CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAM NOTES
​by Judith Eckelmeyer

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The Cleveland Museum of Art

Paris Winds
​
Patrick Gallois, flute
Maurice Bourgue, oboe
Michel Portal, clarinet
André Cazalet, French horn
Amaury Wallez, bassoon
Pascal Rogé, piano

Wednesday, February 19, 1992
​Gartner Auditorium

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Program

Samuel Barber (1910-1981): Summer Music, Op. 31
     Slow and indolent
     With motion
     Faster
     Lively, still faster
​     Faster
    

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 16
​     Grave; Allegro, ma non troppo
     Andante cantabile
     Rondo: Allegro, ma non troppo
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György Ligeti (1923- ): Six Bagatelles (1953)
     Allegro con spirito
     Rubato, Lamentoso
     Quieto (poco rubato). Cantabile, Molto legato
     Presto energico
     Adagio. Mesto--Allegro maestoso--Più mosso.
       Agitato--Tempo I (B. Bartók in memoriam)
​     Vivace. Capriccioso

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963): Sextet (1932-9)
     Allegro vivace: Très vite et emporté
     Divertissement: Andantino
​     Finale: Prestissimo

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Program Notes by Judith Eckelmeyer

Samuel Barber is one of the bright but undersung stars in the firmament of twentieth century United States-born composers. Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, he became a student in the earliest classes at the new Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in the 20s and later taught composition there. In addition to spending many summers studying and writing in Europe he also worked under the auspices of the American Academy as a Prix de Rome winner in 1935. In the same year, and again in 1936, he was awarded Pulitzer Fellowships. These years were ultimately the springboard for his fruitful career, during which he produced his Symphony No. 1, the Quartet in B minor, and the arrangement of its slow movement as the Adagio for Strings. In addition, while in Italy he met Arturo Toscanini, who conducted Barber's Adagio for Strings and Essay for Orchestra (1937) in Europe and with the NBC Symphony. Later collaborations with Martha Graham and with Gian Carlo Menotti led him into the realms of ballet (Medea) and opera (Vanessa), respectively.

Barber's style, while eventually including serial techniques and other modern devices, remained essentially conservative and in touch with principles of romanticism, yet without any attempt at projecting nationalism. His work is marked by a fine craftsmanship and great sensitivity for melodic line, especially in works for the voice, of which he wrote many.

Summer music was commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Detroit; the premiere was given March 20, 1956, at the Detroit Institute of Arts by the principal wind players of the Detroit Symphony. It is a single movement work arranged in modified rondo form. Each section has its own distinct mood, tempo, sense of motion, and texture. The first principal theme, lyrical, in 5/4, returns after two intervening sections (faster, very staccato, and still faster, in 2/4 then 7/16) and again at the end after a third intervening section (fast, syncopated rhythm but with legato melody and a slow trill background) and a return to the staccato theme. The work concludes with a variant of the syncopated legato theme. Throughout Summer Music, the instruments are treated with satisfying variety: upon occasion, for instance, ranges are reversed-the flute line lies below the bassoon or below the horn, providing subtle and lovely timbres.

As distinct as each section of Summer Music is, however, the work is not programmatic. In a 1980 interview with Allan Kozinn, reported in Phillip Ramey's notes for the Barry Tuckwell Wind Quintet recording of Summer Music for Nonesuch, Barber said of the work: "It's supposed to be evocative of summer--summer meaning languid, not killing mosquitoes. I think Henry Cowell once wrote a piece in which the orchestra members had to clap their hands as if to kill mosquitoes--'brilliant innovations,' the critics called it. But really, there is not much to say about Summer Music except that everybody plays it too slowly."
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Beethoven's Viennese career began in earnest in 1792, after an all-too-brief (probably three-week) period of study with Mozart there in 1787. In spite of his first efforts at study with Haydn after 1792 and the undeniable influence of this master on his music, Beethoven still carried the impression of Mozart in his compositional style. Even more than musical style, however, was the matter of genre: Beethoven's Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 16, was evidently inspired by Mozart's Quintet in the same key (K. 452), and several thematic details would suggest that Mozart's music was not far from Beethoven's mind in writing this work.

The Quintet was completed possibly as early as 1796 and premiered in 1797 as a Quintet for fortepiano and four wind instruments (clarinet, oboe, horn, and bassoon). In 1801 it was published for that same ensemble and simultaneously in transcription as a quartet for piano with violin, viola, and cello, with the same opus number, presumably for household use among amateur musicians; the dedication of both versions is to Prince Joseph Johann zu Schwarzenberg.

At the premier, as well as in subsequent performances, Beethoven himself was the pianist. Ferdinand Ries's biography of the composer relates an incident in which Beethoven used his improvisatory skills in the Quintet in an unusual way, to the discomfort of his associates: at a cadenza point (probably the second of two, in the third movement) he extemporized at such length that the wind players had no idea how long they would have to wait for their reentry and several times had raised their instruments to play, only to have to put them down again to wait Beethoven out. Yet in spite of his own excursions in performance, he roundly resented Carl Czerny's taking liberties with the same cadenza!

The Quintet is in three standard movements. The first, a sonata-allegro, is opened by a slow introduction with the dotted rhythm so typical of the French baroque overture and used by Mozart in both symphony first movements and opera overtures (The Magic Flute, for instance--one of Beethoven's favorite works). Haydn's influence is also present in the very convincing return of the first theme toward the end of the development, but in A-flat--the wrong key for the recapitulation. Only with the entry of the theme in E-flat some forty-six measures later do we realize the trick of the false reprise.

The second movement, 2/4, in B-flat, is a neatly formed rondo beginning with a simple melody over an Alberti bass (in which the pitches of three-note chords are played successively in the order lowest, highest, middle, highest). The ghost of Mozart is again summoned: the theme hauntingly evokes his "Batti, batti" from Don Giovanni (which Beethoven thought an immoral opera!) This familiar opening is highly identifiable when it returns after excursions into G-minor, led by the oboe, and B-flat minor and D-flat major, led by the horn.

The third movement is a rollicking 6/8, evoking the merriment of the hunt. It is titled "Rondo." The second excursion, however, is not new material but rather developmental, suggesting a kind of sonata-rondo process often used by Haydn.
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Hungarian-born György Ligeti entered the consciousness of the Western public with the use of his Atmosphères (1961) and Lux aeterna (1966) in the science fiction film 2001, A Space Odyssey. These two works, with their dense clusters of gently shifting sonorities and other-worldly effect of mid-air suspension, belong to a style of composing that occurred well into Ligeti's mature career, after moving to western Europe in 1956.

Ligeti graduated from Budapest Academy in 1949 and in the following year became professor of harmony, counterpoint, and formal analysis there. At this time he was heavily influenced by the work of his countryman, Béla Bartók, both in his musical style and in his research in the folk music of rural Hungarian and Romanian districts. Like Bartók, Ligeti did field studies of Romanian folk music and created many folk-song arrangements. Unlike Bartók, however, Ligeti was working under the Communist regime's post-World War II cultural control which not only limited what a creative artist could produce for public consumption but also what art works from the West could cross the country's borders and thus pollute the creative style of the state's artists. Even though Ligeti would begin to employ the "modern" technique of twelve-tone composition in the mid-50s, the radical change in his music was not possible until he left Hungary.

In his January 1991 Gala Subscription Series recital, Sergei Babayan performed a set of Ligeti's piano works entitled Musica ricercata, composed in 1951-53 while Ligeti was still in Hungary. These eleven miniatures constitute a reflection of the old ricercar (literally, "searching") procedure. Ligeti produced a series of "searches" for ways to treat fundamental elements such as a single note, an interval of two notes, three notes, and so on. In a way, he continued his "search" even beyond these eleven piano works; he decided to transcribe the last one for organ, calling it Omaggio a Frescobaldi (a baroque composer who wrote works called ricercari), and he transcribed numbers 3, 5, and 7 through 10 for wind quintet as the Six Bagatelles heard on tonight's program. Both transcriptions were completed in 1953.

​In his monograph György Ligeti (London, Robson Books, Ltd, 1983, p. 21), Paul Griffiths records an interview with Ligeti in which the composer explains his circumstance at the time he wrote the Six Bagatelles:

"Every composer had to be a member of the composer's union: you had to be in order to get hold of manuscript paper. If you wanted a performance or publication, you had to submit your work to a committee, and there might even be a private performance for that committee... Then you would be informed if they wanted to broadcast the music, or whatever. You couldn't ask. My Arany songs [settings of poems by Hungarian poet Janós Arany, 1817-1882] were something between Bartók and Kodály, with some dissonances, and they were not acceptable.

"But the most interesting thing from this point of view was my Six Bagatelles for wind quintet. The sixth is a chromatic piece and there was no possibility of these pieces being performed when I wrote them in 1953. [Note that recasting already written material for the piano into the new medium of flute/piccolo, clarinet, oboe, horn and bassoon is not mere transcription to Ligeti!] But in 1956 there was a festival and they performed the first five: the sixth was still too chromatic and dissent even for those times."

The premiere performance of the complete Six Bagatelles was given by Stockholm Philharmonic Wind Quintet in Södertälje, Sweden, on October 6, 1969; Ligeti had taught composition at the Stockholm Academy of Music from 1961.

Francis Poulenc is recognized as one of the early twentieth-century French mavericks known as Les Six. Although there were indeed six composers (Poulenc, Louis Durey, Germaine Taileferre, Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger) in this cluster, other creative artists were clearly associated with it--notably Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie. Their maverick status can be said to result from their sense of irreverence for the schooled traditionalists (which to them included the Impressionists), their eagerness to utilize the styles, genres and idioms of the current popular culture, and their whimsical, often outrageous, and quite unique blend of the two sources.

Poulenc is perhaps the most lyrical and sensual of Les Six, but he unquestionably exhibits the love of wit and flippancy common to them all. His three-movement Sextet for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn contains these elements and more. Poulenc composed the work originally in 1930-32, but, dissatisfied with it and several others, he undertook a complete revision of it in 1939. He said of it, "This is chamber music of the most straightforward kind: an homage to the wind instruments which I have loved from the moment I began composing." (Keith W. Daniel: Francis Poulenc, His Artistic Development and Musical Style. AnnArbor: UMI Research Press, 1982, p. 116.) TheSextet received its premiere performance in 1933 and, in its final form, in December 1940.

Poulenc's biographer Henri Hill thought the first movement's form "somewhat incoherent, but the admirable writing for the wind instruments is always in character--a delight in itself." (Francis Poulenc, trans. Lockspeiser. New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1959, p. 59). Its three sections begin with a bright-tempoed motor rhythm, lead through a bassoon solo to a lyrical passage begun by piano, then return to Tempo I and conclude with a march-like finale. The second movement inverts the arrangement of the first; a "very sweet and expressive" melody of the beginning yields to a sprightly, smart section in halved note values and returns to Tempo I. The third movement opens a very rhythmic cabaret style, followed by a long, lyrical, sentimental melody in varying meters, and a return to the first idea; the finale begins slowly in 5/4, with an "expressive, very sweet and melancholy" oboe melody that grows to a majestic finish.

Judith Eckelmeyer © 1992

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As Paris Winds original performance is not available on YouTube, please enjoy these performances:

Barber's Summer Music, Op. 31
University of Michigan Bassoon Studio 

Beethoven's Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 16
Klara Würtz, piano | Henk de Graaf, clarinet | Hans Meyer, oboe | Peter Gaasterland, bassoon | Martin van de Merwe, horn

Ligeti's Six Bagatelles (1953)
The Center Woodwind Quintet

Poulenc's Sextet (1932-9)
Ensemble ACJW

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