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First Piano Quintet Schumann or Before?

Quick! Who wrote the first piano quintet?

The combo of keyboard and four string instruments began to exert its pull on composers as far back as the 18th century, with artists like Luigi Boccherini experimenting with works for piano and string quartet. More commonly, the piano was joined by violin, viola, cello, and double bass. Think Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. Mozart and Beethoven both wrote quintets for piano and winds (oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon).

But it wasn’t until 1842 that the genre firmly took root with Robert Schumann’s chamber music masterpiece, the Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 44. It was Schumann who brought together the modern piano, with its increased power and dynamic range, with the established string quartet (two violins, viola, and cello) that had become the most common and confessional of chamber music combinations. The result allowed for the unprecedented exploration of a much broadened musical vocabulary that spanned confessional intimacy and public declaration. The innovation was immediately recognized and embraced as the quintessential Romantic chamber music form.

Hear Schumann’s pioneering Piano Quintet on today’s Noontime Concert on The Classical Network, as we present a performance by the Manhattan Chamber Players. The program, titled “Breaking New Ground,” will also include Mozart’s String Quintet in C major, K. 515, from 1787. Again, Boccherini wrote a lot of string quintets, but his preference had been to augment the classical quartet through the addition of a second cello. It was Mozart who established the more common practice of doubling the violas. K. 515 became the inspiration for one of Schubert’s greatest works, the String Quintet in C major of 1828. This concert took place at Manhattan’s Baruch Performing Arts Center on April 26, 2017.

Then stick around – at 2:00, we’ll hear a complete performance of Bedřich Smetana’s sprawling collection of nationalistic tableaux, “Má Vlast” (“My Country”). There’s more to this cycle of six symphonic poems than the well-worn “Vltava” (a.k.a. “The Moldau”). Each movement evokes some aspect of Czech history, legend, and countryside.

I hope you’ll join me for Mozart, Schumann, Smetana, and more, this Tuesday from 12 to 4 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

February 27, 2018
Richard Wetz: Rediscovering a Lost Romantic

When it comes to the music of Richard Wetz, all bets are off.

This unsung German composer has been dismissed as a second-rate Bruckner who made some questionable political choices toward the end of his life, under the mistaken impression that it would help to advance his career. (He smoked like a Camry and died in 1935, a month shy of his 60th birthday.) Admittedly, he was also a little too enthusiastic about the whole nationalism thing. He considered Germany’s defeat in World War I a humiliation, so I guess at least we know where he was coming from, even if it seems, as would be the case with so many artists of the time and place, that he sold his soul to the Devil.

His music is grander than grand and plenty solemn, a last gasp of Old School German Romanticism. The Nazis loved Bruckner (who died in 1896 and likely would have been appalled to know it), but for some reason, they had very little use for Wetz. The composer was enlisted to write some occasional works, but his symphonies went nowhere. Ironically, for someone who was so outspoken in his love of country, he was perceived as something of a loner. He was certainly reclusive and felt he could only create within the comfortable surroundings of his home. By extension, he had no interest in contemporary musical developments. He kept right on composing as if it were 1880.

We’ll sample some of Wetz’s music this afternoon, alongside works by fellow birthday celebrants Frank Bridge and Anton Reicha, and performances by pianist Lazar Berman, soprano Emma Kirkby, and conductor Witold Rowicki. Here’s hoping today’s playlist “Wetz” your appetite, from 4 to 7 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Clockwise from left: Richard Wetz, Frank Bridge, and Anton Reicha

February 26, 2018
Northern Lights Music Klami & Tveitt

“The northern lights can be much more than the superficial play of colors in the sky,” observed the Finnish composer Uuno Klami. “They can be an expression of the infinite loneliness of the human spirit.”

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” Klami’s “Northern Lights” (1948) will be one of two works inspired by the atmospheric phenomena, written by composers who would have been intimately acquainted with them.

Klami’s melancholy observation seems almost superficial alongside the life experience of Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt. In 1970, Tveitt suffered an unfathomable loss, when fire swept through his farmhouse in Nordheimsund, destroying most of his unpublished manuscripts – 300 pieces, stored in wooden chests – fully 4/5ths of his compositional output. By extension, and not surprisingly, it also destroyed his ability to compose. He succumbed to alcoholism and died a broken man, with little hope of being remembered, in 1981.

Two of Tveitt’s piano concertos, Nos. 2 & 6, seem to have been lost forever in the conflagration. Another, No. 3, was reconstructed from a broadcast recording. Orchestral parts to the Piano Concerto No. 4 (1947) survived, along with the score to a two-piano version, and again a recording, so that the work could be restored.

The work, subtitled “Aurora Borealis,” falls into three movements – “The Northern Lights awaken above the autumn colors;” “Glittering in the winter heavens,” and “Fading away in the bright night of spring.”

I hope you’re moved to join me for “Aural Borealis,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

February 25, 2018
Schumann & Mendelssohn: Musical Friendship

On this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll have works by two composers who were definitely BFF.

Though for some reason I always peg Robert Schumann as significantly younger, he and Felix Mendelssohn were in fact born only a year apart (Mendelsson in 1809 and Schumann in 1810).

Schumann’s ideas were more progressive, for one, at least on the surface. Mendelssohn, more of a classicist, achieved superstardom early as one of music’s great child prodigies. The two met in 1835. Schumann was a struggling artist with ambitions to become a piano virtuoso – ambitions frustrated by a hand injury he sustained a few years earlier. He was in the process of composing a string of piano masterworks that would help cement his lasting fame.

Mendelssohn was from a well-to-do family, the grandson of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and currently Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He had given his first concert at the age of nine and composed two of his most astonishing masterpieces while yet in his teens (the Octet for Strings in 1825, at the age of 16, and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1826). What the two men shared in common, aside from a passion for music, were an intellectual curiosity and a love of literature.

Needless to say, they became fast friends. Mendelssohn conducted Schumann’s orchestral works, they entertained themselves by playing chamber music, and they engaged in engrossing discussions about the nature and direction of their art in the wake of Beethoven. It was a friendship that would last for the remainder of their lives.

Mendelssohn died in 1847 at the age of 38; Schumann, who struggled with mental illness since at least 1833, began to exhibit psychotic behavior and asked to be placed in an institution in 1854. He died there two years later at the age of 46.

Schumann’s “Andante and Variations” was composed in 1843, in the wake of two chamber music masterworks, the Piano Quintet and the Piano Quartet, both in the key of E flat major. For the composer, sadly, three times was not to be a charm. Part of the problem was the unusual instrumentation, which calls for two pianos, two cellos, and horn. Early performances in the Schumann home were so loud, it may have contributed to his disgust with the piece. At Mendelssohn’s suggestion, he arranged it for two pianos alone. It was only in 1868 that Johannes Brahms, another of Schumann’s friends, recognized the worth of the original version and gave its first public performance with the composer’s widow, Clara, in 1868.

We’ll hear it today, performed at the Marlboro Music Festival in 1985 by husband-and-wife pianists Claude Frank and Lilian Kallir, cellists Melissa Meell and Peter Stumpf, and hornist Julie Landsman.

We’ll also have Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in A minor, written in 1827, a few months after Beethoven’s death. Mendelssohn was 18 years-old at the time and clearly intoxicated by Beethoven’s late quartets, which had only recently been published. Though certainly influenced by the deceased master, Mendelssohn’s own essay in the form is quite at odds with the introspection of Beethoven’s Op. 135. In contrast, he infuses the quartet’s Classical structure with a passionate Romanticism. He also explores the possibilities of cyclic form more exhaustively than any other composer, possibly, before César Franck. We’ll hear it performed at the 1995 Marlboro Music Festival by violinists Lisa-Beth Lambert and Hiroko Yajima, violist Annemarie Moorcroft, and cellist Sophie Shao.

I hope you’ll join me for works by Schumann and Mendelssohn, on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

Robert Schumann (left) and his “brother from another mother”

February 21, 2018
Gaspar Cassadó Rediscovered on The Classical Network

¡Hola!

The centerpiece of today’s Noontime Concert on The Classical Network will be a chamber music rarity by the great Spanish cellist Gaspar Cassadó (1897-1966). Cassadó had the advantage of having been born into a musical household in Barcelona. His father, a composer, organist, and piano salesman, shepherded his development and even moved the family to Paris so that he and his elder brother, Augustin, a violinist, could take advantage of the artistic climate there.

At the age of nine, Cassadó was heard in recital by Pablo Casals, and though Casals was at the height of his career and very much in demand, he took the boy on as one of only three pupils. Needless to say, Casals’ influence made a deep impression on the young cellist. Cassadó also studied composition with Maurice Ravel and Manuel de Falla.

Like the violinist Fritz Kreisler, Cassadó remained sheepish about some of his original miniatures in the styles of other composers and gained a degree of notoriety when it was discovered that many of the works he had been attributing to others, such as Frescobaldi, Boccherini, and Schubert, were in fact his own.

Casals performed and conducted a number of Cassadó’s acknowledged works, and teacher and student often appeared together in concert. However, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Casals fled the country, effectively abandoning his career, while Cassadó chose to continue to perform extensively. Though Cassadó stayed out of Spain until after World War II and performed only once in fascist Germany, Casals publicly disavowed him in a letter to the New York Times. It’s thought that this irreparably damaged Cassadó’s career, though the two cellists later reconciled.

Among Cassadó’s most frequently performed works are his “Rapsodia Catalana,” his Suite for Solo Cello, and “Requiebros,” which was championed by Casals.

We will hear Cassadó’s Piano Trio in C major, performed by artists of the Lenape Chamber Ensemble, from a concert given at Delaware Valley University on July 22. Also on the program is Mozart’s Horn Quintet in E-flat major and Tchaikovsky’s string sextet, “Souvenir de Florence.”

The Lenape Chamber Ensemble is made up of hornist David Jolley, violinists Nancy Bean and Cyrus Beroukhim, violists Catherine Beeson and Brett Deubner, cellist Arash Amini, and pianist Marcantonio Barone.

The ensemble’s next concerts – featuring works by Haydn, Poulenc, and Schubert – will take place at 8:15 p.m. on March 2 at Upper Tinicum Lutheran Church, 188 Upper Tinicum Church Road, in Upper Black Eddy, PA, and at 3 p.m. on March 4 at Delaware Valley University’s Life Sciences Auditorium, 700 E. Butler Street and Route 611, in Doylestown. To learn more, visit lenapechamberensemble.org.

For today, I hope you’ll join me for music by Mozart, Cassadó, and Tchaikovsky, at 12:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Casals performs Cassadó’s “Requiebros:”

February 20, 2018

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