7/5: Contemporary Brass: Tubist Rex Martin with Fulcrum Point New Music Project Brass & Yoko Yamada-Selvaggio

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736) had his life tragically cut short by tuberculosis. He had a successful few years in Naples as a composer of operas, sacred music, and instrumental pieces. He’s best remembered for his comic opera La Serva Padrona (The Servant-Mistress) and his hauntingly beautiful Stabat Mater, written in the last year of his life for a Good Friday service honoring the Virgin Mary.
His Sinfonia in F was originally intended for either cello or viola da gamba, but we’ll hear it today in a low-brass resonance. Stravinsky mined this work for some of the themes in his ballet Pulcinella, which evokes the sounds and styles of the 18th century in a 20th century context. The Sinfonia has four short movements, arranged in the typical Baroque sequence of slow-fast-slow-fast (“Andante,” “Allegro con brio,” “Adagio,” and “Presto.”)

Born in 1931 in Chistopol, then a city in the Tatar republic of the USSR, Sofia Gubaidulina studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory and has lived since the early 1990s near Hamburg, Germany. Her music is better known in Europe than in the US, although both the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic have commissioned works from her.  Her publisher, G. Schirmer, has noted that Gubaidulina has “a deep-rooted belief in the mystical properties of music.” Our tubist tonight, Rex Martin, echoes this evaluation when he says, “She is a very private, spiritual woman.” About Lamento, composed for tuba and piano in 1977, Mr. Martin says: “[It] is one of the most important and, in my opinion, one of the best original works for tuba. Although it contains no memorable melody, little traditional harmony, and only very little perceivable rhythm, it is a very emotional, moving piece.”

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) wrote his Pièce en Forme de Habanera as a vocal etude for students at the Paris Conservatory in 1907. It has been arranged over the past 100-plus years for a multitude of instruments and combinations; hearing it on the tuba, however, may be a “first” for some of us.

Swiss composer Enrico Lavarini (b.1948) has written a set of six Toggenburgerli, brief pieces named for the area in and around the Swiss town of Toggenburg. We hear three of them: “Commodo,” or with movement; “Mesolke,” a Swiss-German word for the Polish dance usually called the Mazurka; and “Uus and Druss,” meaning out and about.

And our concert ends with a very brief and lively Scherzo for Brass Quintet by the young Lucerne-based composer Cyrill Schürch (b.1974), who mentions that he’s acquainted with several tuba players, including Mr. Martin. “Unlike many brass quintets,” Mr. Schürch says, “the Scherzo features the tuba quite prominently; it has probably most of the melodic material. I consider it one of my ‘early’ pieces, quite tonal in many of its structures, but I like to juxtapose various triads (often a half-step apart) to give it its ‘Scherzando’ character.”