Notes for: July 28, 2015
Bloch was Swiss by birth, American by adoption and Jewish by religion, and all three of these circumstances strongly influenced the shaping of his musical personality. He spent the first 36 years of his life in Switzerland, working in his family’s small watch retailing business in Geneva until he could establish himself as a composer, teacher and conductor. Meanwhile, he studied under some of Europe’s leading musicians, absorbing the ferment that pervaded European music in the years before World War I.
In 1916 Bloch migrated to the United States, where he soon earned a reputation as a composer and teacher. His music was played in Boston and New York, and he served as director of the Cleveland Institute of Music and of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Returning to Europe in 1930, he settled permanently in the U.S. in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II. Until 1952, he taught at the University of California (Berkeley). He then “retired” to Agate Beach, Oregon, but he continued to exercise a major influence on young composers through master classes and lectures.
Today Bloch is perhaps best known for his music of Jewish character, particularly his rhapsody for cello and orchestra, Schelomo; his violin suite Baal Shem, and his Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service). However, two-thirds of his output was music of a more abstract nature, blending a range of American and European as well as Jewish influences. In late Romantic style and harmony, the music also reflects Bloch’s life-long interest in the music of Bach.
In November 1947, the Juilliard School and the League of Composers sponsored a three-concert festival of Bloch’s music in New York’s Carnegie Hall. As a followup to this highly successful event, Juilliard commissioned Bloch to write a new piece for performance by Juilliard students. The resulting three-movement Concertino, premiered in 1950, was composed for flute, viola and string orchestra, but Bloch also produced the chamber-music version that we hear this evening for flute, viola and piano.
The first movement, allegro commodo, opens with a flowing section that contrasts mildly dissonant piano chords, reminiscent of guitar strumming, and a melody presented by the viola and then the flute. The melody initially has a Jewish character, but it is continued and developed beyond these roots. The opening section is followed by a modified restatement of the opening theme.
The second movement, andante, is in the style of a passacaglia, a form used by Bach for the organ. The piano opens with a nine-measure modal theme in the unusual meter of 4/2. The theme is then subjected to three variations by all three instruments.
The third movement, entitled “Fugue humoresque”, opens with a three-measure introduction, allegro, for the piano. The viola announces a gigue theme of a fugue, with the flute responding. Bloch concludes with a tongue-in-cheek surprise, marked giocosamente (playful): the meter changes from 4/4 to 2/4 for an unruly polka.