Orpheus: May Program Notes

Notes on the Program

By Aaron Grad Nonet after Quintet, K. 452 (arr. Jean Françaix) [1784/1995] WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Born January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, Austria Died December 5, 1791 in Vienna, Austria Mozart completed the Quintet for Piano and Winds on March 30, 1784, just eight days after finishing the Piano Concerto No. 16 in D Major, and two days before his selfproduced “Grand Academy” concert in Vienna that likely featured the premieres of both works. Chamber music was a rarity on such programs, which usually presented symphonies and concertos along with keyboard improvisations. But the new quintet was unlike any of Mozart’s preceding chamber music, and much closer in spirit to his recent piano concertos. He was certainly pleased with the novel sound of the quintet, writing to his father, “I myself consider it to be the best thing I have written in my life.”

The French composer Jean Françaix (1912-1997) created this edition for Nonet in 1995.

The arrangement distributes Mozart’s piano part among five string players while leaving the wind parts untouched, an approach that emphasizes the work’s melodic freedom, starting with a slow introduction that moves the piano’s delicate strands to a violin. In the Larghetto slow movement, woodwind solos intertwine as if they are characters in a wordless opera, and the concluding rondo makes the most of the contrasting tone colors between winds and strings, reframing the concerto-like dialogue of Mozart’s original.

Harpsichord Concerto [1923-26] MANUEL DE FALLA Born November 23, 1876 in Cádiz, Spain Died November 14, 1946 in Alta Gracia, Argentina Manuel de Falla was born in the port town of Cádiz in southwestern Spain, an area rich with Arabic and Roma (“Gypsy”) influence. Facing limited prospects after he left the Madrid Conservatory, Falla moved to Paris, where he circulated with the likes of Debussy and Ravel. After returning to his homeland in 1914, Falla made his name with a series of colorful works for the stage.

Picking up on the neoclassical trend spearheaded by Stravinsky, Falla wove 17th-century Spanish music into the 1923 opera Master Peter’s Puppet Show. He even incorporated a part for harpsichord, at a time when the instrument was just starting to shed its reputation as a dusty relic. The harpsichordist at the opera’s premiere was the Polish virtuoso Wanda Landowska, who so impressed Falla that he decided to write her a harpsichord concerto.

She debuted the concerto in 1926, with Falla conducting.

A harpsichord produces its tone with a mechanism that plucks the strings; unlike a piano, which transfers the player’s force at the keyboard into an equivalent hammering action, there is no way to boost a harpsichord’s loudness other than playing more notes. To ensure that the harpsichord would not be drowned out, Falla scored his concerto for a small chamber ensemble of flute, oboe, clarinet, violin and cello. For the musical material, Falla turned again to his country’s distant past, incorporating quotations from a 15th-century Spanish song in the first movement and crafting austere motives redolent of early church singing in the second movement.

The dance-like finale decorates the solo line with trills and ornaments, hallmarks of the florid Baroque style. Landowska’s preferred instrument had multiple keyboards and courses of strings that could be linked together (allowing for the pitches to be doubled in different octaves), and Falla instructed that the soloist should mostly use the full array of sounds—the equivalent of an organist pulling out all the stops for maximal sonic impact.

Harpsichord Concerto [1935] BOHUSLAV MARTINŮ Born December 8, 1890 in Polička, Bohemia Died August 28, 1959 in Liestal, Switzerland Bohuslav Martinů lived until the age of 12 in a small apartment atop a Bohemian church tower, where his father was responsible for ringing the bells. Martinů never shed the isolated, wide-angle perspective he developed in his youth, neither during his brief time as a student at the Prague Conservatory nor in his decades of exile in France, the United States, Italy and Switzerland.

Martinů moved to Paris in 1923 to study with Albert Roussel, who exposed the Bohemian expatriate to France’s music du jour: the bright and sharp-edged neoclassicism of Stravinsky and the younger Les six composers, including Milhaud and Poulenc. Martinů’s Harpsichord Concerto from 1935 reflects those neoclassical currents, along with the composer’s fascination during that time with the concerti grossi of Corelli and Bach. In those collective concertos, small groups of soloists and larger accompanying ensembles work together to create diverse sounds and textures—the opposite of the typical solo concerto, which elevates one individual onto a heroic pedestal.

In Martinů’s concerto, the harpsichord is justly listed as the leading soloist, but the unexpected presence of another keyboard instrument (a piano) in the small accompanying orchestra gives this work the flavor of a concerto grosso. The piano is quick to insert itself in the first movement, like an eager sidekick; in the slow second movement, the piano lends support to the harpsichord’s Baroque-style figurations, leaving space for the flute’s lyrical phrases to rise into the foreground. When the soloist finally joins the finale after a long and gleeful orchestral introduction, it starts with a five-note motive lifted directly from Bach’s Second “Brandenburg” Concerto.

Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Op. 28 (arr. Brett Dean) [1895/1995] RICHARD STRAUSS Born June 11, 1864 in Munich, Germany Died September 8, 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany Up to the point when Richard Strauss accepted his first professional post at the age of 21, his musical personality reflected the influence of his father, Franz Strauss, the greatest horn player of the era and a staunch traditionalist devoted to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Besides passing down his discerning tastes, Franz also ran an amateur orchestra that would read through Richard’s scores, an extraordinary resource for a budding orchestral composer and conductor.

A whole new world opened up for the young Strauss when he began working as the conducting assistant to Hans von Bülow at the Meiningen Court Orchestra in 1885.

Guided by his new friend Alexander Ritter, a violinist in the orchestra (and nephew-inlaw of Wagner), Strauss devoured the music of Wagner and Liszt. Ritter encouraged Strauss to try writing a “symphonic poem,” to use Liszt’s term for a programmatic orchestral work in a single movement, and Strauss ended up writing four such works between 1886 and 1889.

After a hiatus, Strauss returned in 1894 to the genre that he preferred to call Tondichtung, or “tone poem.” His next subject was Till Eulenspiegel, a trickster character from German folklore. Strauss had tried adapting Till’s colorful antics into an opera, but the scenario was a little thin for a full-fledged theatrical work, so he redirected his ideas into a concert work “after the old rogue’s tale, set in rondo form,” as he defined it in the subtitle.

Strauss did not follow a strict program outline when he composed Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, but he did point to certain vignettes from the folklore, including Till riding through the market and tipping over the carts, Till flirting with the ladies, and Till impersonating a priest. The most explicit character in the tone poem is the trickster himself, represented by a jocular horn theme. Another recurring motive, introduced by the clarinet, suggests Till’s peals of laughter as various pranks ensue. These instrumental characterizations remain intact in the arrangement for four winds and five strings created in 1995 by Brett Dean, an Australian violist and composer. © 2019 Aaron Grad.