ROSSETTI ENSEMBLE
Sara Trickey (violin) Sara-Jane Bradley (viola)
Tim Lowe (cello) John Lenehan (piano)
Wednesday 20th May at St Mary’s Church, Dorchester
Programme
Piano Quartet in G minor K478 Wolfgang Mozart (1756 – 1791)
I: Allegro II: Andante III: Rondo
This work belongs to the autumn of 1785. Mozart had moved to Vienna four years earlier, imagining with typical optimism that the rich and varied musical life of the capital city would present so many more opportunities to him than had the comparatively narrow provincial centre of Salzburg. If his expectations were not wholly fulfilled, by 1785 he had established himself as an important figure on the Viennese musical scene, respected by the musical public and attracting the interest of the all-important aristocracy. His new surroundings stimulated his creative powers, he received a steady number of commissions and publishers were interested in his work. One of these was Anton Hoffmeister, a prolific and popular composer who, having published many of his own works, extended his catalogue to include music by his most esteemed contemporaries. Hoffmeister commissioned Mozart to write a set of three piano quartets, tonight’s work being the first of these and in fact the only one to be completed. Sales were so slow that the publisher cancelled the commission for the other two.
Works for this grouping were not at all common in the 1780s; those that were available were written largely with amateur players in mind and often seemed like piano pieces with the strings joining in some of the tunes. This work of Mozart’s moves into a very different sphere of subtlety and sophistication. All four instruments take an equal share in the musical discussion and the material and its handling are as imaginative and skillful as that found in Mozart’s contemporary chamber works for more conventional musical groupings. The viola was Mozart’s stringed instrument of choice; no wonder he was able to exploit this extra middle voice to enrich the whole texture.
Ma mère l’oye Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937)
I: Pavane – ‘Sleeping Beauty’ II: Little Tom Thumb
III: Little Ugly Girl, Empress of the Pagodas
IV: Conversation of Beauty and the Beast V: The Fairy Garden
It is not at all unknown for composers, after the completion of a major work, to turn to something smaller and simpler. So it was that in 1908, after finishing ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, his dark and sinister virtuosic piano work, Ravel turned to something altogether different. ‘Ma mère l’oye’ is a set of five short character pieces for piano duet, deliberately written to be within the technical capabilities of young players. The dedicatees were the son and daughter of his friends the Godebskis, one of whom wrote some thirty years later “Ravel was my favourite [among my parents’ friends] because he used to tell me marvellous stories. I would sit on his knee and indefatigably he would begin ‘Once upon a time…’ But neither my brother nor I was of an age to appreciate the dedication as we saw it as something that involved hard work.” We don’t know the standard at which the young Godebskis played but certainly the technical demands of the work are quite modest. Not that the composer is in any way ‘writing down’ to his young friends; the fairy stories are evoked with all the skill and precision that he devoted to all his work.
In our last concert we heard some of Ravel’s piano music dressed in new instrumental clothing at the hands of a sensitive and accomplished arranger. It will be most interesting to hear these pieces arranged for piano quartet by tonight’s pianist, John Lenehan.
I N T E R V A L
Piano Quartet in G minor Opus 25 Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897)
I: Allegro II: Intermezzo – Allegro ma non troppo/Animato
III: Andante con moto IV: Rondo all Zingarese – Presto
If we are able confidently to date with accuracy the composition of the first two of tonight’s works, the same cannot be said of the Brahms quartet. It was often the case that Brahms’ major works had protracted and sometimes quite difficult gestations (the details of which he saw no reason to reveal), this being especially so when he was exploring new genres of composition. In the mid-1850s we know that he was at work on a piano quartet in C# minor, but this was then shelved for twenty years, reappearing in 1875 in a new key and having been largely rewritten. It is reckoned that tonight’s work was first planned in about 1857 and then worked at over the following four years. The first performance was given in Hamburg in 1861, the pianist on this occasion being the composer’s close friend Clara Schumann.
The late 1850s were an unsettled period for Brahms. Interest in his early work, largely stimulated by the enthusiasm shown by his idol Robert Schumann, was hugely encouraging; but within months of their first meeting, Schumann’s mental health was in serious and rapid decline. If this had no effect on Brahms’ growing fame, it had a profound effect on the young man’s emotions, especially as he remained close to the Schumann family throughout the sad years leading up to (and beyond) Schumann’s death in an asylum in 1856. This was a calamity which was to overshadow Brahms for the rest of his life. Still in his early twenties, he was beginning a career as a pianist but had remained based in his native Hamburg to bolster his unsteady income by teaching and choral conducting. It wasn’t until 1862 that he was to fulfil a long-held ambition and visit Vienna, the city which he immediately fell in love with and soon made his permanent home. Despite his reluctance to betray the emotional stimulus for his music, it is clear that this turbulent period had a profound effect upon the music he was producing.
This was the climate in which Opus 25 was created. The reverence for formal structures on which his great predecessors based their works had already been demonstrated in his early piano sonatas; in the quartet this reverence is both entrenched and also permitted to develop in very personal ways. The four movements follow broadly classical outlines; the first movement especially uses traditional sonata form with a large number of contrasting ideas closely argued. The second movement takes something from the well-worn minuet and trio idea but moves beyond the formality of the dance structure and emphasises the contrast of the ‘trio’ section. The slow movement begins with long arches of string melody richly accompanied by the piano but soon evolves into something altogether more extrovert, preparing us for the high spirits of the gipsy-style finale, dubbed by one writer a ‘choleric Hungarian Dance’. Although his close friends (and fierce critics) Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim were less than wholly enthusiastic about the work, the public with a taste for new music reacted very positively, preparing the way for the huge respect shown to his later chamber works.