The Britten Oboe Quartet - Nicholas Daniel oboe, Jacqueline Shave violin, Clare Finnimore viola, Caroline Dearnley cello

Britten: Fantasy Quartet opus 2
Krommer: Oboe Quartet in F
Schumann/Matthews: Mondnacht
Francaix: Quatuor for Cor Anglais and strings

Programme Notes  

Phantasy Quartet for oboe and strings, Op 2                                  Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

Andante alla marcia – allegro giusto – andante - tempo primo.

“...Mr. Britten is the most interesting new arrival since Walton, and I feel we should watch his work very carefully.” So the composer Victor Hely-Hutchinson informed his colleagues at the BBC of the impression made when Britten played some of his music to him in June 1933. Britten was still a student at the Royal College of Music in London, but was already beginning to attract favourable attention from some critics (as well as some less favourable from others, who were suspicious of his ‘cleverness’).

The Phantasy Quartet was written in 1932 and dedicated to the oboist Leon Goosens, who took part in a broadcast performance in August 1933. It was subsequently chosen for the annual festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, held the following year in Florence.

The single-movement phantasy featured prominently in English chamber music during the first decades of the twentieth century, thanks to the competitions inaugurated by Walter Willson Cobbett (1847-1937), a wealthy businessman and amateur musician with a particular enthusiasm for chamber music. He was especially keen on encouraging composers to revive the fantasy genre of Elizabethan and Jacobean consort music, in which a single movement embraced a number of contrasting sections based on a common theme. Britten had already tackled the form in a string quintet earlier the same year, and now turned to it again.

The work is based on three themes - the march, which gradually emerges on the three string instruments, and the oboe’s more lyrical theme, which sets it apart from the strings, establishing the role it will play in most of the piece. After an abruptly broken-off climax, a new quicker section brings in the third element, a nervy theme first played by the violin.

The long central passage begins with the oboe at the bottom of its range and the three string instruments at the top of theirs, inverting the oboe quartet’s usual sound-world, to intriguing effect. The oboe soon drops out to leave the strings in a pastoral frame of mind suggesting, at first, the influence of Britten’s teacher at the Royal College, John Ireland, but which later becomes more agitated and restless. As it calms down, the oboe re-enters, in characteristically florid, rhapsodic style against the strings’ murmuring, near-static, background.

A quickening pace, marked by the nervy theme from the start of the allegro giusto section, leads to the march’s climactic return which, in a mirror-image of the work’s opening, eventually recedes into the subdued mutterings from which it first appeared.

Oboe Quartet No 2 in F                                                                          Franz Krommer (1756-1831)

1. Allegro; 2. Menuetto; 3. Rondo.

Krommer was born František Kramář in what is now the Czech Republic. In 1785 he joined the great wave of Czech musicians throughout the eighteenth century who moved to Western Europe in search of better prospects. Like many of the others he went to Vienna, staying there for a year before taking a variety of posts in Hungary. He returned to settle permanently in Vienna in 1795 where he took up a number of court, church and theatre appointments, finally becoming the last official court composer to the Hapsburg emperors.

Two quartets for oboe and strings were published in his lifetime; a third came to light in a private manuscript collection in the Czech Republic in the early 1960s. Krommer’s oboe writing is remarkable for the range he expects of the player, treating the instrument almost like another violin. The second of the two published quartets begins with a graceful allegro. It is followed by an equally elegant minuet, whose central trio section is dominated by the violin, the oboe joining the viola and cello in an accompanying role. The concluding rondo is bright and chirpy, based on a theme of disarming simplicity and directness. Don’t get caught out by the ending!

‘Mondnacht’ (Moonlit Night), from Liederkreis, Op 39   Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

transcribed for oboe and string trio by Colin Matthews

One of Schumann’s best-loved songs, ‘Mondnacht’, is the fifth song in his Liederkreis (‘Song Cycle’), Op 39. Op 39 has words by Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857). The songs are unified by expressions of yearning and longing, bound together by a wealth of nature images. The day it was completed, Schumann wrote to his future wife, Clara: “The Eichendorff cycle is my most profoundly romantic music so far, and contains much of you in it.” Colin Matthews made this transcription for the Berlin Oboe Quartet, who gave the first performance at the 1990 Bath Festival.

Eichendorff’s poem reads, in translation:

It was as if the sky had silently kissed the earth so that, in a shower of blossom, it should dream only of him.

The breeze swept over the fields, the ears of corn waved gently, the woods rustled softly, the night was so bright with stars.

And my soul spread its wings wide and flew over the silent land, as if it were flying home.

Quartet for cor anglais and strings                                                     Jean Françaix (1912-1997)

1. Allegro vivace; 2. Andante tranquillo; 3. Vivo assai; 4. Andantino; 5. Allegro giocoso.

Born in Le Mans, Françaix began his composing career with a short piano piece written at the age of six. He had his first lessons from his father, a composer, pianist and director of Le Mans Conservatory, and from his mother, a renowned singing teacher. His early talent was recognised by Ravel, who singled out curiosity as his most outstanding gift.

His formal training continued at the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied piano, winning first prize in 1930, and composition with the great teacher Nadia Boulanger. He first attracted international attention with his Concertino for piano and orchestra, first performed at Baden-Baden in 1936. He was awarded the Légion d’Honneur in 1991. He wrote music in a wide variety of genres, including operas, ballets, film scores, orchestral music including several concertos for different instruments (among his last works was an Accordion Concerto dating from 1993), chamber and solo instrumental music, vocal and choral pieces.

Much of Françaix’s most familiar music aims to be witty and entertaining. It is no surprise that he claimed artistic ancestry from Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894), the composer who, above all others, gave French music permission to have fun, even at the height of its obsession with Wagner in the 1880s and 90s. His Cor Anglais Quartet was composed in 1970 and dedicated to the English oboist Janet Craxton, who took part in the first performance, in London in March the following year.

© Mike Wheeler, 2010