Notes on the Program

by Aaron Grad

CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH
Born in Weimar, Germany, 1714
Died in Hamburg, 1788

Symphony in F Major, Wq. 175 / H 650 (1755)

Music had been the family business for generations by the time Johann Sebastian Bach rose from a journeyman organist in the clan’s ancestral region of Thuringia to reach the lofty position of Thomaskantor in Leipzig. Having lost both parents when he was 10, he missed out on learning his trade by his father’s side; maybe that explains why he went to such great lengths to give his own children the best education imaginable. Of his 20 children from two marriages, 10 survived into adulthood, four became highly accomplished musicians, and one — the second oldest son, Carl Philipp Emanuel — was so exceptional that his peers considered him to be the greatest Bach, eclipsing his brilliant but rather old-fashioned father.

Leaning into the keyboard skills that were drilled into him as a child, Emanuel’s first major job was to serve in Berlin as a harpsichordist for King Frederick II of Prussia, a music lover and fine flutist himself. Bach wrote the Symphony in F Major there in 1755, at a time when he was expanding his circle of private patrons outside of the royal court. After 27 years in Berlin, Bach secured what was arguably the most prestigious music job in Germany, directing music for the principal churches of Hamburg, where he succeeded his godfather, Georg Philipp Telemann, in 1768. At some point after that, he revisited the early string symphony to create an alternate version with a small woodwind complement.

The template that Bach was cultivating in his symphonies was an import from Italy, where sinfonia was the local term for an opera overture, consisting of fast outer sections and a slow middle section. At a time when the gnarled counterpoint and endless flow of the elder Bach’s generation was being supplanted by a new style of tidy phrases and structural transparency, Emanuel Bach had a foot in both worlds, and he used all the tools to his advantage. The leaping unison phrases in the fast opening section, for instance, honor the old way of shaping a line, but the phrases that converse like polite questions and answers point toward the clean Classical ethos that would reach its peak with Haydn and Mozart.

Bach was especially well regarded for representing the so-called Empfindsamer Stil (“sensitive style”), leaning into vulnerable emotions and presenting them with unclouded sincerity, as in this symphony’s slow middle section in a minor key. In line with the tradition that often based the third section on a dance style, this one livens up the three-beat flow of a minuet with playful phrasings that cut against the grain of the underlying pulse.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Born in Salzburg, Austria, 1756
Died in Vienna, 1791

Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546 (1788)
Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622 (1791)

As Mozart aged out of his whirlwind run as Europe’s most dazzling child prodigy, he found himself stuck back in his hometown of Salzburg, working a stultifying church job alongside his overbearing father. Years of searching for a stable job yielded nothing, until he finally took the leap at the age of 25 to see if he could make it as a freelancer in Vienna.

One kindly patron who helped Mozart find his footing was Baron Gottfried von Swieten, an ambassador and amateur musician who hosted weekly gatherings to initiate young musicians into a tradition that had, somewhat improbably, all but disappeared in a single generation: the art of fugue as mastered by Bach and Handel. A Fugue in C Minor that Mozart composed for two pianos in 1783 was a direct outgrowth of those gatherings, building its angular subject out of a related theme used by both Bach (in one of his keyboard fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier) and Handel (for the choral fugue “And with His Stripes.” from Messiah).

Mozart published that fugue in its original two-piano version in 1788, and then that same year he also arranged it for strings and added an introductory Adagio, presumably to maximize his income streams at a time when money was getting extremely tight. The stately dotted rhythms and throbbing chords of the Adagio evoke the bygone ceremonial traditions established at the start of the century, building dramatic tension before launching into the formal fugue. It was a sound that clearly stuck with him, since he used a variant of the same fugue subject for the Kyrie from his deathbed Requiem three years later.

The music that Mozart wrote for Anton Stadler, a clarinetist and fellow freemason, was pivotal in establishing the clarinet as an equal to its older cousins in the woodwind family. Mozart’s first composition for Stadler was the “Kegelstatt” Trio from 1786, scored for clarinet, viola, and piano, followed by a Quintet for clarinet and strings from 1789. The Quintet required a particular instrument with a low-range extension that Stadler designed himself, known as the basset clarinet, and Mozart used that same instrument again in this final work for his friend, the Concerto that he completed two months before his untimely death in 1791.

Between his collaborations with Stadler and his increasing use of clarinets in his orchestral music, Mozart had a keen understanding of the instrument’s many tone colors in the different parts of its range, from the deep resonance of the bass notes, through the warm and hollow midrange of the chalumeau register (named for an early forerunner of the clarinet), and up into the brilliant clarity of the highest octaves. He also appreciated the clarinet’s uncommon agility, as heard in passages in the concerto’s fast opening movement where a scale or arpeggio journeys across all four octaves of the instrument’s range. Sometimes the clarinet even seems to be playing out a dialogue between different characters as it leaps between registers.

A critic once wrote of Stadler, “One would never have thought that a clarinet could imitate the human voice to such perfection.” Mozart, the consummate opera composer, seemed to voice the same confidence in his friend’s ability to shape a simple, singable line in the understated Adagio.

The finale has a bit of Haydn’s sense of humor in it, as in the playful held notes of the main theme that draw out unresolved tension. The episodic structure of the Rondo allows for fanciful and dramatic excursions, making each return to the familiar music all the more delightful.

DAVID DIAMOND
Born in Rochester, New York, 1915
Died in Rochester, 2005

Rounds (1944)

David Diamond is best known today as the composer of Rounds, a legacy that obscures his many contributions to American music that were admired by the likes of Gershwin, Copland, and Bernstein. After studying in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, Diamond returned to the United States during World War II. Amid the ongoing despair of the war, the conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos asked the composer for a new piece. “These are distressing times,” Mitropoulos wrote in his invitation. “Most of the difficult music I play is distressing. Make me happy.”

True to its title, this work is full of rounds in which parts enter one-by-one, each playing the same music, like the staggered entrances of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Besides those basic rounds, a variety of sophisticated canons and imitative counterpoint give an antique glow to this modern score, culminating in the finale’s vigorous fugue. Diamond liked to recount a line from his friend Aaron Copland, who programmed Rounds frequently in his appearances as a conductor. “I wish I had written that piece,” Copland purportedly said; “It really works for the audience very well.

© 2026 Aaron Grad