Program Notes

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) Introduzione

Born in Bergamo, Donizetti was, along with Gioacchino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini, on of the leading composers of bel canto opera. He was a significant influencer of Giuseppe Verdi. He was given a full scholarship in the Bergamo Conservatorio, which had been established by the German composer Simon Mayr. Mayr then got him into the Bologna Academy, and there he wrote his first one-act opera, the comedy Il Pigmalione. It was probably never performed during his lifetime.
Nine operas later he moved to Naples to work as resident composer at the Teatro di San Carlo. His comic operas were most popular, and up until 1830 his serious ones didn’t do so well. His opera Anna Bolena was his first successful serious opera, and his historical opera Lucia di Lammermoor, given in Naples in 1835, was also successful.
Censorship in Italy, and especially in Naples, was irritating to Donizetti, so he moved to Paris, where he worked for the next ten years. He was stricken with syphilis, had to be committed to a mental ward, and later died of the disease.

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) Minuet e Scherzo

Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini was descended from a long line of composers and was considered as the greatest and most successful opera composer after Giuseppe Verdi. Verdi, who died in 1901, had named Puccini “keeper of the seal of Italian melody.” A performance of Aïda had ignited the young Puccini’s passion for the operatic stage; his destiny was clear. He was not to follow in the tradition of the Puccini family of Lucca — four generations of musicians who had held the post of maestro di capella at the Cathedral of San Martino. At the Milan Conservatory, where he studied with Amilcare Ponchielli (composer of La Gioconda), he produced his first instrumental and chamber works.
These two instrumental works were undoubtedly entr’acts from one of his operas. It was customary to interject instrumental works between the acts of Italian operas, and as you’ll see with Bottesini, sometimes they were substantial works.

Maddalena Lombardini-Syrmen (1735-1818) String Quartet No. 1 in Eb Major, Op. 3, No. 1

The eighteenth century was not a propitious time for women in the arts. It took determination to overcome societal pressures, and only a few women were able to make music professionally. Madalena Lombardini was one woman who succeeded.
She was born in Venice almost at the same time as Joseph Haydn. She became a student at San Lazzaro dei Mendicati. The Conservatorio, along with three other Venetian music schools, was an orphanage looking for prospective pupils and her parents were impoverished aristocrats who found it advantageous to give her up. Her teachers at the orphanage were Antonio Vivaldi, Baldassare Galuppi and Nicola Porpora, all great masters. Madalena studied later with Giuseppe Tartini; he claimed that she was his favorite student. She was so advanced that Tartini paid her tuition himself.
Madalena eventually married Ludovico Sirmen, a violinist from Bergamo, and began to perform publicly with him. At one of the Concerts Spirituels in Paris in 1761, they appeared together playing a double concerto which they had composed. The concerto and the players were greeted with extravagant praise. After this triumph, Madalena often presented her own compositions at these concerts. A critic in Torino once wrote, “She won the hearts of all the people of Torino with her playing... I wrote old Tartini with the good news, it will make him all the happier...”.
This string quartet shows the distinctive Classical training she received at the Conservatorio, which went well beyond the accepted styles which had become universal under the aesthetic concept developed during the Baroque era. What is immediately apparent is the strength of character of the two movements. The Andante begins lyrically but quickly goes beyond the relaxed feeling with many exuberant phrases. The Allegretto movement is rhythmically inventive and styistically outgoing with plenty of melodic richness, showing off the powerful abilities of this newly-emancipated personality.

Giovanni Bottesini (1821-1889) Gran Quintetto in C Minor

Known as “the Paganini of the contrabass,” Giovanni Bottesini started out studying the violin but when his father applied for him to enter the Milan Conservatory, only two scholarship positions were available — contrabass and bassoon. In a matter of weeks he learned to play the contrabass and was successful in his audition. With prize money won for his solo playing, he bought a very fine contrabass made in 1716 by Carlo Giuseppe Testore and his career took off.
He spent some time in the United States and then became principal bassist in the Italian Opera at Havana, and he later became its director. He wrote his first opera, Cristoforo Colombo, in 1847. Two years later he took England by storm as a soloist, and then moved to Paris, where he conducted at the Théâtre des Italiens. Four years later he conducted in Palermo and two years after that he was conducting operas in Barcelona, and in 1871 he was chosen by Verdi to conduct Aïda in Cairo, Egypt. In between conducting duties he toured throughout Europe as a bass soloist.
During this period it was common to program concerts between the acts of operas.
Bottesini would frequently perform solos and duos in these concerts and they were very popular. He performed his solo fantasies between opera acts — fantasies on Lucia di Lammermoor, I Puritani, Beatrice di Tenda and La Sonnambula. They are virtuosic tours de force that are still popular with those who are good enough bassists to manage them. Bottesini was also one of the first bassists to adopt the French-style bow position (overhand), as was used by all other stringed instrument players.
His Gran Quintetto is one of many chamber works he composed, always including the contrabass. It is a virtuoso showpiece, but with a whimsically mischievous Scherzo and a soulfully serene slow movement.