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Chamber Music for Winds

with guest pianist David Anderegg

PROGRAM

Schumann, Fantasy Pieces for Clarinet and Piano

Saint-Saens, Sonata for Oboe and Piano

Poulenc, Sonata for Flute and Piano

Mozart, Quintet for Piano and Winds K452 (Oboe, Clarinet, Horn, Bassoon, Piano)

Showcasing the expressive beauty and elegance of individual wind instruments with piano accompaniment, the performance offers a richly varied chamber program that ranges from romantic to playful to refined.

The program opens with Schumann’s Fantasy Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, a set of deeply expressive miniatures that reveal the clarinet’s lyrical soul. Camille Saint-Saëns’s Sonata for Oboe and Piano follows, offering elegance and poignant reflection in one of the composer’s final works.

The program continues with Francis Poulenc’s delightful Sonata for Flute and Piano, a work full of wit, charm, and unexpected emotional depth. The performance culminates in Mozart’s Quintet for Piano and Winds K.452, a radiant masterpiece that brings together oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, and piano in a vibrant and conversational ensemble.

Program Notes

David Anderegg

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) wrote his Fantasy-pieces, Opus 73, for clarinet and piano, but also indicated they could be played on the cello or violin. They have become an important part of the cello repertoire, as well as a cornerstone of clarinet music. He wrote these pieces, originally called “Night-pieces” over the course of two days during a happy and productive period in his troubled life. The name “fantasy-pieces” indicated, for Schumann, pieces characterized by rapidly shifting and intense emotional states. The last movement, with the beginning tempo marking “quick and fiery,” is classic Schumann: in the coda, he tells the musicians to play “Schneller” (faster) and then “Schneller” again. This is only slightly less insane than the first movement of his g-minor piano sonata, which begins with the tempo marking “as fast as possible” and then adds two more “Schnellers” before the ending.

Charles-Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921) was well-known as the most talented child prodigy in the history of Western music, surpassing even Mozart: in his debut public piano recital at the age of ten, he offered to play, as an encore, any of the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas from memory. Saint-Saens wrote all kinds of music: symphonies, concertos, opera, and chamber music. He lived a long life, and in his later years, he was seen as a once-beloved, but reactionary figure. His traditional Romantic approach to music did not age well in the era of Stravinsky and Schonberg; in 1919, he said of Darius Milhaud’s polytonal symphonic suite Protée, "fortunately, there are still lunatic asylums in France". The oboe sonata dates from 1921, the last year of his life: he undertook a project to augment the repertoire for wind instruments who had traditionally been neglected in the chamber repertoire. The oboe sonata alternates between lyricism and virtuosity, and is a beloved work for which all oboists are grateful. Shortly after completing it, Saint-Saens died in Algiers at the age of 86.

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) wrote his famous flute sonata upon receiving a commission from the US Library of Congress, which commissioned many of the great works of 20th-centuy chamber music through a grant from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, to whose memory this work is dedicated. (Coolidge is locally famous as the benefactor who built the South Mountain chamber music hall on her estate in Pittsfield in 1918). The first movement, marked “malinconico” or melancholy, and the second, Cantilena, movement are elegiac in nature, but the third is bumptious and playful, almost a can-can in spirit. It is as if Poulenc is grieving, but then laughing in the face of grief, as he so often did throughout his musical career. The piece was a great success at its premiere in 1956 and has been ever since.

The eminent Mozart biographer, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, wrote the following passage in 1977: “Mozart’s creativity reached a high point both qualitatively and quantitatively in the four years from the beginning of 1784 to the end of 1787. In this period he wrote twelve piano concerti; a horn concerto; a symphony; five quintets for various combinations of instruments, among them the (quintet) for piano, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, which he himself, at least at the time of its composition, held to be the best work he ever wrote. It is indeed unique…Each instrument is presented in its deepest individuality; each performs like a virtuoso soloist and at the same time in a cantabile fashion, sometimes playing only one figuration, and then passing it along to the next instrument, which picks it up in a version appropriate to it. It is as if the woodwind sound were dictating the melodic lines.”