I hope you’re in the mood for some licorice stick. On this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” our program will be bookended by two works for clarinet trio.
For Darius Milhaud, as a member of that loose collective known as “Les six,” tomfoolery and high-spirits were a matter of course. Milhaud’s Suite for Violin, Clarinet and Piano, composed in 1936, revisits material from incidental music written for Jean Anouilh’s play “Le Voyageur sans bagages” (“The Traveler without Luggage”). The play deals with an amnesiac World War I soldier attempting to reestablish his identity. Milhaud might seem like an unlikely source for such a serious subject – but then the drama turns out to be a comedy!
The piece falls into four movements: “Ouverture;” “Divertissement;” “Jeu” (literally “Game”); and “Introduction et Final.” We’ll hear it performed at the 1971 Marlboro Music Festival by violinist Marilyn Dubow, clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, and pianist David Effron.
All things considered, Beethoven tended to be a little more severe than Milhaud. If there is play in his music, it is the play of a cat, pursuing a musical idea relentlessly, batting it around, adopting an air of calm, and then tearing off its appendages and hammering it through the floorboards.
Even if that is not your idea of a good time, there is plenty to smile about in his Trio in B-flat, Op. 11. Sometimes identified by the nickname “Gassenhauer,” the work borrows a theme for its third movement set of variations from the drama giocoso (literally, drama with jokes) “L’amor marinaro ossia il corsaro” by Joseph Weigl. Weigl, by the way, was Haydn’s godson.
“Gassenhauser” denotes a certain kind of popular music, a tune picked up by your average man in the street, and sung or whistled oblivious to its origins. The melody was so well-known, in fact, that it was also treated by Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Niccolo Paganini, among others.
You’ll sometimes hear the trio performed with a violin in place of the clarinet – the cello is also sometimes swapped out for a bassoon – but for our purposes this evening we’ll go with the distinctive timbres of the sanctioned version for clarinet trio. Again, Richard Stoltzman will be the clarinetist, alongside cellist Alain Meunier, and pianist (and Marlboro co-founder) Rudolf Serkin.
In between, we’ll experience something completely different. Henri Dutilleux meticulously crafted his seven-movement string quartet, “Ainsi la nuit” (Thus the Night), between 1973 and 1976, after intensive studies of the works of Beethoven, Bartok, and Webern, and a series of preliminary sketches he called “Nights.” All the hard work certainly paid off – the quartet was embraced as a modern masterpiece – though, to my ears, I’ve yet to find any humor in it.
We’ll hear a performance from Marlboro in 2001. Joseph Lin and Harumi Rhodes will be the violinists, Richard O’Neill the violist, and Marcy Rosen the cellist.
It’s said that licorice is very good for the digestion. You’ll find plenty to chew on, on this week’s “Music from Marlboro. Join me this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page
