Program Book — CAMA Presents Les Violons du Roy with Avi Avital — Tuesday, October 19, 2021 — Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara, 7:30PM

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Vivaldi’s concerto for solo mandolin and strings probably dates from the 1720’s, when Vivaldi was travelling constantly, performing concerts and producing his operas. He had left his position as violin teacher at the orphanage/convent/music school/concert venue Ospedale della Pietà, but was still under contract to send back two concertos a month for one gold ducat apiece. Beneath the title on Vivaldi’s manuscript, there is a note that the bowed strings can play pizzicato throughout (“Si può ancor fare con tutti gli violini pizzicati”). Playing without bows, which seems to be the most popular way to play it these days, gives the concerto a delicate texture that the mandolin can dominate. Johann Sebastian BACH: Excerpts from The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080 The Art of Fugue was Bach’s last major project, and he didn’t quite finish it. The idea was to compose a series of fugues and canons all based on the same thematic subject, which could be varied through all the devices that were part of every composer’s education in counterpoint, such as turning it upside down or backward, or augmenting or diminishing the length of its notes. Bach wrote most of them in “open score,” with each voice given its own staff, making it look like music for an ensemble, although it was not unusual in Bach’s day to write keyboard or organ music in open score. Today the Art of Fugue is performed on all sorts of keyboards and by all sorts of instrumental combinations. Bach never finished the fugue called Contrapunctus XIV (the word “contrapunctus” does not appear in Bach’s manuscript, in which most of the fugues are untitled; the labels may have been added by his son Carl Phillipp Emanuel, or by the publisher of the posthumous 1751 edition). It is a Fuga a 3 Soggetti ("fugue in three subjects") that stops after 238 measures, at which point in the manuscript Carl Phillipp Emanuel wrote, “At the point where the composer introduces the name BACH [BH–A–C–BJ for non-Germans] in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died.” The image of Bach dropping dead over the score, quill in hand, is dramatic, but probably fantasy. Carl Phillipp Emanuel was more than 100 miles away in Berlin, where he worked for Frederick the Great, when his father died, and would have had no particular knowledge about what happened. There have been numerous completions of the unfinished triple fugue over the centuries, so many that one scholar wrote a thesis arguing that Bach deliberately left it unfinished as a sort of final exercise in a counterpoint textbook. BACH, arr.AVITAL: Violin Concerto in A Minor, BWV 1041 The only extant evidence for the A minor Violin Concerto in Bach’s handwriting is a set of parts from around 1730, when he was director of music in the churches of Leipzig, and had recently taken over the directorship 14 CAMA'S 103 RD CONCERT SEASON
Vivaldi c.1723, Anonymous Painter of a Collegium Musicum that gave concerts in a local coffeehouse. But the concerto may have been composed a decade earlier, when Bach was Capellmeister at the court of the Duke of Anhalt-Cöthen, the only time in his half-century professional career that he was not employed in making music for Lutheran church services. Most concertos are a bit like a conversation between soloist and orchestra, with the soloist elaborating on thoughts the orchestra introduces. This one is remarkable for how the soloist and orchestra talk almost entirely about different things, without sharing thematic material. The assertive theme that starts the first movement never appears in the solo episodes. Nor does the orchestra ever play the yearning theme that the first solo introduces. The rolling theme in the bass, cello, and continuo that begins the slow movement, and recurs throughout it, disappears during the solo episodes, as do the bass, cello, and continuo themselves, leaving the violas as the bottom of the ensemble. Not until the last phrase of the movement do all the elements come together and all the instruments play at the same time. The finale combines the rhythm and feel of the jig (the traditional last movement of the Baroque suite) with the fugue, the tutti passages corresponding to the fugal expositions. VIVALDI, arr.AVITAL: Lute Concerto in D Major, RV 93 Vivaldi’s Concerto in D, RV 93, for lute, two violins and continuo, became one of his biggest hits in the 20th century when guitarists appropriated it, the dreamlike slow movement becoming a particular radio favorite. On the mandolin it has to be played an octave higher than it would sound on a lute, so that the solo part is often in unison with the first violin part. Oddly enough, there was a time (mostly the 1980s) when cutting-edge lute scholarship held that playing the solo part in the upper octave pitch was precisely what Vivaldi intended, and indeed the visual evidence of the music on the page suggested a solo instrument—the gut-strung mandolino—sounding at violin pitch. Opinion changed when the tradition of concerted music with lute, in which the lute often doubled the violin part an octave down in tutti passages, became better understood. The concerto works with the solo part at either octave. 15 CAMA'S 103 RD CONCERT SEASON
Page 1 and 2: Presenting the world’s finest cla
Page 3 and 4: WELCOME BACK to Live Classical Musi
Page 5: Photo by Nell Campbell On behalf of
Page 8 and 9: Photo by Christoph Kîstlin For DG
Page 10 and 11: he gave the world premiere of Jenni
Page 12 and 13: throughout Canada as well as in Ger
Page 14 and 15: An historic treasure with contempor
Page 18 and 19: VIVALDI: Concerto Grosso in G Minor
Page 20: Sometimes, a Round of Applause Just

Program Book — CAMA Presents Les Violons du Roy with Avi Avital — Tuesday, October 19, 2021 — Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara, 7:30PM

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