With summer vacation winding down – and some even back to school already, poor dears – we’ll take one last trip to the beach. On today’s Noontime Concert on The Classical Network, it’s another program from the Cape May Music Festival.
The New York Chamber Ensemble will present “Folk Dance in Chamber Music,” with repertoire including works by Béla Bartók, Luigi Boccherini, Astor Piazzolla, and Antonin Dvořák, alongside arrangements by Robert Beaser.
Following the concert broadcast, stick around for Rick Sowash’s “Cape May Suite.” Sowash, who makes his home in Ohio, fondly recalls vacationing in South Jersey with his family.
Then cast off with music by the Breton composer Jean Cras. Like Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Albert Roussel, Cras was a navy man. Impressions of the sea saturate many of his works, a number of which were actually written in a ship’s cabin. We’ll hear his symphonic suite, “Journal de bord,” which, like Debussy’s “La mer,” attempts to convey the moods of the sea at different hours of the day.
Rimsky-Korsakov had retired from active service by the time he came to write his Quintet for Piano and Winds. Even so, he had been appointed to the civilian post of Inspector of Naval Bands. We’ll hear a performance of Rimsky’s cheery quintet featuring members of the Munich Residenz Quintet and Wolfgang Sawallisch at the keyboard.
I believe it was Igor Stravinsky who once said, “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.” No one is going to claim the Flemish composer Paul Gilson’s “De Zee” (“The Sea”) is one of the world’s great masterpieces, but clearly there is something to it for Debussy to have borrowed so shamelessly from it when he came to write “La mer.”
Jacques Ibert served in the Navy during World War I. Before our time is out, we’ll travel to destinations around the Mediterranean – in Italy, North Africa, and Spain – with Ibert’s symphonic suite “Escales” (“Ports of Call”).
You won’t have to join the Navy to see the world. We’ve got one in every port, this afternoon from 12 to 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
