Past and Present • Hunter Capoccioni

February 2, 7:30 pm
Great Hall, GBPAC
Tickets • Meet the Artists

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart • La Clemenza di Tito, K. 621, March and Overture
John Harbison • Concerto for Bass Viol (2006) with Hunter Capoccioni, bass
Samuel Barber • Medea, Op.23, Suite

This intriguing showcase of innovative masterpieces past and present features principal bassist of the WCFSO, UNI faculty member, and artistic director and founder of the Cedar Valley Chamber Music Festival, Hunter Capoccioni performing John Harbison’s Concerto for Bass Viol. The work was commissioned by Hunter’s family in memory of his father David Capoccioni and, after performances around the world, finally returns ‘home’ for its Cedar Valley premiere.

Sponsored by a group of generous Cedar Valley individuals in honor of Hunter Capoccioni
 

 

Program notes

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart • La Clemenza di Tito, K. 621, March and Overture

There exist countless unsubstantiated myths surrounding the final year of Mozart’s life, due in no small part to Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (and the subsequent award-winning film of the same name by Milos Forman). This was pre-dated by Pushkin’s vignette, Mozart and Salieri, which helped to propagate the myth that Salieri murdered his younger colleague. Evidence gathered by contemporary musicologists indicates that Mozart was quite prolific until his final illness and his once-dire financial situation was significantly improved.

Some of Mozart’s finest music dates from his last year, including The Magic Flute, his final piano concerto, the clarinet concerto (arguably unequaled in the entire repertoire), the last of his string quartets, and the unfinished Requiem. Lost in the shuffle is his penultimate opera, La Clemenza di Tito, composed on a commission for the coronation of Emperor Leopold II as King of Bohemia. The ceremonies took place in Mozart’s beloved Prague, site of one of his greatest successes, Don Giovanni.

Although Salieri had allegedly turned down the commission five times, Mozart, enticed by twice his usual Viennese fee, could not resist. The composer along with his new colleague, Caterino Mazzolà, liberally edited Metastasio’s 17th-century libretto, and their work became the opera - not Figaro, nor Giovanni, nor The Magic Flute - that Mozart’s own widow had championed. Discussing Constanze’s devotion to Tito, Brian Robins writes:

In contrast to the ill-founded accusations of frivolity and irresponsibility so often been attached to her name, I would suggest that the seriousness, grandeur and dignity of La clemenza di Tito evoked an especially empathetic response to an opera for which Constanze developed a lasting and special affection. Perhaps in the end it was Constanze who was right and posterity that was wrong for so long.

And yet the opera lay scorned by contemporary Mozart scholars and historians. It was not until the premiere 1967 recording, led by Istvan Kertesz and an all-star cast, that Tito began to be recognized as a masterwork worthy of comparison with Mozart’s finest. The overture in particular finds Mozart at his highest creative power, from sweeping gestures reminiscent of the “Jupiter” symphony to ingenious exploitation of the winds like no other composer of his time. We also hear more than a fair share of contrapuntal writing (brought about in part by Mozart’s fascination towards the end of his life of the music of both Bach and Handel). Major and minor transitions fight back and forth to set up Mozart’s highly lyrical themes, the last of which is a stouthearted return to the opening gestures followed by a rousing coda.

• Brian Hughes
 

John Harbison • Concerto for Bass Viol

“It really is just one of those stories where the stars seem to align,” says bassist Hunter Capoccioni, son of the late David Capoccioni.

The commission [in David’s honor] was conceived after one of Paul Ellison’s master classes in 2000. At the end of the master class a discussion
 developed about Ginastera — I believe in reference to the bass solo in the Variaciones Concertantes. Paul began discussing how he and Barry Green had begun a joint commission of a bass concerto from Ginastera. Unfortunately, Ginastera passed on before he could begin writing the work, leaving us to mourn what could have been.”

Thus the seed was planted for a new work for the bass repertoire, but one which would not come to fruition for several more years. Upon discussing many composers with friends and colleagues, it seemed readily apparent to Capoccioni that all signs pointed to John Harbison as the ideal fit. This award winning composer has contributed a large portion of his own oeuvre to contemporary symphonic literature and yet, according to Hunter Capoccioni, “It is difficult to classify Harbison’s eclectic musical language. I hear a sense of nostalgia for the American music of the 1940s and 50s, especially jazz and radio music of the period. Harbison’s background as a jazz pianist subtly pervades some of his harmonic and rhythmic choices.”

Eventually, seventeen orchestras ranging from the Philadelphia Orchestra to the University of Iowa signed onto the commissioning project. The concerto’s premiere took place with the Toronto Symphony on April 1, 2006, and, over the next two concert seasons, the remaining members of the consortium followed in suit, concluding with the Greenville Symphony in 2008.

While calling the work a concerto for “bass viol” instead of string bass or contrabass may seem an odd choice, it reflects Harbison’s knowledge of the instrument and its historical significance:

I still think that it is, in some ways, the most distinct of the string voices in terms of not having the same kind of origins. Of course, one of the things that is certainly important to me about it is the origin in the viol family. I have a certain early music origin as a performer, and have worked with viol consorts and so forth, so I know kind of where that comes from.

The concerto is in the standard three movements. The opening, Lamento, recalls, according to Harbison, a “kind of a pre-history, in which I tried to set a scene of the bass in its old consort. The physical shape of the instrument, having not shifted the way the other violin family instruments did, obviously still shapes the sound.” 

Composer (and a practicing attorney in the Boston area), Vance R. Koven wrote of the concert’s premiere there:

The lament of the first movement is not of the keening sort, but one of dignified restraint, becoming ever more lyrically elegiac but breaking off (prematurely?) before succumbing to any temptation to grandiloquence. The Cavatina creates melodic sense from a mordent-like figuration, developed and extended in lyric manner, climaxing in a passage of rapid figuration in the solo part (suggesting an operatic cavatina) against a calm chorale-like background in the orchestra, until the latter extends the soloist’s outburst. The finale presents ideas more rhythmic than in the prior movements, with the one and only brief passage in which the soloist gets down with a jazzy pizzicato. Overall, this is a work of immense charm and, despite a harmonic palette reminiscent of 1940s post-populism, originality. The writing for the bass defies expectations: light, airy, much extending high notes with harmonics.

• Brian Hughes
 

Samuel Barber • Medea, Op.23, Suite 

As with Aaron Copland’s Ballet for Martha (now known as Appalachian Spring) Barber’s Medea was composed for Martha Graham and her company and first performed in 1946 under the title Cave of the Heart. Graham, the most important figure in 20th century dance, also included among her collaborators William Schuman, Carlos Surinach, Norman Dello Joio, Gian Carlo Menotti, and many others. Of this particular ballet for the great impresaria Barber himself wrote, “Neither Miss Graham nor the composer wished to use the Medea-Jason legend literally in the ballet. These mythical figures served rather to project psychological states of jealousy and vengeance which are timeless.”

Barber constructed the suite in seven movements and returned the title to its original source material. In his own program note he wrote:

The suite follows roughly the form of a Greek tragedy. In the Parados the characters first appear. The Choros, lyric and reflective, comments on the action which is to unfold. The Young Princess appears in a dance of freshness and innocence, followed by a heroic dance of Jason. Another plaintive Choros leads to Medea’s dance of obsessive and diabolical vengeance. The Kantikos Agonias, an interlude of menace and foreboding, follows Medea’s terrible crime, the murder of the Princes and her own children, announced at the beginning of the Exodus by a violent fanfare of trumpets. In this final section the various themes of the chief characters of the work are blended together; little by little the music subsides and Medea and Jason recede into the legendary past.

• Brian Hughes