PROGRAM NOTES

By Laurie Shulman

 

Sextet for Piano and Winds

Francis Poulenc

Born 7 January, 1899 in Paris, France

Died 30 January, 1963 in Paris

 

• Poulenc was one of the iconoclastic French composers dubbed “Les Six” by the critic Henri Collet

• He was largely self-taught, though his mother gave him piano lessons

• Poulenc composed more than 150 songs, which are much beloved by singers

• His Sextet celebrates woodwind colors and the expressive capacity of the piano

 

Francis Poulenc is deservedly celebrated for his superb contributions to the vocal literature. In the realm of the solo song, he remains the finest French composer since Gabriel Fauré. With respect to larger works, his sacred choral compositions have given him a place that rivals that of his contemporary Olivier Messiaen. And perhaps the crowning glory of all his compositions are the operas, ranging from the satirical Les mamelles de Tirésias (1947, after Apollinaire) to the tragic and gripping Dialogues des carmélites (1957). 

 

Oddly enough, however, many listeners familiar with Poulenc's compositions know his music through the instrumental works. He composed a number of smaller solo sonatas (that is, a single instrument plus piano) and works for other chamber ensembles that continue to be performed with regularity. Poulenc's music has a fluidity and grace shared by many of his French contemporaries. It also has substance, that ineffable “something” that makes one eager to hear more, and to hear again.

 

The scion of a wealthy pharmaceuticals manufacturing family, Poulenc had a somewhat unorthodox musical education. His mother was a fine pianist; she and Poulenc's uncle initiated the boy's study of piano and also introduced him to other facets of Parisian cultural life, particularly theater, an acquaintance that was to serve Poulenc richly in his operatic essays. By the end of the First World War, Poulenc had met Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Erik Satie, but he had not struck the right rapport with a fine teacher; for example, he never got past a first meeting with Maurice Ravel. That situation resolved in the early 1920s with several years of productive study with Charles Koechlin. Intensely curious about music beyond Paris, Poulenc also visited Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna and Alfredo Casella in Italy. By the mid-1920s he was writing good music, important music, and his production continued almost unceasingly until his death in 1963 from a heart attack.

​

The Sextet was begun in 1932, but withdrawn after a first performance in December 1933. Poulenc revised it extensively and completed it in 1939. Though concise and economical, it is actually one of his longest chamber works. The scoring, for piano plus wind quintet, is unorthodox but not unheard of. Poulenc had a lifelong soft spot for the woodwind and brass instruments, and always felt more comfortable with them than he did with strings. Plus, he was himself a pianist, so it is hardly surprising that he would combine these favored forces.

 

The first movement is brisk, in a modified ternary form with a slower middle section. There are faint echoes of Stravinsky here, including a toccata-like character that relates Poulenc to the neoclassicists. The richness of his melody and harmony, however, are more directly descended from his French operatic predecessors Massenet and Gounod. And the saucy horn part seems related to the spirit of Gershwin’s taxicab bleats in An American in Paris.

 

Poulenc’s slow movement, marked Divertissement, is also ternary, this time with a faster middle section. The principal theme, an elegant and melancholy statement, belongs to the oboe. Operatic ornaments adorn its melodic leaps, presently emulated by the other wind instruments.

​

The perky finale is a modified rondo that reveals both the acerbity of Poulenc’s wit and a more than passing acquaintance with the popular cabaret music of the day.  Throughout the Sextet, one hears rich melodies, even when the texture is spare, reminding us that Poulenc was also a masterful and experienced song writer. He closes the work with a quiet coda that comes as a surprise after the rambunctious frolic that has preceded.

 

Piano Concerto in D major, Hob.XVIII:11

Franz Joseph Haydn

Died 31 May, 1809 in Vienna, Austria

Arranged for piano and string quartet by Louis Sauter (b.1955)

 

• Haydn’s concerto is a transitional work from late rococo to early classical

• Its exact date is uncertain: probably late 1770s or early 1780s

• Operatic ornaments decorate the elegant slow movement

• The finale is a lively Hungarian rondo, saluting Haydn’s Austro-Hungarian roots

 

Unlike Mozart, Haydn did not write his best music in the realm of the concerto. Part of the reason is that so many of Haydn’s concertos are early and were composed at a time when musical style was undergoing a shift from late Baroque to classical. We think of Haydn – rightfully so – as an anchor of the high classic tradition and a towering figure in the late eighteenth century. The fact is that he was born in 1732, nearly a quarter of a century before Mozart, and nearly two decades before Bach died. The musical world in which Haydn came of age was a period of transition.

 

During his first years in the employ of the noble Esterházy family, Haydn was delighted by the fine orchestra of the princely court. He composed many instrumental concertos that were designed to show off the superior skill of the individual players. Haydn's C-major violin concerto was composed in the 1760s for Luigi Tomasini (1741-1808), who was concertmaster of the Esterházy orchestra. Another friend among that group was the excellent cellist Joseph Weigl (1740-1820), who played in the Esterházy orchestra from 1761 until 1769.  The Cello Concerto in C was composed for Weigl, probably around 1765.

​

Haydn himself was a fine string player, but never the virtuoso that Mozart was at the keyboard. The two composers met and became friends in Vienna in the early 1780s, at which point Haydn may have heard Mozart play some of the younger man’s many wonderful concerti. Haydn’s D major keyboard concerto seems uninfluenced by Mozart. Its style argues for a somewhat earlier composition date, as does its designation for harpsichord or fortepiano, during a transitional period when harpsichord was still widely played. Certainly this keyboard concerto is later than the string concertos for Tomasini and Weigl, but it almost certainly predates Haydn’s and Mozart’s personal friendship. The exact date that Haydn composed his D-major concerto is unknown. It may have been played at a private concert in 1780 by one Fräulein von Hartenstein, a student of Leopold Koželuch. The Viennese publisher Artaria issued the first edition in 1784.

​

Though the D major concerto is not listed by Haydn in his own thematic catalogue of his compositions, it is generally accepted to be authentic. Between summer 1784 and the end of the year, five publishers in four countries printed editions of Haydn’s new keyboard concerto. The rapid dissemination of the piece throughout Europe indicates how famous and popular Haydn had become. The concerto was his most popular work in his lifetime and has remained in the repertoire.

​

Louis Sauter was born in upstate New York but has lived most of his life in France. Educated as an electrical and communications engineer as well as a musician, he did research in signal processing early in his career. He has consulted with the Scientific Committee of the Parisian new music center IRCAM, and with the French national opera. Sauter is a pianist who enjoys playing chamber music and collaborating with singers. He has composed for solo instruments, voice, chamber ensembles, and orchestra.

 

Haydn’s original score calls for two oboes, two horns, solo keyboard and strings. This instrumentation transfers well to piano plus string quartet, in Louis Sauter’s arrangement.

 

MUSICIANS’ CORNER

 

The extended orchestral exposition that opens Haydn’s D major concerto shows great expansion over Haydn’s earlier instrumental concerti. This broader conception of concerto/sonata form is one of the characteristics that differentiates this piece, identifying it as a somewhat later work. The solo cadenza is another feature marking this as a classical (rather than rococo) concerto. The soloist interacts with the strings in a variety of ways, including several opportunities for brief improvisatory cadenzas. They are cohorts, intimate members of a chamber ensemble. Haydn frequently assigns the soloist’s thematic material to the strings. The expressive slow movement shows off his gift for elegant melodic ornament to great advantage.

​

Haydn scholar A. Peter Brown believes that the third movement Rondo all’ungherese {
(“Hungarian rondo”) is one of the earliest examples of Haydn using an Eastern European folk style. H.C. Robbins Landon identifies the melody as based on a dance tune not from Hungary, but from Bosnia and Dalmatia. Either way, the finale is vivacious and appealing, with its mock-serious minore section and winking grace notes. The figuration is not so elaborate as Mozart’s, perhaps reflecting Haydn’s background as a string player. Often the soloist’s passage work is more violinistic than pianistic.

 

Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op.44 (1842)  

Robert Schumann

Born 8 June, 1810 in Zwickau, Saxony, Germany

Died 29 July, 1856 in Endenich, near Bonn, Germany

 

• Schumann was the quintessential romantic

• He composed the piano part of this quintet with his wife Clara in mind

• Listen for contrast in the principal themes of the opening movement

• A song-like slow movement moves to a dazzling scherzo built from simple scales

• The finale is a masterpiece of counterpoint, also recalling a first movement theme

 

Robert and Clara Schumann were married in September, 1840, the day before Clara's 21st birthday. The ceremony took place after almost four years of prolonged hostility and opposition from Clara's father, the prominent piano pedagogue Friedrich Wieck, and against his will. Still, Schumann was elated about his marriage. His ebullience gave rise to a stream of compositional energy, as if there were no end to the music within him. 

 

Today, Schumann's bipolar nature is well known. His manic/depressive disorder manifested itself in composition by an obsessive focus on one particular type of writing for a prolonged period. In the late 1830s, he had composed almost exclusively for solo piano. The year 1840 brought forth an outpouring of Lieder, including the important song cycles Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und Leben; 1841 was a year of orchestral works.

​

In 1842 Schumann turned his attention to chamber music, producing the 3 string quartets, Op. 41, this afternoon's piano quintet, and the Piano Quartet Op. 47, also in E-flat. Schumann was treading a new path for himself with these works. This was the composer of brilliant vignettes inspired by literary masterpieces and the writings of Jean-Paul Richter; the composer of Carnaval and Faschingsschwank aus Wien, of Kreisleriana and the Davidsbundlertänze. Schumann, the miniaturist par excellence, turned from the extra-musical associations which had dominated the music of his youth. Instead, he immersed himself in the study of counterpoint, particularly fugue, and the composition of absolute music. The first result of his new absorption was the three string quartets. They proved to be his only essay in the genre, but he profited from his fresh experience with them to combine the quartet ensemble with piano in his next chamber work, the Piano Quintet.

 

Schumann cannot truly be said to have "invented" the piano quintet as Mozart did the piano quartet. The 18th-century Italian Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805), who was active in the Spanish court, wrote a dozen works for the same instrumentation. They are little known today, and were almost certainly unknown to Schumann, whose expansion to the combination of piano plus string quartet was logical in light of his recent completion of the Op. 41 quartets. He was anxious to return to composing for the instrument he knew and loved best – and Clara's instrument. At the same time, he was still filled with ideas for the string quartet. By combining the two, he brought together his own considerable musical imagination with the varied sonorities of five players. 

​

Clara was, of course, the pianist for whom Schumann wrote the work. She played its premiere, and incorporated it into her repertoire immediately, thereby contributing to its popularity. The piano quintet rapidly became one of Schumann's best known compositions. Schumann's friend Mendelssohn played the second performance, and had an early hand in the reworking of the scherzo. 

 

The Piano Quintet is one of Schumann's happiest inspirations in the realm of formally governed, abstract music. It shows a command of form and a discipline over his musical imagination that recurred infrequently in his remaining 14 years. The opening movement is a fine sonata-form structure, with both strong and lyrical themes. As one would expect, the piano plays a major role, functioning as a partner to the string quartet as a whole rather than as one of five individual components of the musical texture. Nevertheless the keyboard does not overshadow the string players, whose parts are written effectively and idiomatically. The movement is noble and strong, characterized by aggressive foursquare phrases and a compelling vitality throughout. Schumann demonstrates his mastery of song-like writing in the lovely slow movement. He casts this march as a rondo, with strongly contrasting episodes interrupting its tentative main idea.

​

Schumann's scherzo is dazzling. This whirlwind, bravura tour de force is constructed, remarkably, of ascending and descending scale passages. Both its trios provide rhythmic contrast; the second in particular contains probably the most challenging technical writing for strings in the work. 

​

The finale is one of the most extraordinary movements in the entire chamber music literature. Schumann teases us with G minor before firmly grounding his musical material in the home tonality of E-flat major. As in the first movement, he shows a gratifying command of form and musical matter throughout; the finale is a convincing sonata-rondo. But in this Allegro ma non troppo he saves his finest writing for last. In the splendid coda – another fugato – he not only concentrates his most technically secure contrapuntal writing, but also incorporates the main theme of the first movement. This coda bears proud testimony to his hard-won mastery of counterpoint.  Schumann weaves expertly, bringing his quintet to a brilliant, unified, and satisfying close.

 

Program Notes by Laurie Shulman ©2024

First North American Serial Rights Only

​

​

MUSICIANS OF THE WESTCHESTER PHILHARMONIC

Click here to view our roster of musicians. 

​

​

BOARD & ADMINISTRATION

Click here to view the Westchester Philharmonic’s Board and Administration 

​

​

FRIENDS OF THE PHIL

Join the "Phil Family" by supporting the Westchester Philharmonic today!

 

Contributions from friends like you play a vital role in our ability to bring you the great musical works you love, the world-class performers you admire, and the music in the classrooms that our children so richly deserve.

 

The easiest way to support the Phil is to have your credit card handy and make a secure contribution online here.

 

You may also mail a check made out to Westchester Philharmonic to:

​

Westchester Philharmonic

170 Hamilton Ave, Suit 350

White Plains, NY 10601

 

The Westchester Philharmonic is an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Tax ID #22-2474284.

​

​