Week Four: Chamber Music
Saturday, July 28th - White Recital Hall 
Sunday, July 29th - St. Mary's Episcopal Church

Ottorino Respighi: Quartetto Dorico 
          Anne-Marie Brown, Tony DeMarco, Jessica Nance, Alex East
W.F. Bach: Duet No. 1 in E Minor, Fk. 54
          Shannon Finney, Celeste Johnson
Jacques Ibert: Trois Pieces Breve
          Shannon Finney, Celeste Johnson, Jane Carl, Joshua Hood, Tod Bowermaster
Heinrich Hofmann: Octet in F Major, Op. 80
          Shannon Finney, Jane Carl, Joshua Hood, Tod Bowermaster, Tony DeMarco, Anne-Marie Brown,
​          Jessica Nance, Alex East
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Program Notes:

Program Notes by Andrew Granade

​​In this final week of Summerfest, we are exploring the final part of our theme. We’ve looked at the connections between art and music, at the soul that animates music, and now we are uncovering the variety of styles of chamber music itself. Chamber music is a social music, an intimate style where the audience is invited to be part of the musicians’ process and create a close connection with them. Perhaps no genre exemplifies this social aspect better than the string quartet, a genre that Goethe famously said was “four intelligent people conversing among themselves.”
 
Unless you have encountered Ottorino Respighi’s chamber music before, you probably know the composer for his Pines of Rome, an orchestral tone poem that depicts trees around Rome at different times of day and entered popular culture when it accompanied flying whales in Disney’s Fantasia 2000. That work points to an important aspect of Respighi’s musical language that is on full display in his Quartetto Dorico – his ability to create vivid depictions of images from real life, a skill that has led some scholars to label him an “avid observer” of the world who then brings those observations to musical life. Respighi came by this ability honestly during his study with the masterful orchestrator Rimsky-Korsakov and his admiration for (and study of) the works of Maurice Ravel. It also led to an unconventional approach to musical form and a painter’s approach to harmony and timbre.
 
The title “Doric Quartet” points to some of the “observations” Respighi wants to share with his audience. Writing the work in 1924, Respighi was taking part in a larger conversation in his homeland of where Italian music should go in light of European cultural shifts toward modernization in society and art. Many artists at the time believed that Italian art should look back to antiquity, particularly Roman antiquity, as a means to removing German and French influence on their art and creating a new, truer “Italian” style. For musicians, who have little music remaining from that time period, that anachronistic move meant using ancient scales and collections of pitches, in this case the Dorian which was the first tone in Gregorian chant in the Medieval Roman Catholic Church. The use of modes re-energized Respighi’s music as it opened up new harmonic resources he could use to paint on his musical canvas, but it also brought in a new focus on linear constructions and piercing clarity in his harmonies. To that end, when he started the Quartetto Dorico Respighi jettisoned the traditional format of a three or four movement work in favor of one extended movement following a more narrative flow. Still, you can see the remnants of the traditional form in the tempo and character changes over the work’s 20-minute length. The work opens with an overture-like choral section followed by the introduction of the main theme. The quartet then moves to a scherzo-like section that concludes with a striking fugal passage. The third section is like a traditional slow movement in which the theme is transformed by a new context. The final section features a passacaglia, a series of variations on the theme, before ending as it began with a statement of the theme in unison. Still, even with these vestiges of traditional form, Respighi creates a new, modal style undergirded by archaic passages of counterpoint. He also uses those powers of observation to place you back in a Medieval cathedral where the strings are the organ and the melody line is reminiscent of monks chanting, creating a new sonic world based on the old.
 
 
W.F. Bach: Duet No. 1 in E Minor, Fk. 54
 
One of the great pleasures of chamber music is hearing the variety of sounds, textures, and colors that composers elicit from similarly sounding instruments. The string quartet is emblematic of this style with its gradations of strings, but it is not the only example. Composers regularly write for duets of instruments, whether pairs of violins, pianos, or flutes, as in this exquisite work by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach.
 
W. F. Bach’s name might not be as well-known as other initialed sons of Johann Sebastian Bach like C.P.E. or J.C. Bach, but W.F. certainly paved the way for his younger brothers. Wilhelm Friedemann was J.S. Bach’s eldest son and received the gift of his father’s tutelage in music from organ lessons to some of Bach’s most celebrated compositions including the series of pieces collected in the Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and the first volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier. So it is small wonder that W.F. Bach was a master organist and improviser. Unfortunately, it is also small wonder that like his father, W.F. was not willing to change with the times and write in the simpler, more accessible Classical style that arose during his lifetime. As a result, Wilhelm Friedemann’s reputation declined every year he lived, and he ultimately died in poverty in Berlin.
 
The six flute duets that make up the collection that includes our Duet No. 1 are most likely from the later years of Bach’s life when he was in Berlin. I write “most likely” because we are not certain exactly when they were composed (some scholars argue that they were written during his time in Dresden with persuasive research backing up their assertions). What we are certain of is that they are some of the greatest and most idiomatic works for woodwind duet from the 18th century, even when considered next to similar works from Johan Joachim Quantz or Wilhelm Friedemann’s brother C.P.E. Bach. They represent the height of Baroque music with the variety of their contrapuntal techniques while demonstrating some of the new expressive possibilities opening up with the new empfindsamer stil or “sensitive style” that was sweeping German-speaking lands. This conflict between older and newer styles gives the duet its drive, from the free treatment of dissonance (a newer style) next to chains of strettos (the older style), and from the recycling the opening theme in a shortened form in the final “Vivace” (an older style) to the sometimes-striking asymmetric patterns (the newer style). While maintaining the formal constraints inherited from his father, Wilhelm Friedemann demonstrates his coloristic imagination in his use of the two flutes, creating a rich work that sounds surprisingly contemporary even 250 years later.
  
 
Jacques Ibert: Trois Pieces Breve
 
We started this week’s concert with a string quartet, the most iconic of chamber music genres and one that has been admired for generations. Another aspect of chamber music is the variety of genres it supports and the legacy of standard instrumental groupings that are rarely heard outside the chamber music concert. The Trois Pièces Brèves is for one such grouping, the wind quintet, which has a history and richness similar to the string quartet.
 
Antoine Reicha is usually celebrated up as the father of the wind quintet for the 24 quintets he wrote for a grouping of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn starting in 1811. But the ensemble probably dates from the court of Joseph II, the Austrian Emperor while Mozart was in Vienna, who staffed his imperial Harmoniemusik with two oboes, two clarinets, two horns, and two bassoons. Whatever its origin, the wind quintet was seen as music for light entertainment and so languished under the serious artistic impulses of the Romantic period until composers in the early 20th century like Hindemith, Nielsen, and Schoenberg rediscovered it. Those composers, and a host of composers since, appreciated the timbral freedom these five instruments gave over the string quartet’s limited palate and the diversity of invention provided by instruments creating sound by vibrating one reed, two reeds, and even a brass mouthpiece.
 
Jacques Ibert was one of those composers drawn to the ensemble for its sound world that he thought removed from the overt Romanticism of the string quartet. Ibert was a Neo-Classical French composer, trained by Gabriel Fauré (whom we heard last week) and interested in clean lines, classical form, simplicity, and a touch of insouciance in his music. These interests led him to write often for winds over strings as their ability to start and stop sound immediately combined with the range of sounds from warm and rich to biting and sarcastic allowed him the breadth of expressive possibilities he desired. His Trois Pièces Brèves began life as incidental music for the comedy Le stratagème des roués and the opening movement, “Assez lent, allegro scherzando,” certainly betrays that origin. Here is a fanfare for the curtain to rise that goes horribly wrong as the melody steadily picks up steam, threatening to come unglued as all the instruments struggle to keep up and stay balanced. An “Andante” follows that allows Ibert to show the delicate coloring available in the wind quintet. The movement opens with the flute and clarinet gently intertwining their melodic lines in a lovely dance that is soon taken over by the oboe and bassoon as all the instruments join to close out the movement. The final movement, “Allegro,” is the most substantial and begins with an awkward fanfare before settling down for music that would not be out of place accompanying a mid-century French film set in the countryside. The instruments all take a moment to shine, allowing Ibert to play with the multitude of coloristic possibilities open to him before an upward flourish ends the piece with a happy ending for all involved.
 
 
Heinrich Hofmann: Octet in F Major, Op. 80
 
After hearing a string quartet, a woodwind duet, and a wind quintet, there is one other ensemble we must hear on any concert that purports to show the breadth of chamber music – the octet. The problem with the octet is that unlike the string quartet or the wind quintet, the instrumentation that makes up an octet is not as set in stone. Mozart and Beethoven wrote octets called “harmonie” that featured two each of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons. When Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia first designated a work an “octet,” around 1800, he had a piano as the central instrument in addition to strings and winds and therefore basically wrote a concerto. The idea of an octet without piano that mixed strings and winds caught on rapidly, but early examples by the likes of Louis Spohr and Antoine Reicha of wind quintet fame used different combinations of winds and strings. It wasn’t until Franz Schubert wrote his Octet in 1824 that the now-standard grouping of clarinet, horn, bassoon, two violins, viola, cello and bass came into being. When Schubert’s work was published in 1853, it set off a mini-craze of compositions for this ensemble, including a work by Heinrich Hofmann.
 
You’ll be forgiven for perhaps not recognizing the name Heinrich Hofmann. Even the great German Romantic critic Eduard Hanslick could only muster a sideways compliment, writing that “Heinrich Hofmann is not a highly gifted composer, but a reliable, skilled practical musician, able to present commonplace ideas in a tastefully refined form.” Hanslick most likely derided Hofmann because the composer was in the vein of Johannes Brahms and Hanslick had a stake in Brahms’s success. But it is true that Hofmann was not a groundbreaking composer in a time that cherished originality. Hofmann wrote traditionally Classical works that were well-balanced, beautiful, and of the highest craftsmanship, traits that are certainly on display in his Octet.
 
Hofmann’s Octet was his last chamber work and features a subtle shift from Schubert’s instrumentation; Hofmann removed the bass and replaced it with a flute, marking a desire to focus on lyricism and charm over weight and depth. That charm is amply on display in the first of four movements, a beautifully flowing “Allegro molto.” The second movement, “Andante sostenuto,” continues the allure with the winds playing a striking and dignified main theme and setting up the movement’s central idea of the strings and winds taking turns leading the ensemble. The movement ends with a light duet between the flute and violin that flows gracefully into one of the work’s surprises, a Baroque gavotte, a favorite dance from the court of Louis XIV that became a staple of dance suites. This short movement demonstrates Hofmann’s traditionalism with its clear counterpoint and adherence to the gavotte’s formal focus on the pickups to the main beat. The final movement begins with a “Moderato” flute theme that in its restraint belies the spirited “Allegro vivo” that comprises most of the movement. Listen as the instruments throw the theme to each other, seamlessly spinning out duets and trios that lead to a rousing finale where all the instruments rush to the end, certainly making us wonder if perhaps Hanslick was wrong in his assessment and there is a bit more than mere practicality in Hofmann’s confection.