Wit and Virtuosity Chamber Music by Haydn, Gandolfi, Poulenc, and Beethoven
Richard Wigmore
“Divertissement,” as Francis Poulenc titled the slow movement of his Sextet, aptly sums up a concert that celebrates four composers playing airily with their musical materials. There is wit and ingenuity aplenty, plus a fair dash of sentiment. But things rarely get too serious. Beethoven’s irresistibly tuneful Septet for mixed strings and wind was one of the inspirations behind the similarly scored Plain Song, Fantastic Dances by Boston-based composer Michael Gandolfi. In between we have one of Haydn’s most brilliant and (in its finale) zany piano trios, and the Sextet by Poulenc that refracts Mozart and Stravinsky through a 20th-century Parisian prism. Michael Gandolfi Plain Song, Fantastic Dances Rock, jazz, and blues have always been prime influences in the work of Michael Gandolfi, who studied at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein and Oliver Knussen, and now heads Tanglewood’s composition department. Gandolfi composed Plain Song, Fantastic Dances for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players in 2005, to c elebrate the 125th anniversary of the city’s St. Botolph Club, a forum for artists. Scored for clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello, and double bass (the exact forces Beethoven used in his Septet), the work was premiered by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players on October 23, 2005. “At the time I set out to compose this work,” the composer writes, “I was studying Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète, 15
