WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

Dvořák (1841-1904)

Slavonic Dance, Op 46 No 8 (1878) arr. Clements

Furiant: Presto

Haydn (1732-1809)

London Trio No 1 in C major (1794)

Allegro moderato

Andante

Finale Vivace

Janáček (1854 –1928)

Mládí (1924)

I. Allegro

II. Andante sostenuto

III. Vivace

IV. Allegro animato d’Indy (1851-1931)

Chanson et Danses, Op 50 (1898)

Chanson

Danses

Dvořák (1841-1904)

Czech Suite in D major, Op 39 (1879) arr. Sheen

Preludium (Pastorale)

Polka

Sousedská (Minuet)

Romance

Finale (Furiant)

Vibrant dance rhythms – sometimes rustic, sometimes refined – propel us forward through the rich selection of music in tonight’s concert, with the emphasis firmly on the pungent flavours of central Europe. What better place to start, then, than with a Slavonic Dance by Antonín Dvořák?

Despite their title, however, there’s little that’s particularly Slavic about the two collections of dances that Dvořák composed between 1878 and 1885. In his first collection, at least – of which today’s Dance forms the energetic finale – Dvořák looked closer to home for inspiration, to the Bohemian folk music that he’d known since his childhood. Not that he stole any folk tunes directly: the Dances are entirely Dvořák’s own work, even if their Bohemian musical accent is strong.

The Slavonic Dances were originally conceived as a kind of follow-up to the equally well-known Hungarian Dances by Dvořák’s great friend and supporter Johannes Brahms. Brahms had recommended Dvořák to his Berlin music publisher Fritz Simrock, and following the success of Dvořák’s early Moravian Duets, Simrock wanted more of the same: colourful, energetic music of a distinctly central European character, and which would capture amateur performers’ imaginations. Something along the lines of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances, in fact. Dvořák was happy to oblige, composing an initial set of eight Slavonic Dances for piano duet, intended for informal performance at home. They proved so popular that he quickly reworked them for orchestra (they’ve had countless further arrangements ever since) and followed them up with a second set seven years later.

No 8 is a particularly fiery member of the first set, taking the form of a Czech furiant dance with unusual rhythms and syncopations that might make foottapping more difficult than it might at first seem. A rousing, swaggering opening tune shifts restlessly between minor and major, followed by lighter, more graceful music and eventually a slower, quieter melody in its contrasting central section – before the swagger of the opening makes its exuberant return.

We jump back in time almost a century for tonight’s next piece, and to an Austrian on a mission to entertain the English nobility. By the 1790s, when Joseph Haydn composed his ‘London’ Trio No 1, he’d spent more than three decades employed as music director in the lavish but rather isolated Eszterháza Palace, in what’s now north-west Hungary (in Haydn’s time, firmly at the heart of the Habsburg Empire). During those decades, he’d used the wealthy Esterházy family’s resident musicians to the fullest, virtually inventing the modern symphony and string quartet as musical forms, and developing his clean, clear, elegant and mischievously witty musical style across operas, chamber music and plenty more.

But equally, he felt he needed to stretch his wings. In 1790, aged 58, he found his chance. The incoming Prince Anton looked to trim back his artistic outgoings, still guaranteeing an on-going salary for Haydn, but no longer requiring his permanent presence. The composer’s music was already wildly popular among London audiences, and German-born, London-based impresario Johann Peter Salomon snapped him up for two visits to England, the first in 1791-2, and the second in 1794-5. Both went down a storm, so much so that Haydn reportedly even considered settling permanently in the English capital (and was explicitly invited to do so by King George III, no less).

He hobnobbed with royalty and the aristocracy, was fêted at high-society occasions, and even received an honorary doctorate in Oxford (which provided his ‘Oxford’ Symphony, No 92, with its nickname). One such meeting was with the Earl of Abingdon, Willoughby Bertie, who was already a huge fan and had done much to popularise Haydn’s music among London concert-goers. He was an amateur composer himself, too, and Haydn had encouraged his writing, even from afar.

Haydn wrote in his diary on 14 November 1794: ‘I went with Lord Abingdon to Preston, 26 miles from London, to visit the Baron of Aston – he and his wife both love music.’ The composer took with him an unusual gift: four short pieces for the unconventional combination of two flutes and cello (or bassoon in tonight’s performance). At that time, the flute came second only to the keyboard as the instrument studied by artistically inclined members of polite society. Both Abingdon and Aston were accomplished flautists, and Haydn’s four pieces were designed specifically for them.

Like its three counterparts, the so-called ‘London’ Trio No 1 shows Haydn indulging himself in light, charming, immediately captivating music that’s full of refinement and wit. There’s nothing shallow about it, however, certainly in terms of the impeccable craftsmanship Haydn brought to the piece. Despite having just three melodic lines available to him, the composer ensures a winning balance of richness and transparency between the parts, and gives all three players equally demanding roles too. The two flutes chase each other through his graceful opening movement, propelled along by the bassoon’s bassline, before the gently rocking dance of the second movement, and a typically mischievous, dashing finale that sees the three players jostling to decide who’s playing the melody and who’s covering the accompaniment.

Indeed,itmakesalot ofsensethatJanáček’s instrumentsaresingingso warmlyaboutthegolden daysofyouthinawork that’ssoopenlynostalgic, writtenbyamanjustfour yearsawayfromtheendof hislifewho’slookingback withaffectiontosomeof hisearliestmemories.

There are plenty of energetic rhythms in tonight’s next piece, though strictly speaking, they’re not connected with dance. In Leoš Janáček’s case, those rhythms came predominantly from the flow and cadences of his own spoken language, Czech, which he mined for both rhythm and melody across his operas and his instrumental works. The distinctive, seven-note, sing-song melody that permeates the opening movement of his Mládí, for example, is rumoured to be singing ‘Mládí, zlaté mládí!’ (‘Youth, golden youth!’). When you hear it, it makes perfect sense.

Indeed, it makes a lot of sense that Janáček’s instruments are singing so warmly about the golden days of youth in a work that’s so openly nostalgic, written by a man just four years away from the end of his life who’s looking back with affection to some of his earliest memories. Janáček wrote his wind sextet Mládí in the very month of his 70th birthday, July 1924, and the piece was intended for concert celebrations of that anniversary. Its premiere performance in Janáček’s home town of Brno in October that year, however, was dogged by instrument malfunctions, leaving the composer furious, and he had to wait for a performance in Prague the following month before he was happy with it.

Janáček had initially been inspired by hearing French flautist Paul Taffanel’s influential Société de Musique de Chambre pour Instruments à Vent ensemble, first in Salzburg in 1923 then later in Brno, and set about writing his own work for a distinctive and unusual ensemble of flute (or piccolo), oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, horn and bassoon. The addition of a bass clarinet to the conventional wind quintet line-up gives Janáček’s ensemble a characteristically rich, resonant sound that he exploits throughout the piece.

His specific subject matter was his time as a young boy chorister studying at the Augustinian Abbey in Brno, where he gained a thorough immersion in both music and Czech patriotism, both of which would occupy his later life. He’d written an earlier piece inspired by the same institution, called March of the Blue Boys (referring to the blue uniforms of the Augustinian students), for the unusual combination of piccolo, flute, bells, tambourine and piano, and he adapted this earlier work as the third movement of Mládí.

After the piece’s opening tribute to ‘golden youth’, in which Janáček places his memorable theme in sometimes unusual sonic settings, his sober second movement, it’s been suggested, refers to the composer’s unhappier memories of the school’s strict regulations. The third contrasts the piping eagerness of his March of the Blue Boys with a more relaxed trio section, while his finale recalls the earlier ‘golden youth’ theme before a more surging, energetic melody takes over, leading to a high-spirited conclusion.

As well as inspiring Janáček to compose his Mládí, Paul Taffanel’s Société de Musique de Chambre pour Instruments à Vent was instrumental in popularising wind music among French composers and audiences, not least through commissioning a whole collection of new works for wind ensembles. One of those was tonight’s next piece, the 1898 Chanson et danses by Parisian composer Vincent d’Indy.

He's perhaps a figure we’re not terribly familiar with, though he was hugely influential as a composer and teacher. D’Indy was urbane and well-travelled (he counted Bizet, Massenet, Liszt and Brahms as friends, for example), and among his star pupils were Albert Roussel, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Erik Satie and even Cole Porter (who signed up for a twoyear course with d’Indy, only to leave after just a few months).

D’Indy was indeed something of a stickler for strict musical education, even going so far as to co-found Paris’s Schola Cantorum as a direct competitor to the more established Paris Conservatoire, since he was dissatisfied with the older institution’s level of teaching (and its worryingly forward-looking ways). Which is somewhat ironic, since the musician d’Indy held in highest regard was Richard Wagner, still a controversially progressive figure for many. D’Indy rushed to attend the first complete Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1876, and his own opera Fervaal –premiered in Brussels in 1897 – was even described as a ‘French Parsifal’.

There’s plenty of Wagnerian influence to be heard, in fact, in d’Indy’s Chanson et danses, not least an almost direct quotation from the older composer’s luscious Siegfried Idyll, upon which d’Indy bases his opening ‘Chanson’ movement. The theme is first heard in a relaxed clarinet duet, before it returns more nobly on the ensemble’s horn. If his opening movement retains its restrained, somewhat languorous mood throughout, d’Indy’s second movement breaks the atmosphere with music of great energy and spirit. It’s essentially a sequence of dances, perhaps recalling the movements of a French Baroque Suite, led by a distinctive, repeated-note melody from the oboe against chattering accompaniment from clarinets and bassoons. After a monumental climax, the clarinet emerges rather stunned with a quiet, slow-moving melody, which, as we soon discover, returns us to the hushed, Wagnerian reverence of the piece’s opening.

We return to Dvořák for the concert’s final piece, and to a composer again celebrating his native Bohemia. In his Czech Suite, Dvořák painted vivid musical pictures of both a countryside and a collection of folk dances that he’d known all his life. He wrote the Suite in 1879, the year after his first set of Slavonic Dances, when his fame was first beginning to grow.

What Dvořák created in his Czech Suite falls somewhere between a set of dances and a serenade. The work opens with a lyrical, scene-setting Pastoral, which evokes the work’s bucolic atmosphere with the distant hum of Czech bagpipes ever-present behind a smoothly flowing melodic line. The second movement is a stylisation of a polka, one of the most popular Bohemian dances, which found its way into many other composers’ works. It begins with a wistful, somewhat understated melody in the minor, but becomes far more confident and rambunctious when it shifts to the brighter major. The third movement is a Sousedská, a Czech folk equivalent of a minuet. Fourth comes a lyrical nocturne in the form of a Romance, which opens with a flute melody against gently pulsing accompaniment, and a dazzling, dashing, boisterous Furiant brings the Suite to an exuberant conclusion – and may well take you right back to tonight’s opening piece.

© David Kettle