Leicester International Music Festival

The Berkeley Wind Ensemble

James Turnbull oboe, John Slack clarinet, Rosie Burton bassoon, Paul Cott horn with Elizabeth Burgess piano

Poulenc: Trio
Woolrich: Favola in Musica
Poulenc: Clarinet & Bassoon Sonata
Mozart: Piano and Wind Quintet

Programme Notes

Trio for oboe, bassoon and piano Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)

1. Lent – Presto; 2. Andante con moto; 3. Rondo. Très vif.

Poulenc always felt more at home writing for solo wind instruments than for strings. His appreciation of their vocal qualities echoes Stravinsky’s comment that they “breathe most attractively”. All but two of his published chamber works feature wind instruments.

The Trio is his first chamber work to bring together winds and his own instrument, the piano. As in his later Sextet, the combination was the perfect vehicle for his distinctive blend of perky humour and bitter-sweet, rather melancholy lyricism. He wrote the piece in 1926 and dedicated it to the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, whom he had met eight years before, “to show him as best I could my loving admiration”.

True to the anti-romantic spirit of the time, and following Ravel’s advice, Poulenc turned to classical models as a basis for the work’s structure. He claimed to have based the first movement on Haydn’s allegros, though it is more the stately rhythmic character of a baroque French overture which is hinted at in the slow introduction. The presto sets off at a jaunty pace – a combination of ebullient high spirits and elegant wit which seems the epitome of 1920s’ Parisian insouciance. Its progress is interrupted by a slower, more wistful central section, but the quicker music returns to shrug this off.

The andante is perhaps more Mozartian in feel, and Poulenc’s continual reminders to the oboist and bassoonist to produce a singing tone point up the music’s essential character, designed to offset the brittle sophistication of the outer movements.

Where Haydn was the model for the first movement, that for the finale is closer to home – the arch-classicist of nineteenth-century French music, Saint-Saëns, in particular the breezy, debonair scherzo of his Piano Concerto no 2. Here too, though, amid the rhythmic bounce and buoyant energy, there is room for broader, more song-like melodic writing in the contrasting episodes (Poulenc marks a prominent melody in the oboe part to be played ‘with charm’). Towards the end the music gradually accelerates, and the final bars are brisk and to the point.

Favola in musica 1 John Woolrich (born 1954)

John Woolrich is one of the most individual voices in contemporary British music. His work often explores haunted nocturnal landscapes dotted with fantastic machines of various kinds, and playing with artfully skewed memories of earlier music. Monteverdi, Purcell and Mozart are among the composers he has most often been drawn to in this respect.

This is the first of two works with the title Favola in musica (Story in Music), taken from the subtitle of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (Orpheus) of 1607, the earliest opera still regularly performed. Scored for oboe, clarinet and piano, it was commissioned by Nicholas Daniel, who gave the first performance with Joy Farrall and Julius Drake at the Cheltenham Festival in July 1990.

In spite of the title, it is actually based on another Monteverdi work, ‘O sia tranquilo il mare’, for two tenors and continuo, from his eighth book of madrigals. The text is a lover’s lament: he stands faithfully on the seashore waiting for his beloved, although there is never any sign of her return. The music is, in the composer’s words, a “retelling” of Monteverdi’s piece, taking in references to other lovers separated from their loved ones by the sea – Fiordiligi and Dorabella in Mozart’s opera Così fan Tutte, Penelope waiting for Ulysses’ return, in Monteverdi’s opera of that name, and Wagner’s Tristan.

Woolrich’s piece is also a tribute to the Venetian composer Luigi Nono (1924-1990), who died while it was being written.

Sonata for clarinet and bassoon Francis Poulenc

1. Allegro. Très rythmé; 2. Romance. Andante très doux; 3. Finale. Très animé – andante.

Poulenc’s Sonata for clarinet and bassoon dates from 1922, a few years earlier than the Trio that opened this concert. It is one of a number of short, snappy chamber works he composed in this early part of his career when, as his biographer Benjamin Ivry so aptly puts it, he “aspired to an eighteenth-century clarity but with the energy of a circus band”.

It is dedicated to Audrey Parr, who, four years earlier had created the designs for the ballet L’homme et son désir with music by Poulenc’s colleague Darius Milhaud. Milhaud described the Sonata as “a marvel of precision, gaiety, charm and grace”. In a letter to Charles Koechlin, with whom he had begun studying the year before, Poulenc wrote: “I'm pleased with it. The counterpoint is sometimes quite amusing.”

Stravinsky’s influence registers in the brisk, spiky opening movement, but there is also a vein of lyrical Gallic elegance that surfaces in the central Romance. Here the bassoon plays more of an accompanying role, and this movement is recalled briefly in the middle of the finale, interrupting an otherwise typical piece of knockabout fun. At the end Poulenc enjoys the Haydnesque joke of teasing the audience as to when the piece has actually finished.

Quintet in E flat for piano and wind, K452 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

1. Largo – allegro moderato; 2. Larghetto; 3. Rondo. Allegretto.

Mozart’s piano and wind Quintet is a pioneering and unique masterpiece. He wrote it in March 1784 for his benefit concert at Vienna’s Burgtheater the following month. In a letter to his father, Leopold, he remarked that it had been “exceptionally well received”, and went on to say “I myself consider it the best thing I have ever written in my life”.

The first movement’s slow introduction is a broad, spacious affair, relaxed, good-natured, and setting the tone for the whole work. There is dialogue, not rivalry, between the instruments, the allegro moderato being driven forward by the gentle insistence of the opening rhythmic figure.

The wind instruments launch the second movement with one of those wistfully smiling tunes which Mozart was able to conjure up so often. A moment of drama half-way through darkens the mood; although it quickly subsides, underlying tensions remain to the end of the movement.

The rondo finale is all charm and good-humour; even the central C minor episode is more thoughtful than tragic. The movement culminates in a ‘cadenza in tempo’, with all five instruments, starting with the oboe, entering one after the other - the one moment in the quintet which takes the work to the bounds of chamber music and looks over into the realm of the concerto.