Vitali Chaconne

J. Teske

2003-11-27 15:57:49 UTC

The Vitali Chaconne has a curious history. It first seemed to appear
in Ferdinand David's "Hochschule der Violinespiel" (that is an
approximation...I don't really know German. David BTW was
Mendelssohn's friend and consultant on the Mendelssohn Concerto).
The birth and death dates of Tomasso Antonio Vitali are not known. I
saw one program note which doubted he ever existed. There are
suspicions that he was invented out of whole cloth by David in the
same manner that Kreisler passed off many of his own compositions as
those of others.
There are a zillion versions of this Chaconne out there. The
International edition (I believe edited by Francescatti) is among the
worst (as are most Francescatti editions.) The configuration of the
variations and even how many variations are included varies widely
from edition to edition. I played it once in church and based upon
recordings, we guesstimated the timing for the piece to be 8-9 minutes
minutes. When I played it with our organist, we timed it at nearly 12
minutes and I was playing the piece at tempi approaching Heifetz'
('cuz that was how I first heard the piece). Upon closer examination
of editions, my edition (by an obscure Italian publisher...now out of
print) had something like 6-7 more variations, plus an 8 bar organ
intro which did not appear in other editions.

One thought might be to find "the" Sarah Chang website or her
management's website and email the point of contact and asked which
edition she used. At my suggestion, a friend once did that for some
piece Leila Josefowicz did on her album and she put him in touch with
the estate of the arranger from whom he obtained the piece.

It is highly possible that Chang may have had an arranger do a quick
adaptation solely for the purpose of this recording, particularly
since no "official" edition appears to exist. This sort of thing is
done all the time (Anne-Sophie Mutter has a version of the Tartini
"Devil's Trill" sonata with chamber orchestra on one of her albums.
Its a pretty safe bet that Tartini had no hand in this. Of course,
now Mutter is married to someone who can crank out almost any
arrangement she might want...not to mention whole concerti.)

Make very sure that whatever arrangement you used correctly mates the
violin part with the orchestral part. This piece is very easy to lop
off variations which is exactly what I did for time constraints.

I do endorse Connie's idea of using the piece though. It is very
effective and is actually somewhat easier than it sounds (My kind of
piece.)

Jon Teske

On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 19:05:03 -0500, The Devil's Interval

Post by The Devil's Interval
My daughter is planning to enter her chamber orchestra's concerto
competition and, thanks to an idea (I think it was Connie's) from this
group, she's starting to learn the Vitali Chaconne. Before she can apply to
audition, we need to determine that the score will be available for chamber
orchestra. So far, I'm having a bit of trouble tracking down the score.
There is a version for violin, ORGAN, and orchestra, which is available for
sale, but that's not the right one. So far the librarian I talked to came up
with only one version for violin and chamber orchestra. The publisher is
Maurice Senart, Paris, 1926. it's under copyright but also out of print. The
library (I talked to him on the phone) said that we could not xerox it, that
the might lend it to an institution (so maybe I could get the music school
to intervene, but...)
The problem is, she's learning the version published by International, but
the other version might be quite different.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge of this piece? Has anyone performed it or
know it to be performed by a chamber orchestra. We have the Sarah Chang
recording -- it is with the English Chamber orchestra -- but there is no
annotation on the cd material about the editor or version of the score.
--Karen