Program Notes

By Georgeanne Banker

George Frederic Handel
Suite No. 1 in F major from Water Music, HWV 348
Concerto in F major, HWV 331

Some music is written about nature, while other music is meant for performance in nature. Or, more specifically, to be played outdoors, on a large barge, on a large river. By about 50 musicians. With a royal audience listening from another, adjacent barge, and a scattered public enjoying the spectacle from nearby banks and bridges.

Such was the inception of George Frederic Handel’s Water Music, which sounded for the first time on the balmy summer evening of July 17, 1717. The occasion was a water party, which saw King George I and company float along the Thames from Whitehall to Chelsea, dine, and float back. While not the first water party, a venue for regal visibility if not a free outdoor concert, this one was more a PR event staged by the unpopular Hanoverian King. With party music at its heart, the event started at 8 p.m. and lasted until dawn. One spectator, Friedrich Bonet, noted:

Next to the King’s barge was that of the musicians, about 50 in number, who played on all kinds of instruments, to wit trumpets, horns, hautboys, bassoon, German flutes, French flutes [recorders], violins, and basses; but there were no singers. The music had been composed specially by the famous Handel, a native of Halle, and His Majesty’s principal court composer. His Majesty approved of it so greatly that he caused it to be repeated three times in all—namely; twice before and once after supper.

For the occasion Handel supplied a collection of music now grouped as the three Water Music suites in F, D, and G major Full of movements that float between pomp and elegance, the Suite No. 1 in F major is scored for strings with oboes, bassoon, and horns, the latter instrument making one of its earliest appearances in English orchestral music here.

The Suite in F major begins with a grand French overture, complete with the form’s signature, dotted rhythms worthy of any royal procession by land or by sea. Moving through French dances, airs, and allegros of exciting timbral contrasts, the suite includes a hornpipe, a dance originating in the British Isles, nodding to Handel’s (and the King’s) adoptive home.

Five years later, Handel penned a work known as the Concerto in F major, HWV 331, likely part of a “New concerto for French Horns,” which draws music from the allegro and hornpipe of the second Water Music suite in D major. Transposing the music to F major, these expanded borrowings (a favorite technique in which Handel reimagined and remixed his previous work), invoke that night on the river, though this time he politely asks the trumpets to stay ashore so that the horns might shine.

Antonio Vivaldi – The Four Seasons

It’s difficult to imagine the universe before the creation of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, for are we not born knowing how to eat, sleep, and hum the first happy phrase of Spring?

By 1725, Vivaldi, a one-time priest, one-time music director at Venice’s famed Ospedale della Pietà, and now somewhat of a musical free agent, had made an international name for himself as much for his virtuosic violin playing as for his engaging compositions. That year, he published a collection of twelve concerti through the Amsterdam-based firm Le Cène, which catered to an international crowd hungry for the latest Italian fare. Titled Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione, the contest of harmony and invention, the collection opens with four remarkable trials of each property: violin concerti titled Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. Pictorial and programmatic, even more remarkable was that each concerto came with a bespoke sonnet, thought to be written by Vivaldi himself.

Vivaldi dedicated Il cimento to the Bohemian Count Wenzel von Morzin, for whom Vivaldi was the maestro di musica in Italia (and whose cousin, some 30 years later, would grant the young Joseph Haydn his first-ever maestro gig). While the Count was aware of the Four Seasons concerti, which were written a few years prior to publication, in the dedication Vivaldi made up for any lack of novelty in presenting them here in a rather novel way: “…while [the concerti] may be the same, I have added to them, besides the sonnets, a very clear explanation of all the things that unfold in them so that I am sure they will seem new to you.”

In print, Vivaldi transcribed each poetic line over their corresponding measures, with a few other pictorial indications, leaving no doubt as to where the birds might sing or storms might rage.

Spring opens with that rosy E major theme printed alongside the line Giunt' è la Primavera, springtime is here. Upon our arrival in the countryside, we are greeted by a trio of trilling birds, while the Largo, scored for the upper voices, sees the goat herder (solo violin) dozing among the rustling plants (orchestral violins) and his faithful dog, who barks throughout his entire nap (relatable). Our canine companion is played by the viola, with a forceful, ripped tone (strappato), before the season closes with a pastoral dance.

Vivaldi’s Summer, in G minor, is one of stifling heat and mercurial weather. A frightened shepherd sings a chromatic soliloquy, while flies and wasps (dotted rhythms in the orchestral violins) buzz amid distant thunder, portending some spectacular, stormy orchestral tuttis.

A precursor to Haydn’s merry setting, Vivaldi’s Autumn welcomes the harvest with a song, and some imbibed interjections from the ensemble. Panning across a few dozing drunkards (muted strings with an arpeggiating harpsichord), the season ends with a hunt, complete with familiar horn calls and the orchestra in pursuit of an agile soloist. The Four Seasons shivers to an end with the frigid bravura of Winter’s winds, some cozy pizzicato raindrops, and plenty of virtuosic skating across icy fingerboards.