Classical Meets Folk: CityMusic at Waterloo Arts

Classical Meets Folk: CityMusic at Waterloo Arts

Nan Kennedy

CityMusic’s second chamber concert at Waterloo Arts turns to folk music, which was part of the audible landscape for classical composers. Their string trio will play duets for two violins, by Haydn, Mozart and Bela Bartok; and trios by Haydn and Beethoven for two violins and double bass. Masha Andreini and Aniela Eddy are the violinists; Tracy Rowell plays bass.

The concert is in the Nan and MilesKennedyCommunityArtCenter at Waterloo Arts (enter at 397 E156 St) on Friday, February 19, at 7 pm, and will include a short intermission. Like the M4M concerts, CityMusic concerts are free. And when they’re held at Waterloo Arts, they include (sometimes) a gallery show and (always) the possibility of a glass of wine or some such from the Callaloo Café.

The full CityMusic orchestra will perform at St Jerome church on March 17 and May 12. The M4M series at Waterloo Arts begins in March, with the Bayard String Quartet, followed by the Charnofsky Piano Trio in April; the Trillium Trio (flute, clarinet, bassoon), which was our very first M4M concert, in May; the Tower City Brass Quintet in September; the Silver Keys Clarinet Quartet in October; and Joe Parker with his sitar in November.

Where did the folk influence come from? Haydn’s parents were working folk – musical working folk – and he grew up singing folk songs with them and their neighbors. He also adapted some of the Landler, the immensely popular German dance, as did Beethoven and Mozart.

Beethoven wrote 179 folk-song arrangements, many of them English, Scots or Irish – although he never visited Britain. A Scots collector paid him by the song (possibly one British pound apiece, which apparently had been Haydn’s rate) and Beethoven obliged generously – despite the difficulties of smuggling goods between Austria and Scotland during the Napoleonic War. The songs didn’t sell well in Scotland – not simple enough.

Bela Bartok, after hearing a peasant woman singing, began to record (on an Edison phonograph) hundreds of songs from small villages in rural Hungary and Romania. His intention was preservation, but the process had a profound influence on his own compositions.