It’s a mercurial November Sunday here in Princeton, one hour overcast and gloomy, the next blue sky and amorphous clouds, with perhaps an interlude of rain expected this afternoon. Optimal conditions for a pilgrimage to Solebury, PA (outside New Hope), at 3 p.m. to hear Concordia Chamber Players perform Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Phantasy Quintet.”
It’s not that Vaughan Williams didn’t know how to spell “fantasy.” His “Phantasy” was one of a number of works commissioned from England’s great composers by Walter Wilson Cobbett. Cobbett was a businessman and amateur violinist whose dual passions were chamber music and music of the Elizabethan era. The “phantasy” was Cobbett’s musical folly, an eccentric answer to the fancies and fantasias of Byrd, Gibbons, and Purcell.
Cobbett’s phantasies are short and sweet at around 12 minutes in length. Personally, I could listen to Vaughan Williams all day, but the Concordia concert will also include Johannes Brahms’ String Quintet in G major, Op. 111. Very cool.
The program will open with a rare bit of chamber music by a composer who liked to think big – Anton Bruckner. Bruckner composed his String Quintet in F major in 1878-79, between his Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6. This is civilized and beautiful music. In 1884, the Viennese critic Theodor Helm wrote: “While the finale of the Bruckner Quintet – at least the effect of first-time listening – is in doubt, the three remaining movements are of the highest interest, especially in the happy and original invention of the motives. …But the pearl of the quintet is the Adagio (in G-flat major), one of the noblest, most enlightened, tenderest and most beautiful in sound, written in modern times […]. What an exceedingly deep, flowing in a truly ‘infinite’ stream of emotion! This adagio looks rather as if it were a play, only now found in Beethoven’s estate, from the last time of the master and animated by his fullest inspiration. This is probably the highest praise that can be said about the composition of a living sound artist, and we are not afraid to say it.”
The entire quintet runs to some 43 minutes. Concordia will perform the sublime Adagio, around 14 minutes in length.
The venue is the hill-top, timber-trussed Trinity Episcopal Church, located at 6587 Upper York Rd., again, in Solebury, PA. I can’t think of a cheerier venue for a concert of this kind. Anticipating a phantastic afternoon!
For more information, visit concordiaplayers.org.
Leave a Reply