Departments
Arts
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Week of 23 October 1998 |
Vol. II, No. 11 |
Arts
An ear on music at home
Parlor Philharmonic to give modern premiere of 19th-century work at Marsh
"Johann Nepomuk Hummel is not a great composer," says Mark Kroll, "although sometimes he gets pretty high up there." A surprising assessment from a man promoting a concert at Marsh Chapel on October 29 that features a Hummel "modern première"?
Not at all, counters the professor of harpsichord and fortepiano at SFA, where he chairs the department of historical performance and has been directing BU's Early Music Series for 20 years.
"In his day Hummel was as famous as Beethoven," says Kroll, "if not more so. Yet today hardly any of his music remains in the standard repertoire. At Marsh Chapel you won't really hear us playing Hummel. You'll hear us playing Haydn, Beethoven, and von Weber as arranged by Hummel."
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Mark Kroll: "What is
significant about this concert is that we can hear
how the middle class in Europe heard music from the
first decades of the 19th century up until the
present century: they heard it by playing it."
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"What is significant about this concert," says Kroll, "is that we can hear how the middle class in Europe heard music from the first decades of the 19th century up until the present century: they heard it by playing it.
"Before the development of the phonograph and radio," he explains, "music lovers discovered new works and had access to them by making that music themselves. As soon as a new orchestral work had been premiered, a publisher would sell reductions or transcriptions. Instead of an ensemble of several dozen players -- the way it was played in a concert hall -- the piece could be played at home either on piano alone or on piano and, say, flute, cello, and violin."
Last year Kroll and his colleagues from the Parlor Philharmonic (John Solum, traverse flute, Carol Lieberman, classical violin, and Arthur Fiacco, classical cello) released a compact disc of Hummel's arrangements of two Mozart symphonies that generated considerable interest. Kroll discovered the music for the Mozart arrangements in Dresden in 1991 and came across a new cache of Hummel material -- including the Freischütz overture -- at the British Library in 1994.
"Hummel went to London and immediately proved himself as a superb arranger," Kroll says. "There was a whole industry of hacks making arrangements at the time, but he was no hack."
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Three from BU to speak at AMS conference This year's annual meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS) takes place at the Park Plaza Hotel from October 29 through November 1. As well as the concert at Marsh Chapel (see main story), delegates will be able to hear from three Boston University people: Zbigniew Granat, a doctoral candidate in musicology at GRS, will speak on The Musical Work in Jazz: Bill Evans' Formal Concept of 'Nardis'; Assistant Professor of Music Emilio Ros-Fábregas will chair a session of the International Hispanic Study Group, on The Idea of Nationalism in Musicological Discourse: Its Impact on Iberian and Latin-American Music History; and Associate Professor of Music John Daverio will speak on One More Beautiful Memory of Schubert: Schumann's Critique of the Impromptus, D. 935. Daverio has become a de-facto meeting planner as the chairman of the AMS's local-arrangements committee for the Boston conference, "doing most of the work and earning his place in heaven," as Mark Kroll puts it. For more information on the AMS conference, see the BU-hosted Web site, http://www.bu.edu/sfa/AMS98/. |
No hack indeed. Born in 1778, Hummel began playing violin at age five and piano at six. He studied with Mozart between the ages of seven and nine, becoming his prize pupil. "According to descriptions from listeners who knew them both, Hummel played piano just like Mozart," says Kroll. "He was soon famous as a composer as well, but above all was the most famous pianist in Europe, a virtuoso par excellence. He also wrote the most important theoretical book on piano playing at the time. Hummel was a teacher, a composer, a conductor. He toured Russia in 1822 and met the Irish composer and pianist John Field, he toured Poland in 1828 and met Chopin. This is a man whose career began with Mozart and ended with Chopin."
Yet today, save for a handful of chamber compositions, his music is hardly played at all. Of course that is changing with the enthusiasm that has met Kroll's performances of the parlor arrangements of orchestral works. "We played the arrangement of the Beethoven no. 1 at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, and I got a fax from a woman with a small ensemble wondering where she could find the music," he says. Kroll is working on a critical edition of Mozart's symphonies nos. 35 and 36 for A-R Editions, due for publication next year. And the other Hummel material he's discovered? "A question of time."
"When Hummel was in London he made about 50 transcriptions of orchestral works, including 24 opera overtures, Beethoven symphonies 1 through 7, Mozart symphonies and piano concerti, Haydn symphonies, you name it," says Kroll. "These are masterpieces of their kind, and nobody knew they existed. There's a vast amount of music out there waiting to be discovered."
Mark Kroll and the Parlor Philharmonic will perform Hummel's arrangements of Beethoven's Symphony no. 1 and von Weber's Freischütz overture, as well as Salomon's arrangement of the Haydn 96, in Marsh Chapel on Thursday, October 29, at 8 p.m. Admission is $10 for the general public and $5 for students, AMS members, and senior citizens. For more information, call the School for the Arts at (617) 353-3350.