what was happening elsewhere in Europe in the 1770s. When he died his sisters sold an impressive collection of 1833 pieces for harpsichord, organ and pianoforte – 172 pieces being his own works, the rest were pieces by German, Italian and French composers. His expressive world is far more searching than Scarlatti, a quality that sometimes reminds us of the music of Mozart and Haydn and pre announces Schubert and even Chopin.
D. Scarlatti
Sonata in D major K.492
Sonata in B minor K. 197
Sonata in F minor K. 386
Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are single movements, mostly in binary form, some in early sonata form, and mostly written for harpsichord or the earliest pianofortes. Some display harmonic audacity in their use of discords, and unconventional modulations to remote keys.
Born in Naples, Scarlatti spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. Both of these cultures, Neapolitan and Iberian can be found in his works that didn’t refer to the folk and dance elements directly, but rather in an assimilated way, in which Scarlatti had developed his own style. Sonata K.492 is one of the exceptions, where a pure flamenco quote appears (the sonata is almost a pure bulería). In another register, his introverted Sonata in B minor K 197 displays the recurring streaks of pathos that Neapolitan music revels in. The melodic line whimpers with plaintive little appoggiaturas as harmonic tension accumulates from the use of stubbornly immovable pedal points in the bass. In Sonata K. 386 we can find again some Hispanic elements in the form of a toccata.
W.A. Mozart
Fantasia and Fugue in C Major K. 394
Fantasia in C minor K. 396
Both Fantasias were written in 1782, even if K.396 was first published in 1802 when Maximilian Stadler completed the 28 bars fragment manuscript that Mozart hadn’t finished. The title “Fantasia” comes from him and seems appropriate. Both works, from the same period, were written at a time when Mozart was having a Baroque moment, discovering the music of J.S. Bach and Haendel. In a letter to his father he mentioned that he was collecting Bach’s fugues. He even transcribed some of them for string quartet. Mozart took to the style immediately and earned a reputation for his virtuosic keyboard improvisations. These two pieces, written in a free form, as “fantasias” offer, or so we imagine, a sense of Mozart the improviser, and the Fantasia and Fugue K.394 was one of the results from his interest in counterpoint.
M. Blasco de Nebra
Sonata n°10 in C Major
Sonata n° 1 in C minor
Sometimes called the “Spanish Scarlatti”, Manuel Blasco de Nebra has been forgotten for two centuries, before the first manuscripts and editions of his remaining 30 keyboard pieces were brought to light. Not much is known about his short life. His father was the organist of Seville Cathedral before he took over the position in 1778. Renowned for his excellent sight-reading and playing of the organ, harpsichord and fortepiano as well as his improvising skills, his works evoke Scarlatti’s concise forms – he also uses the binary form, usually an adagio followed by a fast finale – and extraordinary power of invention.
Nonetheless, he took the potentially pianistic qualities of the music further than his predecessor and his contemporaries like Carlos Seixas or Antonio Soler (who he might have met). In his book The Sonata in the Classic Era, William S. Newman studies the pre history of the Viennese Classical Sonata from 1730 to 1820, identifying Sevilla as an important manufacturing center for harpsichords and pianos. The first Spanish pieces written for piano were written in Sevilla. This may explain the inner expressiveness of particularly the adagio movements that Blasco de Nebra managed to reach by exploring the possibilities of these new instruments. Indeed, the title of the two Sonatas chosen from this programme employ the expression “Clave y Fuerte Piano” – meaning they could be performed on both instruments, harpsichord and pianoforte. One must realize that towards the end of the century the two instruments stood side by side in musical salons and concert halls – Scarlatti had already worked with both instruments while he was active in Spain and some Viennese composers such as Beethoven in his early sonatas also mentioned both instruments. Even if Blasco de Nebra was more familiar with the expressive devices of the harpsichord – whose tone color closely interwined with the crisp and transparent style of his Sonatas – some highest and lowest tones in these pieces exceed the range of the baroque instrument, suggesting the use of the piano instead.
On another technical point, it is interesting to mention that the notation of some of his ornamentation, in particular the notation of the grace note, refers to the characteristic Italian notation, that is also found in the music of Mozart, who was greatly influenced by Italian music, as were other Southern German and Austrian composers.
What comes through the two chosen Sonatas for this programme, is that he texture of Blasco de Nebra’s writing has one foot in the ornamented and expressive Baroque style while anticipating the Classical era of Haydn and Mozart in their clarity of phrase structure and harmonic simplicity. In some Sonatas however, he goes even further developing a harmonic world that can be a richly mysterious one, which has led some commentators to say his music at moments sounds like Chopin’s, Schubert’s or Schumann’s.
F. Schubert
Drei Klavierstücke D946
F.Schubert, as Blasco de Nebra, lived in a period of musical evolution, and he explored the connecting way between Classicism and Romanticism, never reaching a full reconciliation of the two, as this wasn’t his artistic aim. Often added to the “First Viennese School” - originally listing Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven only – Schubert (1797-1828) is actually the only Vienna-born member of this group. Vienna, a central musical hub at this time, as was Seville for Spain during the life of Blasco de Nebra.
Rather than chosing an early piece, a sonata, for this programme, as with the late Mozart Fantasias’, I have chosen the Drei Klavierstücke, completed in May 1828, the year of Schubert’s death. Published posthumously by J.Brahms in 1868, it is said that these pieces should have been completed by a fourth one and were conceived as a third set of Impromptus. Like the Impromptus, the Drei Klavierstücke express in microcosm so much of Schubert’s unique sound world and musical personality – daring and unusual harmonies, beautiful songful melodies, and episodes of profound poignancy or intimacy. Throughout these three pieces, we hear the extraordinarily broad scope of his creativity and emotional landscape. On another hand, these pieces are impromptus in all but name, showing a maturity and mastery of the structure that hadn’t been achieved before. All the three pieces share a similar rondo pattern, even though each one of them forms a closed and independent poetical and dramatic universe on their own. Qualified as “music more eloquent than words” they are the perfect example of how Schubert took music out of the salons, into nature or into another kind of domestic intimacy where in his own words “When I wished to sing of love, it turned to sorrow. And when I wished to sing of sorrow, it was transformed for me into love.”
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Holy Trinity Church, Sandgate Road, Folkestone, CT20 2HQ Folkestone, United Kingdom
