Wit and Virtuosity

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 celebrate 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, admiring the paintings and photographic collages of David Hockney, and reading Boris Vian’s Autumn in Peking. Among other things I was impressed by the bold strokes and clarity of line that were apparent in the Stravinsky and Hockney works, as well as the strong connection to their respective traditions. This was complemented by the surreal, humorous, and irreverent nature of Vian’s writing. All of the works shared a vibrant, vivid and assured purposefulness that I sought to create in Plain Song, Fantastic Dances.

“I selected an early plainsong (Gregorian chant) to serve as the primary theme for the opening movement of the work, ‘St. Botolph’s Fantasia,’ in tribute to St. Botolph, a 7th-century English monk. I also found a 12th-century Notre Dame School melismatic organum based on this chant melody, which I quote at the beginning and end of the movement. (Melismatic organum is a two-part composition in which an elaborate melody is composed over a preexisting chant.) The overall design of the movement is a variation form that presents the Gregorian melody in increasingly elaborate contrapuntal treatments, culminating in a seven-part texture in which the theme is stated in multiple speeds and keys.

“The second movement, ‘Tango Blue,’ is light, rhythmical and bluesy. It features the woodwinds and horn supported by a pizzicato string accompaniment that is mildly evocative of tango rhythms. Two extensive solos, one each for horn and clarinet, lead to the climax of the movement, during which the strings abandon their pizzicato-accompaniment role, join in the melodic features of the movement, and ultimately lead the ensemble in the return of the opening harmonies and figures.

“‘Quick Step’ is a fast-paced finale driven by a primary melody that derives from the movement’s opening harmonic sequence. This melody is sequentially stated by several instruments and in several keys before leading to the movement’s detailed, contrapuntal middle-section. The contrapuntal passage smoothly leads back to the opening harmonic sequence. When this occurs, one might expect a full recapitulation of the primary melody. However, a fragment of one of the contrapuntal melodies is heard instead. This fragment serves as the material for a transition that leads to an extended coda in which the plainsong from the first movement reappears. The primary melody of the third movement emerges from within the increasingly elaborate accompaniment, providing counterpoint for the plainsong and enabling the piece to reach its ultimate close.”

Joseph Haydn Piano Trio in C major Hob. XV:27

The rapid rise in domestic music-making in the late 18th century fueled a lucrative market for keyboard trios. This was one musical arena, too, where women could dominate: as many prints and paintings confirm, the piano or harpsichord was traditionally a female preserve, while the subordinate string parts were taken by men (female violinists were rare, female cellists unheard of).

While the “Gypsy Rondo” has long been a popular hit, Haydn’s other late piano trios are still among his least-known masterpieces, mainly because of their supposed lack of interest for cellists. Yet far from being a dispensable supporting act, the cello adds crucial rhythmic definition and sustaining power to the keyboard bass, which on the fortepiano had nothing like the sonority of the modern Steinway.

Composed in late 1795 or 1796 for the professional pianist Therese Bartolozzi (née Jansen), whom Haydn had befriended in London (in May 1795 he had been a witness at her marriage to the picture dealer Gaetano Bartolozzi), this C-major work is one of the greatest of his trios. It is also pianistically more difficult than any of the earlier trios, exploiting to the full Bartolozzi’s virtuoso technique.

The opening Allegro combines vaulting, muscular energy with a feeling of relaxed improvisation so characteristic of Haydn’s trios. The development opens with a stretch of intricate neo-Baroque counterpoint, continues with a warmly sonorous statement of the main theme in A-flat major, and then approaches the recapitulation via a startling last-minute deflection to B minor, of all keys, with an inspired casualness typical of Haydn’s late trios.

This is followed by a gentle, pastoral Andante in the luminous contrasting key of A major, disrupted by a vehement central episode with a distinct whiff of the Hungarian puszta. The mercurial finale is one of the funniest pieces even Haydn ever wrote, playing outrageous games with the theme’s first three notes, plunging into unscripted keys, and constantly duping us as to the exact moment when the theme will return.

Francis Poulenc Sextet for Piano and Wind Quintet

“Do not analyze my music—love it!” Francis Poulenc’s own advice to his listeners was typical of the most lovable of French composers, once described as “part monk, part ragamuffin.” Poulenc was the most gifted of the Parisian group of enfants terribles dubbed Les Six, and the one who remained truest to its anti-Romantic, anti-Germanic ideals. Beneath the ebullient boulevardier surface, though, lay a melancholy that deepened after the death in 1935 of his close friend Pierre-Octave Ferroud in a car accident. While Poulenc never lost his jokey subversiveness (he once confessed he would like to have been Maurice Chevalier), it coexisted from this time onwards with a deepening Catholic faith, manifested in a steady flow of religious works from the mid- 1930s onwards.

Another member of Les Six, Darius Milhaud, summed up his friend and colleague: “Francis Poulenc is music itself. I know no music more direct, more simply expressed, or which goes so unerringly to its target.” The Sextet for piano and wind, composed in 1931–2 and revised in 1939, demonstrates his point. This is vivid, instantly captivating music, written with an uncanny feeling for the individual characters of the five wind instruments. Poulenc’s favorite composers were Bach, Mozart, Satie, and Stravinsky; and while it never sounds like pastiche, the Sextet refracts the spirit of Mozart and the neo-Classical Stravinsky of the 1920s through Poulenc’s own irreverent Parisian persona.

Launched by gleeful upward flourishes, the first movement (“Very fast and fiery”) is a manic collage, juxtaposing motoric rhythms that seem to parody The Rite of Spring and snatches of Mozartian opera buffa. A plangent bassoon recitative, sensuously expanded by the other instruments, brings an abrupt change of mood: a reminder, too, that Poulenc was one of the century’s great melodists. The motoric music returns, much abbreviated, with tipsy syncopations for the horn.

Initiated by a soulful oboe melody, the central Divertissement is Poulenc’s take on a rococo-Mozartian idyll, raucously punctured by a section marked to be played twice as fast. After the idyll returns, the harmonies darken disturbingly in the coda. The priapic horn kick-starts the madcap Prestissimo finale, with its echoes of the music hall and circus. Amid the hyperactivity is a broad, lyrical episode that betrays Poulenc’s love of 19th-century French opera. The fun suddenly ceases for a slow and solemn coda, introduced by the bassoon, that reflects on earlier themes. Against expectations, Poulenc the melancholy introvert has the last word.

Ludwig van Beethoven Septet in E-flat major Op. 20

In 1799, while grappling with the First Symphony and the Op. 18 String Quartets, Beethoven produced his most famous work in the 18th-century divertimento tradition: the E-flat Septet for the novel combination of clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, and cello, with the double bass lending added weight to the sonority. It was first played at a private gathering on December 20, 1799, with Beethoven’s friend Ignaz Schuppanzigh taking the often flamboyant violin part. After its public premiere the following April, the Septet quickly became Beethoven’s most popular work, to the increasing irritation of the composer, who was heard to mutter that it contained “rather too much sentimentality and rather too little skill.”

Beethoven’s instrumental line-up gave him plenty of scope for colorfully varied sonorities. As in Schubert’s Octet—a work directly modelled on the Septet—the winds can be used as soloists (with the clarinet starring in the first two movements), in pairs—often in antiphony with the strings— or as sustaining instruments in quasi-orchestral “tuttis.” The violin is very much first among equals, with bursts of concerto-like virtuosity in the finale. But the cello also has its moments of glory, whether in its soaring cantilena in the central section of the Adagio or the homely waltz in the scherzo’s trio.

Unusually for a chamber work (an obvious precedent here was Mozart’s Piano and Wind Quintet, K. 452), the opening Allegro is prefaced by a grandly imposing slow introduction—Beethoven immediately announcing that the Septet is to be more than a lightweight divertissement. The Allegro itself mingles alfresco jollity with a symphonic cohesiveness that was second nature to Beethoven even in his most relaxed works. The bouncy opening theme is rarely far away, dominating the central development and underpinning a new cantabile melody on clarinet and horn near the start of the recapitulation.

The Adagio explores the same vein of luxuriant lyricism

as the slow movement of the B-flat Piano Sonata Op. 22. Its romantic opening clarinet solo is immediately repeated on the violin, with clarinet and bassoon weaving exquisite snatches of countermelody—a process closely followed by Schubert in the Adagio of his Octet. Next comes an oldfashioned galant minuet which Beethoven adapted from his Piano Sonata in G, later published as Op. 49 No. 2. The trio features cavorting triplets for horn and clarinet.

For his variation fourth movement Beethoven alighted on a charmingly naïve tune said to be based on a Rhenish folksong. There are five variations, by turns skittish and lyrical, and artfully contrasted in texture. Turning to the minor key, No. 4 exploits the horn’s potential for keening melancholy. The irrepressible scherzo, launched by a self-important horn flourish, is Beethoven at his most bucolically unbuttoned.

The finale begins with a portentous slow introduction, then deflates the accrued tension with a voluble, popular-style Presto (the composer’s own piano improvisations were famed for extreme contrasts of this kind). The mood briefly turns serious at the start of the development, where Beethoven works a fragment from the main theme in strenuous contrapuntal imitation. Then, after a new chorale-like tune, the violin embarks on an elaborate cadenza before the recapitulation gets underway—a tribute to the virtuosity of the Septet’s violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh.