Composer: Giuseppe Torelli (1658-1709)

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Giuseppe Torelli was an Italian composer from Verona.  Per Wikipedia, quoting The Sonata in the Baroque Era (William Newman, 1972) and Edward Tarr's editorial notes to a Torelli symphony, Torelli is "most remembered for contributing to the development of the concerto, especially the solo concerto, and for his music for string instruments and trumpet."

 

It's sad how someone who helped pioneer an incredibly popular musical form and was really prolific in the trumpet has been largely forgotten.

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Date: 1688

 

Original Instrumentation: Violin, cello

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Movements:    

1. Introduction-Largo

2. Allegro

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Why this one:

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This was published in 1688, making it the oldest Lazarus Music piece I've done by quite a lot and I was self consciously looking for the oldest thing I could find that I could 1) read the score and 2) actually maybe play.

 

This is part of a collection of 12 Concertinos de camera (i.e Chamber concertinos, or short chamber works.)   The score was handwritten and the divisions between when concertino ended and another started took me a bit to figure out.  I picked this one mostly because it was the one i was staring at when I figured out the piece boundaries.

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Description:  

 

Movement 1 - Introduction - Largo

Key:  Am

Time: 4/4  BPM=60 (Introduction), BPM=50 (Largo)

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After a brief 7 bar adagio intro, the movement transition to a Largo that has a really, for lack of a better word, "medieval" feel.  I think it's in A melodic minor, meaning an A minor scale with the 6th and 7th notes raised (so F# and G#) on ascending passages and natural (so F and G) on descent.  It's not rigid in that formula, and there's also a lot of raised fourth D#s throughout which is part of what gives it its character. 

 

There's a lot of melody motion in both the violin and cello parts, though in the violin more of the melody is sketched out with sixteenth notes.

 

The Largo section is structured AABB, with the B section having a similar main violin melody but down a fifth and displaced back two beats.  (So the melodic line starts in earnest on beat 1 rather than beat 3 like in part  A.

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Performance:​

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I recorded this piece in one session, cello first then violin.  Neither the intro nor the Largo were technically challenging to play but I had to do a second take of the entire Largo section because BPM=50 is really slow and it took me a bit to lock into it.   It's really really easy to rush ahead of the beat at that tempo.  Mike had suggested recording it at eight note =  100 rather than quarter = 50 and I probably should have done that.  I almost did, but I was concerned that since I hadn't practiced it like that that I would get turned around and make it take even longer. 

 

Other than fighting the metronome, I didn't have any trouble with the actual notes.

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Errata:
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I wonder if i misread or the copyist mis-notated something in the A section of the Largo.   At (XX:XX) before section repeats the violin feels like it's pulling to the same eighth note E to A resolution as the beginning before starting the sequence again, but then it just stops.  There wasn't anything notated in the score there, but maybe I was supposed to have understood that the E to A resolution was to repeat, despite that.   I've found in older  scores that how they notate repeated sections is a little idiosyncratic so it's very possible I interpreted the score too literally.   

 

This is a hazard of the LMP express method, where i record both parts in the same session without having heard how they play together beforehand.  I didn't notice that weirdness until after i listened to it after i got home.  I was maybe too focused on the playing during the session and perhaps missed the forest for the trees.

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Movement 2 - Allegro

Key:  A minor

Time: 3/4  BPM=120

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The part of this movement that I find most interesting is the rhythm.  It is mostly in swing rhythm which gives it this odd blend of medieval-esque melody with more modern almost jazz sounding rhythm.  Both instruments use a dotted 8th to 16th note as the foundational blocks (i.e. long short-long short-long short-long).

 

It's got such a strong rhythmic motif that this aspect almost overrides the melody; even after practicing and recording it I'd be hard pressed to hum the melody cold, but could absolutely hum out the rhythm. 

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Performance:

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I didn't have any trouble with this, as like the Largo, it wasn't all that technically difficult but this time i wasn't fighting to pull ahead of the metronome.  

 

I made an in retrospect really obviously boneheaded mistake when I was preparing this piece.  There were two measures in the A section the violin that I had interpreted as a nested version of the swung rhythmic idea inside a single beat, using dotted 16th to 32nd note.   I think this absolutely was not the case, I got faked out by what I now think was an errant mark in the handwritten score that i thought was a quarter rest, which would left too many beats in the measure with the notated dotted 8th to 16th figure.   So I, for some reason, thought the mistake was that the swung beat was supposed to be in one beat,  meaning the copyist had just not marked enough flags for that rhythm.    It did stick in the back of my mind that it was kind of odd that the nested swing rhythm was only in those two measures.  After I recorded it, I looked at the score again and realized my mistake. 

 

But on the upside, that dotted 16th to 32nd note figures in the violin was the hardest part, though that was more of a conceptual difficulty in preparation.  You can't easily count that rhythm so you just have to feel it and it took me a bit to lock in during practice.  I didn't have trouble in the studio, other than the fact that I had misread the score.   

 

I went back in and punched those measures weeks later.  Sigh.

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Album Art:

 

I've never been to Verona and wasn't feeling very creative, so this is just a goofy picture of me drinking a beer on a tricycle at a coffee shop / video store in Orlando.