Trio in A, Op.47 - Matteo Bevilacqua

Composer: Matteo Bevilacqua (1772-1849)

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Bevilacqua is really not well attested online, though I did find a bit about him in an article by Tom Moore on academia.edu.  Moore says "Unlike many musicians from this period, who left behind a trail of reviews of performances and publications, there is very little information regarding Bevilacqua" which is definitely true.  I could find no recordings at all of Bevilacqua's music and very little biographical information.

Bevilacqua is described as a flutist and guitar virtuoso and he moved from his native Sicily to Vienna in 1805. He was also a writer and published two volumes of poetry.   He also apparently published an Italian translated of Don Quixote in 1812, which makes me happy in particular because that's one of my favorite novels.  I'm glad to record works by anyone who likes Don Quixote enough to do a translation of it.

(Note: there is a contemporary concert pianist named Matteo Bevilacqua and he, understandably, dominates any online searches on the name which makes the classical composer even harder to find.)

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Date: 1807, per IMSLP

Original Instrumentation: 2 violins (or flutes), guitar

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Movements:    

1. Andante

2. Largo

3. Polonaise

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Why this one:

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​After my first few duets with guitar (Beringer, Casorti, Stahl) went ok, I decided to try a guitar piece with a slightly larger ensemble.  This piece is way longer and the guitar part here was more difficult throughout.  Bluntly, I was feeling a little more ambitious.​

Description:  

Movement 1 - Andante

Key:  A

Time: 4/4  BPM=80

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This movement has a stately, formal feel and an overall structure of AA'BA.  The A' section has mostly the same melodic contour of the A section, but modulated to E major, a pretty basic classical modulation.  The B section has a very different melody and feel, starting in the key of A minor (the parallel minor of the home key of A major) before transitioning to C major and then working it's way back to A major for the recapitulation of section A.

The violins are doing the melodic work here, with violin 1 having a little bit more action than violin 2.  The guitar is in support throughout with straight chords or arpeggiated chords in sixteenth notes or eighth note triplets.

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Performance:​

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​I had been putting off starting this piece because of this movement.  It's not that it was all that difficult but at about 6.5 minutes it's pretty long, almost twice as long as anything else I'd done with a guitar, and I was having trouble gearing myself up for it.  I did the guitar first, both because it's generally easier to start with the more chordal support instrument and because the violins had some tricky parts in movements 2 and 3 that I wanted to have more time to work.  The piece is 11.5 minutes long, so it wasn't likely I'd have time to do more than one instrument in any single recording session, and indeed it took me 3 sessions to record this.  (My sessions are generally around 2 or 3 hours.)

I was well rehearsed and feeling pretty good about this movement and I didn't really have any trouble with it, though some of the sixteenth note arpeggios in the guitar in section A took me a few tries to get the articulation as clean as I wanted.​

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Errata:

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As I did for my other guitar works, I tabbed out the guitar part and played to that in the studio.  I read guitar in standard notation poorly, and figured the time investment to bring my reading ability up to my mandolin/mandola/mandocello level probably didn't cost trade.  My notation software makes tabbing guitar extremely easy, as I can just input the standard notation music and then copy paste it into a tab staff.  I do have to do a pass through for playability to make sure the fingerings are ok because the program makes weird choices sometimes, but it doesn't take very long.

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Movement 2 - Largo

Key:  D

Time: 3/4  BPM=50

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This movement has a rather sweet sounding opening 4 bar theme.  The most conspicuous element here is the second measures' "ba bada ba ba" rhythmic motif which will come back throughout the first half of the movement.

The second half of the movement moves rhythmically more to straight sixteenths, dropping the slight gallop of the initial rhythmic idea.  

The violins are mostly harmonizing with each other in the same rhythm, though the violin 2 switches more firmly into an accompanying role in the second half, with a lot of pedal tone arpeggios under the violin 1 melody.  Unlike in the other movements the guitar actually has some melodic lines, here, rather than just sketching out chords.

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Performance:​

This was the easiest movement in theory, as there was nothing too tricky in any of the instruments and Largo is really slow.  I say "in theory" because I had a hell of a time with violin 1, despite it not being difficult from a technical standpoint.  I was very off my game in general on that session and I kept rushing ahead of the extremely slow beat and fumbled several of the runs.  My first take was so shaky that I opted to scrap it and just do another one before we went back through to see if I needed to punch anything.  I think my exact words were "That was garbage.  I'm just going to do it again."  I didn't even bother listening back to the first take.  Take 2 was a lot better, but I still made some stupid mistakes on, weirdly, a bunch of easy parts.  It was frustrating.

I opted to play the repeats in this movement because it was so short.​

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Violin 2 was smooth sailing.  It's not really any easier than violin 1, but I was playing better that session.

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Movement 3 - Polonese

Key:  A

Time: 3/4  BPM=90

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A polonaise is a polish traditional dance in triple meter.   ("Polonaise" is French for "Polish" and presumably "polonese" is the Italian transliteration of the French word.) This movement is roughly structured ABA, with the first A section having a substructure of abac and the shorter final A section having an ae substructure.  

So the whole movement is this:

A     B    A

abac  B    ae

The b subsection modulates to E major, and c feels like its pulling to A minor.  The B section is in C major, though the ending has a minor flavor, maybe A minor again.  

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Performance:​

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I wasn't sure what speed to play this at initially, but after listening to a bunch of polonaises and looking up some instructional videos about the style I settled on BPM 90.  I'm no polish dance expert, but the end result sounds ok to me.

This was by far the most difficult movement of the piece.  Violin 1 had lots of position work and required a lot of quick shifts and string crossings in the fast 16th note passages and the guitar was a bit of a minefield, alternating between super easy chords on the beat and 16th note arpeggiations that required both fast and precise right hand work and some tricky left hand contortions.   At 90 BPM, this was the fastest thing I'd yet attempted on the classical guitar by quite a lot.   

The guitar, which I did first, gave me trouble exactly where I expected it to in the aforementioned arpeggios but I was rehearsed enough that it wasn't a soul crushing experience.  

Violin 1 really gave me fits as I was having a bit of an off day overall and the second movement took me way longer than I anticipated, which meant I was also running out of time to finish movement 3 before my session ended.  That extra clock pressure always makes it a lot harder.  The a section that kicks off the piece was really difficult to articulate cleanly and since the hard part is such a long string of quick sixteenth notes there aren't any places to sneak in a punch in.  Basically I had to make sure I got the entire phrase in one take and there was a lot to keep track of and a lot that could go wrong.  A fumble in articulation, a fret buzz, or a slight squeak on any single note of the 40 note run would mean I had to do the entire thing again.

Also, psychologically, just knowing that I wouldn't be able to punch in anywhere increased the mental strain of recording this part and made it more likely that i'd screw up some part of it.  I finished the violin 1 just a few minutes before my session ended, and I'm not unhappy with how it came out.

Violin 2 wasn't all that hard, especially compared to violin 1, and I didn't have any trouble with it.

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Errata:

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The end of the B section, the part that feels like it's drifting minor, is my favorite bit of this movement. 

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Album Art:

I took this picture of the Palmenhaus Schönbrunn in Vienna.  (It's a greenhouse in the Schönbrunn Palace complex, the ridiculously enormous Baroque palace that the Habsburg's used.