The Saddest Concerto of All Time

in my last video we looked at sadness in music and i suggested that the cello is one of the saddest instruments at least as far as orchestral instruments are concerned but i also mentioned a piece which i want to look at today which i think of as probably the saddest concerto of all time and yes it happens to be a cello concerto i've been going back and forth a bit with the best way of presenting this i said it was going to be a three-part series but i've decided to lump both remaining parts into this one video so today i want to talk firstly about concertos and why they're not usually the best place to express sadness and then as promised i'll introduce this piece to you and give you 10 ways it flips the rules of concertos on their head to create probably the saddest concerto of all time so let's start with a concerto and a concerto is simply an instrumental composition written for a soloist or sometimes several soloists accompanied by an orchestra as a genre the concerto has been around for about 300 years now and you could argue it's always been about the opposite of sadness a concerto is usually focused on just one thing showing off the soloist [Music] orchestras are a fundamentally anonymous group of players so concertos are very popular because with them the audience gets to connect a face to the music an individual highly skilled performer they can look up to and even idolise so it's not surprising that concertos are often flashy showcases for the soloists amazing technique [Music] vivaldi laid the ground rules for the modern concerto he was a violinist himself staging concerts every sunday at the ospadela de la pieta in venice and he was one of the first true showmen as a concerto soloist his virtuoso performances could be so powerful and or inspiring that some visitors found themselves terrified of the red-haired priest who performed them i'm not surprised that metal musicians today find a connection with vivaldi's music because it often emits similar levels of energy but all this focus on display and virtuosity led some people to look down on the concerto as a home for second-rate music there wasn't much real musical substance in a concerto they thought it was mainly just a chance for the soloist to show off their wares by the early 19th century new musical societies like the philharmonic society of london went as far as banning concertos altogether for a while at least in their founding charter concertos were specifically excluded from concert programs which were meant as they said to promote the performance in the most perfect manner possible of the best and most approved instrumental music it's got to be approved now around the same time a certain ludwig van beethoven had just written his violin concerto and here he is wearing a rather cool beethoven fifth midi roll t-shirt which you can get from the link in the description beethoven's piece was considered a bit of a dud in its day because it wasn't as technical and virtuosic as people were used to it's strange to imagine because this is now considered one of the best concertos ever written but it took a good 40 years after its premiere before attitudes began to change the hungarian violinist yosef yoakim who was just 13 years old at the time played the concerto at his sensational london debut and continued to champion it for the rest of his life people came to realize that this wasn't a concerto that was just about being flashy and showy it was a real piece of music and a really good one beethoven's piece opened the door to other composers throughout the 19th century to lessen the emphasis on virtuosity mendelson brahms and tchaikovsky all wrote concertos which had their fair share of showiness but also really worked as pieces of music but even if virtuosity was no longer a primary requirement surely at very least the solo line should have an extrovert character when you think about it it's quite an aggressive almost political act to say in this piece we're going to have 50 fantastic musicians over here and their job is to be the background to this one really cool soloist over here who's the person you should really focus all your attention on i always wondered how these guys felt about it so if that heroic soloist is not extroverted if they're standing at the front gazing at their feet and muttering to themselves metaphorically speaking of course what would be the point and this makes the cello a difficult choice as a concerto soloist it's reserved and somber manner means extroversion doesn't come very naturally to it it's also lower in the register meaning there's a danger it will be drowned out by the orchestra where there are hundreds of concertos written for the more naturally extroverted violin and piano you can probably count the successful cello concertos on two hands to me concertos work best where idea and instrument are in harmony when the music seems to embody the whole idea of the solo instrument and i'll probably get in trouble for saying this but there are moments in even those successful cello concertos where the instrument appears to attempt to be something it's not in passages like this one from the dvorak concerto there's a tension between instrument and idea it just feels like there's some kind of mismatch the closest i can describe it is how it feels for somebody quite introverted and introspective like me to get out on stage and try and talk in a lively and entertaining way to an audience it's like yeah you might be doing an okay job but you just can never shake the feeling that i'm just not really where i want to be to my mind one of the most successful forerunners of the piece i really want to focus on was a beautiful piece by max brook called colney dre although brook was raised protestant the col nidre arranges two jewish themes and at times imitates the rapsodic voice of the kantor who chants the liturgy in the synagogue [Music] this piece points the way it taps into a more lyrical vein of cello solo writing darker and more melancholy and connected with the sound of the human voice there's nothing awkward here the idea and the instrument seem perfectly aligned but it's not a full concerto it's a single slow movement for a full concerto we need a range of expression and it's hard to see how we'll fulfill all the demands for showmanship a soloist requires while still staying true to the character of the instrument if we can square that circle i think we'll have a good chance of creating our saddest concerto of all time but to do so we'll have to think outside the box so it's time for the big reveal i'm sure if you know any cello concertos you've probably already guessed the piece we're going to talk about for the rest of the video is what's that dorian yeah of course you can have a guess route of ours concerto for birds and orchestra you know that's that's a really good idea that's that's actually a really sad piece in parts i would love to hear you be one of the soloists in this one day so yeah great idea but not the one i was thinking of now the piece we're going to talk about is the elgar cello concerto and here are 10 ways it overcomes the challenge of writing this kind of piece to create not just one of the status concertos but to me one of the saddest pieces ever written the last three examples are really heartbreaking let's go and have a listen [Music] from the very opening you can tell this is going to be a concerto with the difference where most concertos tease the arrival of the soloist often making us wait several minutes for the soloist's first entry this concerto plunges straight into an intense solo line it's a pretty bold move as one writer put it it's as if shakespeare had started hamlet plunging straight in with to be or not to be but it launches us straight into the dark intensely personal world of the piece it's a piece that focuses in on the cello and in particular on its melancholy nature i can't think of another piece where instrument and idea are so perfectly aligned [Music] part of that sound is the connection to human song this is the main theme of the opening movement it's hard to imagine one that could be more introspective to me this theme sounds like someone humming to themselves as they walk along a country road [Music] just like the cole nadre elgar is drawing out the emotions by focusing in on that connection to human song and he continued the song-like nature of the music in the movement's overall structure which is a simple aba form elgar sketched this theme while recovering from an operation he was in a pretty dark state of mind and felt traumatized by the events of the first world war which had destroyed much of the old world he'd known and loved it's the kind of pastoral theme we think of as typically english today although that's got more to do with vorn williams than elgor but it was a theme elgar was particularly proud of on his deathbed elgar rather feebly tried to whistle the theme to his friend violinist william reed billy he said with tears in his eyes if you're ever walking on the malvin hills and hear that don't be frightened it's only me [Music] but if the concerto starts out with a haunting melancholy tone it's not long before it erupts into a fully fledged outburst of grief when played out fully on the cello's a string the theme moves from nostalgic folk tune to anguished lament the anguish culminates in what to me is one of the most iconic and goosebump inducing effects of the whole piece an agonizing scale run that screams up to the very top of the instrument as the music slows and intensifies into a powerful climax [Music] it's an incredible wailing sound playing this high up on the cello is very difficult it's almost impossible to play exactly in tune and it gives the music a strained pained quality which elgar uses throughout the concerto [Applause] [Music] there's a kind of gentle virtuosity in this but also a kind of vulnerability the soloist is putting their technique on the line balancing on a sort of cotton tight rope of melody that feels like it could break at any moment by keeping the orchestral accompaniment to a minimum throughout you feel aware of the physicality of the soloist and how precarious their position is you can feel this most powerfully when the orchestra suddenly drops out leaving the soloist all alone [Music] i'm a big fan of this kind of extreme of quietness that forces us to hang on every intimate note the soloist plays as if we're eavesdropping on someone's private thoughts [Music] as well as wailing the other human sound given musical expression most often in the piece is the sigh or the moan at its simplest this can be just one note falling to its neighbor below it's an obvious but surprisingly effective way of giving a sense of sadness and grief each one of these little falling motives feels literally like an exhalation of breath [Music] all of these melancholy sounds are placed within a very unusual structure that brings introspection to the fore since vivaldi's time most concertos used a three movement fast slow fast structure with weightier movements on the outside sandwiching a smaller flirtation with sadness in the middle elgar flips this approach on its head the first and third movements are lyrical and introverted sandwiching a more virtuosic second movement which we'll come to in a minute and he adds on a fourth final movement which despite a lively first half eventually reaches an intense slow moving climax so overall the feel of the whole concerto is completely different to any other that i can think of laser focusing in on that introspective slow moving often heartbreaking music so how did elgar overcome the problem of virtuosity well his master stroke in the second movement is to write something that is virtuosic but which is centered in a sense of fragility we've talked about the virtuoso origins of the concerto and despite the intense focus on introspection elgar was savvy enough to realize that if a concerto doesn't have any moments at all for a bit of showmanship the danger is the soloist won't feel it's a good showcase for their skills and won't feel particularly incentivized to include it in their repertoire elgar's brilliant solution is to create a movement that feels like a memory of past happiness everything is fast and energetic but played as a delicate and fragile flickering of light elgar underscores the fragility with leaps up to the cello harmonics which have a delicate ethereal tone and every so often the music suddenly slows right up almost as if the soloist was awakened from their reverie back to cold reality [Applause] so yes it's a fast virtuosic movement but it's one that feels very natural on the cello and very natural within the context of the piece by keeping everything fragile and delicate elgar connects the emotional atmosphere to the other movements so we've had now vulnerability fragility a sense of human song a sense of introversion and the sounds of sighing and wailing but to really get those emotions flowing we need to intensify the closing pages of the final movement do that in more ways than one firstly elgar takes those sighing motives and saturates the music with them almost everything becomes a falling sigh [Music] and this downward sighing motion spreads elsewhere one side is usually followed by another that's slightly lower so there's a continual downward motion [Music] and the harmony also moves downwards step by step the whole thing goes round and round getting lower and lower giving us a sense that we're trapped in a cycle of grief it's music that almost literally seems like the sound of tears falling down a face conductor kenneth woods described it as the most moving page in cello literature [Music] the soloist here is jacqueline dupre and she adds our final piece to the puzzle i mentioned at the start how the sadness of a piece of music is often connected with the events we associate with the piece either from our own lives or associated with the piece itself it's surprising today to realize that the cello concerto just like the beethoven violin concerto was considered a relative failure in elgar's output for several decades after the premiere the story people initially associated with the piece such as it was didn't seem to work at first the concerto got off to a bad start with a truly disastrous first performance it was the opening concert of the london symphony orchestra's 1919 season and in a scenario which feels only too familiar to us composers the conductor albert coates overran the rehearsal time on the rest of the programme leaving not enough time to rehearse the new commission but in truth the problem lay much deeper than that elgar's public persona was as a grand old man a pillar of the music establishment the quintessential edwardian gent right down to the amazing tash [Music] he held the post of master of the king's music and with his pomp and circumstance marches and his pompous and sometimes grandiose orchestral music he was associated in the public imagination with a form of very patriotic englishness and in fact he still is to this day [Music] but that imperial kind of englishness had suffered a hammer blow in world war one the world that had created elgar had vanished and was replaced with a new one packed with things like jazz modernism and women's rights and amidst all of that elgar had begun to seem like yesterday's man so in that climate a brooding autumnal dark night of the soul kind of piece written by an old man from a bygone era was just not what the times required so the concerto found itself in a period of limbo which lasted right through to the 1960s sometimes it takes the world to change for a great piece of music to be recognized but sometimes it just takes the right performer beethoven had joseph joachim to champion the violin concerto but for elgar it was jacqueline dupree duprey was only 20 years old when she first recorded the piece and her playing was so full of youthful vigor and enthusiasm that it cast the piece in a completely new light it became a worldwide sensation and the piece has been associated with her ever since the story of what happened next is very well known at just 28 dupre was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and was forced to abandon her career she died 14 years later at the age of 42. both duprey's success and her tragedy seem today inextricably linked to the concerto every new interpretation of the piece is compared to hers her story and her performance add another layer of emotion to the piece and are the final part of what gives this piece my vote as the saddest most heartbreaking concerto of all time now i used a lot of music clips in this video so it's certainly going to get demonetized and as you can probably imagine it takes a lot of work to put something like this together so if you would like to support the channel do please consider joining my patrons over at patreon thank you to all of them and thanks to you for watching and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 532,957

Keywords:

Id: Scba4avQ-t0

Length: 20min 36sec (1236 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021