Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Marlboro Music Festival

Ravel, Les Six, and Marlboro’s French Trios

Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio in A minor had been gestating for at least six years before he finally sat down to write the work over the summer of 1914. At first, progress was slow, but when war was declared in August, Ravel put on a burst of speed to finish the piece so that he could he could do his patriotic duty and enlist in the French army. He was rejected from the infantry and the air force on account of his diminutive size and precarious health, but he learned to drive a truck and cared for the wounded at Verdun on the Western Front.

We’ll hear Ravel’s Piano Trio on this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” alongside a couple of other trios by composers of the next generation – Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud – both of whom had complex reactions to Ravel’s music.

Poulenc and Milhaud together formed one-third of Les Six, that collective of French composers who rose to prominence in Paris in the late ‘teens and 1920s. Each had his or her own distinctive style – the group’s other members included Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Germaine Tailleferre, and Louis Durey – but together they displayed a united front in resistance to the so-called Impressionists (Debussy and Ravel) and most of all Richard Wagner. Any trace of Wagnerian portentousness would be blown out between the tent flaps, as the spirit of the circus, café and cabaret came to dominate a new aesthetic.

You’ll hear it embodied in Poulenc’s Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano (1926), which begins very somberly indeed, before taking off with irrepressible joie de vivre. The central movement is both elegant and wistful in a manner characteristic of this composer, and the cheeky finale is presented with an ironic smile.

Interestingly, Milhaud’s Suite for Clarinet, Violin and Piano (1936) revisits material from incidental music he composed for Jean Anouilh’s play “Le Voyageur sans bagages” (“The Traveler without Luggage”), about an amnesiac World War I soldier. The piece falls into four movements: “Ouverture;” “Divertissement;” “Jeu;” and “Introduction et Final.” As the titles suggest, much of the music is sassy and full of play, and it is to be wondered what Ravel, a veteran of the Great War would have thought of it.

I hope you’ll join me for a trio of French trios, performed by musicians of the legendary Marlboro Music Festival, this Wednesday evening at 6 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical NetworkWWFM The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

PHOTO: Ravel in uniform

October 4, 2017
Kodály and Dohnányi at Marlboro

Tut tut! Gentlemen! Don’t you know that you’re the future of Hungarian music?

On the next “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll hear works by Zoltán Kodály (his Serenade, Op. 12, with Karina Canellakis and Augustin Hadelich, violins, and Michael Tree, viola) and Ernő Dohnányi (the Piano Quintet in C minor, Op. 1, with Stephanie Brown, piano, Joseph Genualdi and Mayuki Fukuhara, violins, Philipp Naegele, viola, and Lisa Lancaster, cello).

Hungary for chamber music? Join me for archive performances from the legendary Marlboro Music Festival, this Wednesday evening at 6 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

PHOTO: Dohnányi (left) and Kodály duke it out over a cowering Béla Bartók in 1900

September 27, 2017
Shostakovich & Jewish Folk Music

Wrote Dmitri Shostakovich, “Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it; it is multifaceted – it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears…. This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be….”

Keeping that in mind, this week on “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll hear Shostakovich’s song cycle “From Jewish Folk Poetry.” The work was conceived in 1948 at great personal risk to the composer (who, by the way, was not Jewish). Under the Zhdanov decree, Shostakovich had already been denounced for the second time with charges of “formalism” for his alleged embrace of decadent Western tendencies in his music. Furthermore, it was a time of heightened anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, as Stalin targeted Jewish intellectuals and artists. For these reasons, Shostakovich’s songs were not given their first public performance until 1955, two years after Stalin’s death. The first eight of them were performed at a private birthday celebration at the composer’s home in September of 1948. Shostakovich would incorporate Jewish music, whether as an act of solidarity or a gesture of subversion, in many of his major works.

“From Jewish Folk Poetry” was toured around the United States by Marlboro musicians in 1968. We’ll hear a 1967 performance from the Marlboro Music Festival, featuring soprano Benita Valente, mezzo-soprano Glenda Maurice, and tenor John Humphrey, with Luis Batlle at the keyboard.

Then we’ll turn to a String Quintet in A major, by a composer Shostakovich knew very well, Alexander Glazunov. Glazunov, who was director of the Petrograd Conservatory, saw to it that the talented young Shostakovich be allowed to bypass preparatory theoretical courses and enter directly into the conservatory’s composition program. In general, Shostakovich was lukewarm on his mentor’s music, but he had very kind words for the man and expressed admiration for his scherzos.

The String Quintet is full of serene lyricism, generously melodic and beautiful. We’ll hear it performed at Marlboro in 1982, with Sylvie Gazeu and Ernestine Schor, violins; Toby Hoffman, viola; and Peter Wiley and David Soyer, cellos.

That’s an hour of music from Russia, with love, on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

PHOTO: Once and future cellists of the Guarneri Quartet (David Soyer passing the bow to former student Peter Wiley in 2001) will be heard in music by Alexander Glazunov on this week’s “Music from Marlboro”

September 20, 2017
Marlboro Music Lives On WWFM

Just because the summer festival is over doesn’t mean that the music goes away. Representative musicians from Marlboro tour throughout the year.

This week on “Music from Marlboro” we’ll hear performances from two concerts given at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Jennifer Johnson Cano, Mezzo Soprano, will appear in Ottorino Respighi’s “Il Tramonto” (“The Sunset”) for vocalist and string quartet, on a text of Shelley, recorded in 2010. Then violinists Joseph Lin and Judy Kang, violist Richard O’Neill, and cellist David Soyer will perform Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor, from 2002.

The program will open with Maurice Ravel’s “Introduction and Allegro” for harp, flute, clarinet and string quartet, captured at the Marlboro Music Festival’s Persons Auditorium in July of 2010.

I hope you’ll join me for another “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

August 30, 2017
Marlboro Music Festival: Casals & Hindemith

This week on “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll sample from two authorized recordings made at the Marlboro Music Festival and issued commercially on Columbia Records and Sony compact disc.

Legendary cellist Pablo Casals was affiliated with the Marlboro festival for the last 13 years of his life, from 1960 to 1973. We’ll hear Casals conduct Marlboro musicians in one of the orchestral suites of Johann Sebastian Bach. It was Casals who, at the age of 13, rediscovered Bach’s cello suites in a thrift shop in Barcelona. His 1939 recordings established the works as cornerstones of the modern repertoire. Casals’ loving, humanistic interpretations of Bach’s orchestral works (as well as those of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann) form a remarkable capstone to an enviable career.

We’ll also listen to Paul Hindemith’s Octet for Winds and Strings, composed in 1957-1958. The work is scored for clarinet, bassoon, French horn, violin, two violas, cello, and double bass. Played by an impromptu group of eight talented Marlboro musicians, it’s as fine a performance of the piece as you’re ever likely to hear.

I hope you’ll join me for “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

August 23, 2017

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