Ah! Sweet bird of youth!
We’ll be casting fists full of seed and suet on this week’s “Music from Marlboro.”
Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings is still regarded as one of the most amazing feats by one the great composer prodigies in all of music. Mendelssohn completed the work in the fall of 1825, when he was 16 years-old. He cemented his reputation the very next year, in 1826, with his spritely overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Around the time of the overture – as a matter of fact, written just before – Mendelssohn produced a String Quintet in A major. The Octet had been conceived as a birthday gift for the composer’s friend and violin teacher Eduard Rietz. Rietz would have an unwitting influence on the Quintet, as well, as Mendelssohn replaced the slow movement six years later, following Rietz’s death, with a new one composed in his memory. It was in this form that the Quintet would be published in Beethoven’s home town of Bonn, Germany, in 1832.
We’ll hear it performed in a spin-off recording from the 1978 Marlboro Music Festival, featuring violinists Jaime Laredo and Ani Kavafian, violists Heiichiro Ohyama and Kim Kashkashian, and cellist Sharon Robinson.
Leoš Janáček was actually 70 by the time he came to write “Mladi,” or “Youth,” in 1924. The Czech master was at the height of his belated fame, having struck paydirt with a series of operas, including “Jenůfa,” “Káťa Kabanová ,” and “The Cunning Little Vixen.” The Sinfonietta, the “Glagolitic Mass,” and the String Quartet No. 2 “Intimate Letters” were yet to come.
“Mladi” was the outgrowth of a trip down memory lane, reflections on his younger days, which he was in the process of sharing for a projected biography. The work is a kind of musical reminiscence of his life as a schoolboy at the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in Old Brno, where he received his earliest education.
We’ll hear it performed by Marlboro wind players in 1997, including flutist Paula Robison, oboist Jennifer Kuhns, clarinetist Igor Begelman, clarinetist and bass clarinetist Michael Rusinek, bassoonist Daniel Matsukawa, and hornist Radovan Vlatković.
It’s an hour of youth, age, loss, gain, and reflection. Two composers exercise their burgeoning and undiminished creativity, at either end of their careers. Birds of a feather flock together, on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
BTW – Marlboro musicians will be in Philadelphia, at the American Philosophical Society, to perform works by Schubert, Handel, Brahms, and Kate Soper, tonight at 7:30 p.m. The concert is part of a Marlboro tour, with further stops in DC (on Thursday), Chicago (on Friday), and Boston (on Sunday). To learn more, visit marlboromusic.org.
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page
