Trois pièces brèves Jacques Ibert (1890-1962)
1. Allegro; 2. Andante; 3. Assez lent – allegro scherzando.
Ibert is best known for the entertaining Divertissement for small orchestra which he put together from the score he wrote in 1929 for a production of Eugene Labiche’s classic French farce An Italian straw hat. He wrote a large number of orchestral works, including the evocative Escales (Ports of Call), and among his more unlikely pieces is a three-movement orchestral symphonic poem based on Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol. For many years he was Director of the Villa Medici in Rome, to which the Paris Conservatoire sent the winners of its annual Prix de Rome for a further two years’ study; he had been a prize-winner himself in 1919.
His Trois pièces brèves (Three Short Pieces) date from 1930. The first piece opens with some energetic scene-setting, hinting at the oboe’s carefree tune which follows. The andante mostly consists of a gently lyrical duet for flute and clarinet, in which the oboe and bassoon join for the last three bars. A short rhetorical slow introduction introduces the third piece, the main part of which alternates between a perky theme, starting on the clarinet, and an elegant waltz which ends the work with an exuberant flourish.
Wind Quintet, Op 10 Pavel Haas (1899-1944)
1. Preludio. Andante ma vivace; 2.Preghiera. Misterioso e triste; 3. Ballo eccentrico. Ritmo marcato; 4. Epilogo. Maestoso
Pavel Haas was born in Brno, the capital of Moravia (the eastern part of the present-day Czech Republic), and studied with Leoš Janáček at the Conservatoire there. After graduation he could work on composition only in his spare time, at first, but after his marriage in 1935 he was able to devote himself full-time to composing and private teaching.
As a composer he was influenced by Moravian folk music and traditional Jewish chant, as well as the scoring techniques of composers such as Stravinsky and Honegger. Among his most successful early works are his Second String Quartet (subtitled ‘From the Monkey Mountains’ - referring to the highlands straddling the Bohemian/Moravian border), and his tragi-comic opera The Charlatan, for which he wrote his own libretto. The quartet is one of many works reflecting his interest in jazz, including as it does an added percussion part in the last movement, a feature of the score that outraged some members of the audience at its première in 1925, but which Haas later withdrew.
In 1941, he was deported to the Nazi prison camp at Terezín, from where he was sent to Auschwitz in October 1944. Most of the music he completed there is lost, with only a male-voice chorus, a group of four songs and his Study for string orchestra surviving.
Composed in 1929, his Wind Quintet contains undeniable echoes of Janáček, as well as of Jewish synagogue chant and Czech folk song. After the rustic-sounding Prelude, Preghiera (Prayer) sounds a meditative note, before the perky Eccentric Dance of the third movement. Epilogue ends the Quintet in a pensive mood.
Impromptu No 2, for flute, oboe and clarinet Thea Musgrave (born 1928)
Born in Barnton, Midlothian, Thea Musgrave settled in the USA in 1972. She was composer in residence at the Leicester International Music Festival in 2004.
During a long and distinguished career, she has been particularly successful as a composer of chamber and orchestral music, including several concertos and concerto-like works, and operas. In many of her instrumental works, in fact, an operatic principle can be heard at work, with individual instruments playing out a dramatic scenario.
The second of her two wind chamber works entitled Impromptu was commissioned by the Department of Music, University College, Cardiff, in association with the Welsh Arts Council. It was composed in the summer of 1970, during her first visit to Santa Barbara, as visiting professor at the University of California.
She describes it as “light-hearted and brilliant” and says that it is “notated in such a way that it can be played with considerable rhythmic freedom”. Its five distinct sections play continuously. The work is framed by an introduction and coda in which the three instruments are given roughly equal roles. In between come three sections in which each of the instruments in turn takes the lead: the lyrical ‘Andante Espressivo’ is led by the flute, ‘Drammatico’ is dominated by the extraordinarily agile and wide-ranging clarinet part, while the oboe is the predominant voice in the section marked ‘Leggiero e Fantastico’ (light and fantastic). The coda draws the work to an unexpectedly quiet conclusion.
Prélude, Menuet and Rigaudon from Le tombeau de Couperin
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) transcribed for wind quintet by Mason Jones
Neo-classicism in music was not yet a craze, still less a formulated concept, when Ravel began work on Le tombeau de Couperin. Earlier composers, such as Grieg and Tchaikovsky, had paid tribute to the 18th century in works like the Holberg suite and Variations on a rococo theme respectively, but the ‘back-to-Bach’ spirit of the 1920s had yet to take hold of composers like Stravinsky and Hindemith.
Writing to a friend in October 1914 Ravel mentions ideas for a ‘French suite’ (“not what you think; it won’t contain La Marseillaise”) for piano. Completed in 1917, it consisted of a prelude, fugue, three dance movements and a final toccata. Two years later Ravel orchestrated four of the movements (omitting the fugue and toccata), slightly changing their order. [Mason Jones’s transcription for wind ensemble substitutes the Fugue for the Forlane of the orchestral version].
‘Le tombeau de Couperin’ literally means ‘Couperin’s tomb’, but ‘monument’ is probably nearer to the intentions behind the work. François Couperin (1668-1733) was one of the leading figures in French music in the early eighteenth century. Later generations of French musicians admired his music for the way it embodied the classic Gallic virtues of grace, clarity and elegance. Although Ravel transcribed a forlane from one of his Concerts royaux in order to prepare himself for writing his piece, it was as much to the spirit of eighteenth-century French music in general, as to Couperin in particular, that he was paying tribute. The work also links into the tradition, particularly common in the eighteenth century, of composers writing music in honour of deceased colleagues. François Couperin himself wrote works in memory of both Lully and Corelli.
Another impulse behind the work is revealed by the fact that Ravel dedicated each movement to the memory of a friend killed in the First World War. In erecting his monument both to them and to classical French culture, he quietly asserted his belief in civilised values amid a world which seemed to have turned its back on them.
© Mike Wheeler, 2011