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Bohuslav Martinů 1890-1959

Oboe Quartet H 315 Written in 1947

Moderato poco allegro

Adagio, Andante poco Moderato – poco Allegro

Martinů was a Czechoslovakian composer who was for a time a student at the Prague Conservatory. Composition was more important to him than his violin studies and he did not take to the rigours of the general curriculum and was eventually dismissed for “ incorrigible negligence” ! In the 1930s having moved to Paris Martinů wrote in the Neoclassical style and was influenced strongly by Stravinsky’s angular and rhythmic sound-world. Martinů drew on his Bohemian and Moravian traditional folk melodies and has thus been compared with Prokofiev and Bartók.

Martinů and his family fled Europe for the USA in 1940 and this oboe quartet was written in New York in a period of turbulent personal life. Martinů finally returned to Europe and died in Switzerland.

The quartet is a light piece which is rarely performed. It has two short movements. Martinů’s angular and quirky instrumental writing is evident and the strong rhythmical character and close imitation of phrases between the four players is immediately clear. The oboe is not seen here as the lead or solo player but is in balance with the other instruments.

The first movement has a genial mood and uncomplicated structure. The second movement is in three sections. The opening chords set up the dance style that reflects Martinů’s Czechoslovakian origins and sound-world. The quartet is rounded off with a short allegro that culminates in a straightforward cadence.

 

Poulenc 1899-1963

Sonata for Oboe and Piano 1962

Elégie (Paisiblement, sans presser)

Scherzo (Très animé)

Déploration ( Très calme)

Francis Poulenc was born in Paris into a prosperous and well educated family. His mother taught him the piano from a young age. As a student he met Milhaud and Satie and others who encouraged him to compose. He travelled to Vienna and met Schoenberg. Composition training was not successful and Ravel could get nowhere with this most individual musician. Poulenc wrote many pieces of chamber music and much was influenced by Jazz.

Roger Nichols Poulenc’s biographer tells us that “Poulenc’s style and the French Aesthetic…are defined by their elegance, lightness of touch and humour but with the ability to move one deeply” For some commentators Poulenc’s music is seen as slight, inconsequential and not worthy of serious consideration, but Nichols’ view is more positive and understanding of a very complex personality writing music from his own conviction rather than received education and composition training.

This sonata for oboe and piano was dedicated to the memory of Prokofiev. It is from a group of three woodwind sonatas written in the last year of his life. The first movement is in three distinct sections. The Piano keeps the pulse while the oboe weaves around using its wide register in a variety of moods. The Scherzo is a lively three part movement with a slower middle area and more rhythmic outer sections. The final movement echoes the Chorale of Bach’s time 200 years earlier. This movement is melancholic and has many references to Poulenc’s own earlier music. The harmonic language of his choral pieces and Organ Concerto for example is reflected here.

Roger Nichols in The New Grove Dictionary of Music.

Sergey Prokofiev 1891-1953

Quintet Op 39 in G Minor. 1924

Tema con variazioni, Andante energico, Allegro sostenuto, ma con brio,

Adagio pesante, Allegro precipitato, ma non troppo presto, Andantino

Prokofiev was born in Ukraine. His mother was a pianist and a very strong musical influence over her only child. He was precocious and at eleven years old began to take lessons from Glier in harmony, form and orchestration. In 1905 Prokofiev joined the St Petersburg Conservatory. This was an uncertain and disruptive time as the arts suffered in the build-up to the Revolution. In 1918 Prokofiev travelled to the USA where he made a name as an opera composer, but he was dissatisfied and moved on in 1922, this time to Paris to join his mother who was already there. He married a singer and settled into a family life with their two sons. At this time there were no plans for the family to return to Russia.

This Quintet is closely related to Prokofiev’s ballet Trapèze and is based on life in the circus. It reflects Prokofiev’s characteristically ironic and unconventional musical world. The six movements demonstrate spikey angular lines and contrasting smoother melodies. It is playful and energetic and the circus is not far away. In the first movement the two contrasting variations are formed from the oboe’s opening theme. The second movement features the double bass whose theme is taken up by the other instruments in turn. The third movement evokes the circus as the uneven rhythmical patterns in 5/4 time threaten to destabilise the listeners. The original ballet dancers found this particularly challenging too ! The Adagio pesante has a drone played by the double bass. This underpins a somewhat eerie sound above with the oboe and violin playing near the bridge. The fifth movement is as its title suggests very energetic and there are strong accents, rushing scales and pizzicato attacks. Finally a minuet and trio with instruments working in pairs. After the trio the minuet returns and the whole piece is brought to its end with a short dissonant passage and a rush to the finish which is led by the viola and double bass. Circus life indeed !

Programme notes by Helen Simpson.

 

Josef Haydn (1732-1809) String Quartet in B♭ Op 76 no 4 (1797)

Allegro con spirito
Adagio
Menuetto: Allegro
Finale: Allegro, ma non troppo

In 1795 Haydn returned from his spectacularly successful visits to England to the relatively light duties prescribed by the new Esterházy Prince Nikolaus II.  Nikolaus had abandoned his father’s palace at Esterházy, sacking its extensive musical establishment, and divided his time between Eisenstadt and Vienna.  Haydn was kept on, but his main duty was just to write a Mass for the Princess’s name day. He was free to accept other commissions.

One such commission came from Count Joseph Erdödy, the Hungarian Court Chancellor.   Although Erdödy’s father had employed an orchestra to play in their family’s three palaces, the son, on inheriting the title in 1789 responded both to contemporary taste and financial stringency by replacing the orchestra with a string quartet.  In 1796 he placed a generous commission with Haydn for six quartets.   The resulting ‘Erdödy’ quartets are a triumph, perhaps the pinnacle of Haydn’s long quartet-writing career.

The fourth of the set, nicknamed ‘The Sunrise’, dawns gently in a simple Bb chord from the three lower strings. The first violin’s theme cautiously rises, with no suggestion of the movement’s Allegro con spirito marking.  After 20-odd bars light floods in, somewhat reminiscent of the opening of ‘The Creation’ on which Haydn was working at the time, and the spirit is freed in dancing semiquavers.  The opening chord returns in F but now with the theme in the cello curving down, rather than rising.  The movement develops the contrast between these ideas.

The Adagio is one of Haydn’s most profound.  Its pausing, hesitantly rising opening recalls, in slow-motion, the start of the first movement.  The first violin’s rapt meditation is intensified by closely overlapping entries of this opening phrase.  The Menuetto is rustic rather than courtly, and its lines again recall the gentle rise of the opening sunrise.  The Trio is linked through from the Menuetto by a held chord on the cello and viola, again recalling the work’s opening.

The last movement’s structure starts with alternating major-minor episodes, but after the reprise of the major section Haydn puts his foot on the accelerator, Più allegro,  Più presto, an exhilarating race to the finish.

Schulhoff 1894 – 1942

Five Pieces for String Quartet

1.Alla Viennese
2.Alla Serenata
3. Alla Gzeca
4. Alla Tango Milonga
5. Alla Tarantella.

Dedicated to Darius Milhaud.

Ervin Schulhoff was born in Prague and became a composer and pianist. Among his early teachers were Reger and Debussy, before he moved to Germany and established himself in the company of Dadaist practitioners such as Grosz and Klee, who were working in other art forms. Back in Prague Schulhoff worked in the Prague Theatre Jazz Orchestra as the resident pianist. By the mid 1930s as a Communist and with Soviet citizenship and Jewish ethnicity Schulhoff was in danger. He was taken to the internment camp at Wülzburg and he died there, from Tuberculosis in 1942.

Schulhoff’s music demonstrates the growing movement in Europe known as the New Objectivity. Listeners are given a stark representation of reality and not infrequently made to feel uncomfortable and disturbed as a result. The influences from working with jazz musicians and experimenters with sound machines and home-made instruments show in some of Schulhoff’s compositions and these have been labelled “functionalist music”.

A comment made in 1924 at the first performance about Five Pieces for String Quartet praised the music’s human and technical worth but at the same time Schulhoff’s ability not to take himself too seriously. This is evident in today’s performance 100 years later.

The five short movements have titles of well known dances and they look back towards the Baroque dance suites. These were character pieces written for entertainment and which did not require deep concentration. Schulhoff’s pieces have an edginess and nervy energy which belies their titles and assumed moods. Here, there is evidence that Schulhoff developed compositionally far beyond what he had been taught and his use of the four stringed instruments is closer to that of Bartók than Reger or Debussy, his early teachers.

The Serenata shows the influence of drones in folk traditions and they have a rhythmic function here. Bartók’s influence is clear in the Czeca movement. The Tango is relatively relaxed with longer melodic lines and a more open texture. This is more sensual as expected. There are no clichés though and it is less catchy than some of Schulhoff’s jazz Piano pieces. The Tarantella is derived from the Italian word Tarantole, the name for the Tarantula spider. The energy here is redolent of the creature indeed ! The Tarantella dance of the spider, from Puglia Southern Italy, describes the effect of the bite of the Tarantula spider. The victim dances themselves into a frenzy and then collapses with exhaustion. Musical accompaniment and incitement is given by Mandolines, Guitars and Tambourines playing furiously.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) String Quartet in D min D.810 (Death & the Maiden) (1824)

Allegro
Andante con moto
Scherzo: Allegro molto
Presto 

Though composed in the same year as the A-minor “Rosamunde” quartet, the opening four bars of this D minor quartet set it in a different world from Rosamunde’s understated charms.  The hammered out fortissimo triplet figure (illustrated) demands our serious attention, but is immediately transformed into an almost apologetically tender pianissimo phrase (illustrated).  After a pause, the tension mounts, driven by the triplets, to a reinforced version of the opening.  This emotional roller-coaster continues throughout the movement.  The triplets sometimes give way to the dotted rhythm of a yearning tune (illustrated) that Jack Westrup attributes to Schubert’s admiration for Rossini;  this theme in turn gets transformed into more serious matter against running semiquavers.  The emotional intensity and tightness of construction of the movement recall the later Beethoven but it was written the year before the first of Beethoven’s late quartets.  The repeated notes of the opening bars and their rhythm are echoed in the themes of the other three movements.

The theme for the variations of the G minor Andante con moto comes from Death’s contribution to a short Schubert song of 1817, inviting a terrified young girl to sleep safely in his arms.  The quartet version is lighter: a fourth higher and con moto.  The  calm of the first two variations is shattered by the brutal dactyls (–˅˅) of the third, in a more rapid version of the rhythm of the theme; calm returns only to be broken again by the long crescendo of the repeat of the fifth variation to yet more terrifying dactyls.  The terror subsides to a serene end and a Schubert-hallmark switch to the major.

The fiercely syncopated energy of the Scherzo contrasts with a  tranquil Trio, whose D-major theme (illustrated) is  related to the work’s opening.  The Scherzo leads to the tarantella-form Presto finale.  The tarantella folk-dance hails from Taranto in southern Italy: a courting couple dance encircled by others as the music gets faster and faster.  Taranto independently gave its name to the tarantula spider, the effects of whose allegedly serious bite could, it was thought, be ameliorated by wild dancing.  Pepys records tales of itinerant fiddlers cashing in on this belief especially during the harvest when bites were more frequent.  It is quite possible that Schubert intends the allusion to cheating death, but either way this energetic dance with its prestissimo ending provides a rousing climax to the quartet.

Programme notes by Chris Darwin (Haydn and Schubert) and Helen Simpson (Schulhoff).

See Chris Darwin’s Programme Notes for other works on his web page.