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Program Notes
Victor Ewald (1860-1935) could well stand as an archetypal Russian musician in the late 1800s/early 1900s. His professional life was outside music, being a renowned and celebrated civil engineer in his home city of St. Petersburg. His composer colleagues followed similar paths: Alexander Borodin (chemist), Modest Mussorgsky (Imperial Guard officer), Cesar Cui (Imperial Army officer/engineer), and Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov (Imperial Navy officer). A distinctive exception is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, whose early three-year period as a civil servant was set aside as his composing fame grew, his creative efforts receiving substantial private and government financial support.
The composers listed above (again excepting Tchaikovsky, though he was on good terms with them) were joined by Ewald and other Russian musicians at regular “Friday Evenings” in St. Petersburg, hosted by Mitrofan Belyayev, an enthusiastic patron of the arts (by profession a timber merchant). A string quartet, which featured the host on viola and Ewald on cello, introduced a vast quantity of music to St. Petersburg listeners, new music as well as first hearings of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms quartets. Ewald also played tuba, and it is undoubtedly on these evenings that his brass quintets were premiered. Belyayev would eventually start a music publishing house (Edition M.P. Belyayev) and publish Ewald’s Quintet in Bb minor (op. 5).
Brass ensembles have existed since earliest antiquity, fulfilling religious, civic, and military functions. It is in St. Petersburg, however, that brass chamber music, in a recognizable quantity, really begins, starting with twelve short pieces by visiting German violinist Ludwig Maurer, in 1874. One influential factor was the public sponsorship emanating from the Tsar himself, Alexander III, the second-to-last Tsar before the overthrow of the imperial government in 1915. Alexander was a dedicated student of the cornet, taking weekly lessons from the German virtuoso Wilhelm Wurm, who would visit the Palace every week. Alexander also hosted weekly soirees, dedicated to small brass ensemble music, with the various parts performed by military officers and government officials, all dedicated amateurs. As Alexander aged he switched from cornet to tuba.
While Ewald was technically also an amateur, there is nothing in his music that is lacking in craftsmanship, invention, and dramatic color. Entering the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1871, at age twelve, his skills reflect the demanding nature of this school that had been created by Anton Rubinstein in 1861. Rubinstein, in addition to being a world-renowned piano virtuoso and composer, was a fierce educator, routinely demoting and firing faculty members who did not live up to his standards – he even created classes that were required for faculty to attend. Ewald studied both composition and cello.
Founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, the port city of St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd in 1914, Leningrad in 1924, and returning to St. Petersburg in 1991) was intended to open up Russia to the outside world, and through this city flowed virtually all the scientific knowledge and culture that was able to enter Russia from without. It is impossible to not hear influences of various works in Ewald’s brass quintets: of course Russian composers like Tchaikovsky and Borodiin but also Brahms and even Bruckner: a turn of phrase here, a chord progression there, references abound.
Ewald’s Quintet no. 4 was actually his first, but was immediately viewed as near impossible to play, and subsequently transcribed for strings. For much of the 20th century, his Quintet in Bb minor (also published in America as Symphony for Brass) was the only Ewald widely known, performed frequently. In 1964 musicologist Andre M. Smith (also former bass trombonist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra), received manuscripts from Ewald’s son-in-law, Yevgeny Gippius of the other quintets, and he spent some nine years examining and authenticating the scores. The American Brass Quintet performed the complete cycle during their 1974/75 Carnegie Hall Recital Hall series, the Western Hemisphere premieres of nos. 2, 3, and 4. The actual composition dates of the four quintets are:
Quintet no. 4 in A flat major (Op. 8) - c. 1888
Quintet no. 1 in B flat minor (Op. 5) - c. 1890
Quintet no. 2 in E flat major (Op. 6) - c. 1905
Quintet no. 3 in D flat major (Op. 7) - c. 1912
A photograph from 1912 shows Victor Ewald in a brass quintet, holding his rotary-valve tuba. The other instruments are two piston-valved cornets, rotary-valved alto horn, and rotary-valved tenor horn.
One cannot discuss any tradition of American brass chamber music without acknowledging the tuba virtuoso Sam Pilafian (1949-2019), founding member of the Empire Brass. I will always remember attending a public coaching session at the Juilliard School, where Sam was working with a student quintet on an Ewald quintet. Like many great musicians, Sam was always alert to the potential of modeling his concepts on inspiration he received from a wide variety of sources. He spoke at length about listening to the cellist in the Borodin String Quartet, how he studied this basic conception of how the lowest voice in a chamber ensemble functioned (with his infectious smile he referred to “leading from the back seat”). And he specifically recommended listening the two quartets by Alexander Borodin, how closely they were to Ewald’s brass music. He had asked the students what they were listening to while studying Ewald, and the answers were limited to various recordings of the Ewald quintets – Sam spoke intensely about how one must seek out the surrounding context of any work we are studying, and to not automatically just listen to our brass examples (hence Borodin’s string quartets). He also recommended that the students examine the act of playing chamber music on brass instruments in general – how chamber music is really an “overheard conversation,” and how we need to be able to play our instruments “conversationally” – he said that he often tells himself to “play 30%” of his tuba when playing in this sort of intimate setting. To paraphrase Sam: “We are all required to project with resonating power in large ensemble settings, but should also be able to ‘converse’ quietly: much like the contrast between lieder and grand opera performance.”
Serious, mature dialog is the hallmark of these recorded performances – no preciousness, pretention, or grandiose posturing in this ensemble. Here are brass chamber musicians who understand that true rubato can exist within steady pulses that are felt in one’s core. The collective experience gathered here represents many decades of professional work on the highest level, resulting in a fundamentally shared lightness of touch that has room for suggesting, in the most nuanced way, both tears and laughter. Every phrase is an expression of natural breathing: the bad method-acting that so often characterizes romantic brass chamber music performances is unthinkable here.
Dizzy Gillespie was once interviewed on French television and was asked “what is the principal quality of great music making?” His answer: “buoyancy” – we might envision this as an internal spirit that has nothing to do with outward veneer, and can be experienced in the finest interpretations of any music, including “heavies” like Wagner and Bruckner. Similarly, Italian author Italo Calvino wrote in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, lectures that focused on defining universal qualities of great art, that “lightness” comes first. And Calvino lists “quickness” second, meaning not any sort of superficial expression of speed, but rather how immediately responsive art can be, such as musicians to each other and also “speaking” to their listeners.
Consider the opening measures of op. 5, the most familiar music in this collection: the solo bass voice of the ensemble initiates a rising layered texture as each instrument enters. David Taylor’s phrasing is a perfect example of true rubato: within the measured tread of his solo there is shape and color, beautifully understated with solemn gravity – not a trace of the bloated swelling commonly heard in this passage. His poised touch is answered in kind by his colleagues, and immediately it is clear that we are in masterful hands. One is reminded of something Charles Mingus once said, that while playing in tempo a musician must decide “what part” of the beat they need to be emphasizing – also Leon Fleisher advising a young musician to “play notes as late as possible, but never be late.
Coming full circle, experiencing these recordings brings to mind a statement by the above-mentioned Anton Rubinstein, an immensely prominent musical figure of the 19th century who is all but forgotten today. He was attempting to express verbally what constituted an ideal musical performance: “A free walk on firm ground.”
——— Chris Gekker
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