Friday, June 28, 2013

Dorian Wind Quintet. June 27, 2013.

Richardson Auditorium, Princeton, NJ.  Balcony Center, Second Row (Free).

Musicians
Gretchen Pusch, flute; Gerard Reuter, oboe; Benjamin Fingland, clarinet; John Hunt, bassoon; Karl Kramer-Johansen, horn.

Program
Quintet for Woodwinds (1948) by Elliott Carter (1908-2012).
Quintet in E flat major for Winds, Op. 88, No. 2 by Antonin Reicha (1770-1836).
Prelude and Fugue in D minor (BMV 539) (arr. Mordechai Rechtman b. 1926) by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).
Anniversary Variations on a Theme of Antonin Reicha from Wind Quintet in E flat major, Op. 88, No. 2.

This concert is the second of the four free concerts Princeton will put out this summer.  I have said on many occasions that I do not understand chamber music, and frankly a wind quintet did not hold a lot of attraction for me.  To me the music probably would be delightful but uninspiring.  I decided to go because Anne had a class to go to, and I wanted to meet up with David and Vivien since we hadn’t done so for a while.  It turns out there is nothing wrong with delightful yet uninspiring; I enjoyed the concert much more than I expected.  And it was good to meet up with our old friends.  David also provided considerable insight into the program, as he usually does.

I have heard a couple of Carter’s works before, and (looking back at my notes) heard one that was composed when he was young (1944) and one when he was much older (1996).  I found the first one quite enjoyable and the second one out of my reach.  Today’s piece was written during his “early period,” and indeed I enjoyed it.  In any case, one can only complicate things so much with five instruments.  There are only two movements: Allegretto and Allegro giocoso.

Kramer-Johansen then came to the podium to talk a bit about the first half of the program.  He described the Carter work as a great appetizer which I actually thought did the work a little injustice.  He then talked a bit about the Reicha piece.  I had never heard of Reicha before, and Wikipedia has a listing of his compositions that ends with Op. 107.  Op. 88 itself consists of six quintets.  In my (and no doubt many others’) defense, he was a contemporary of Beethoven and probably was eclipsed by him.  Many people wouldn’t have heard of Salieri either if it were not for the plays and movie that portray him as a hater of Mozart.  Here is what little I have found out about Reicha (is it Anton?): born in Prague, lived in Paris most of his life, and a friend of Beethoven’s.

The quintet doesn’t have the complexity and degree of contrast of a Beethoven work, and sounds like it is from an earlier period.  It was a delight to listen to, though.  The movements are (i) Lento – Allegro moderato; (ii) Scherzo: Allegro; (iii) Andante grazioso; and (iv) Finale: Allegro molto.

After the intermission, the clarinetist Benjamin Fingland talked about the second half’s program.  The Bach piece actually started life as a violin work (BWV 1001?) and was transcribed by the composer into an organ piece to become BWV 539 (he also added a prelude to it.)  [This would imply the BWV numbers are not chronological.]  Mordechai Rechtman, a long time a bassoonist at the Israel Philharmonic, transcribed that into a quintet.

This was another delight.  I told David afterwards that I really appreciated how easy it was – with the different instruments – to follow the different contrapuntal lines in the composition.  When it is played on one instrument by a soloist, the soloist tries to get her fingers to work independently, and the listener tries to follow along and locate the different voices.  In this transcription, the listener can simply relax and enjoy the music and the structure without working very hard at it.

The Dorian Quintet was started in 1961 (at Tanglewood), and for its 40th anniversary celebration it took a theme from the Reicha quintet (specifically its Andante grazioso movement) and asked five different composers to write a variation on it.  They only provided the key and the notes; no composer, no tempo, no dynamics.  Fingland relayed how the different composers reacted to the theme: one ridiculed it as being lightweight, one couldn’t make sense of it and decided to use the Dorian anagram “draino” as the title, one was so generous that he wrote four variations on it (even though only one was requested.)  Not everyone knew it was a Reicha theme.

In any case, in addition to the theme, these are the variations: (1) Con eleganza – Sir Richard Rodney Barrett (1936-2012); (2) Four Variations – George Perle (1915-2009); (3) Variation on a Reicha Theme – Billy Childs (b. 1957); (4) DRAINO VARIATION – Bruce Adolphe (b. 1955); and (5) Finale: Andante; Lento; Allegro – Lee Holby (1926-2011).

While the variations all sounded modern, there are enough of the theme fragments in them that the connection was reasonably obvious.  (And The Draino variations is appropriately titled.)  To the uninitiated – and that would include me – they could have all been written by the same composer.  As with modern music, the enjoyment is more on trying to analyze things than in the aesthetic appeal of the composition.  Given the rest of the program, I didn’t mind it at all.

I also came away happy that my scope of knowledge has been expanded a bit.  I don’t believe I had heard a wind quintet at all – and would have guessed English horn as the fifth instrument instead of the French horn (which is technically a brass instrument.)  I am also glad to hear Reicha for the first time.


The attendance wasn’t all that great.  Perhaps the threat of a tornado in the area kept people away?

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