Old Pine Street Church, 412 Pine Street, Philadelphia, Sunday, March 1, at 2:00 PM
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, 8855 Germantown Ave, Philadelphia, Friday, March 6, 7:00 PM
Heitor Villa-Lobos: Jet Whistle for flute and cello
Jessie Montgomery: Duo for violin and cello
Claude Debussy: Sonata for flute, viola, and harp
Ernst von Dohnányi: Serenade, Op. 10 for violin, viola, and cello
Albert Roussel: Serenade, Op. 30 for flute, violin, viola, cello, and harp
Heitor Villa-Lobos
Jet Whistle
In this little duet from 1950 we hear the unique blend of elements created by Villa-Lobos, combining the music of his native Brazil with the European classical tradition, particularly the music of J. S. Bach. In the first three movements, the flute and cello take turns having the melody and the accompaniment: they are a waltz, a slow movement with a sinuous melody, and a somewhat Bachian movement founded on a repeating accompaniment figure. The coda of the last movement is the source of the title: the flute has a string of upward-rushing passages culminating in a series of shrieks with the flutist blowing into the mouthpiece for maximum volume.
Jessie Montgomery
Duo for violin and cello
Grammy-award-winning Black violinist-composer Jessie Montgomery trained at the Juilliard School, New York University, and Princeton University. She composed this duo in 2015 as an “ode to friendship” for cellist Adrienne Taylor. It makes considerable demands on both performers, making the two instruments sound like a larger ensemble.
The first movement, “Antics,” is an intense dialogue between the instruments, much of it played pizzicato. The second movement, “In Confidence,” calls for sustained double-stops most of the time, giving the effect of a quartet playing a solemn chorale. In the lively final movement, “Serious Fun,” rolled chords in both instruments similarly give the impression of a bigger group.
Claude Debussy
Sonata for flute, viola and harp
The outbreak of World War I made composition nearly impossible for Debussy for much of 1914, but despite illness he then embarked on his final great project: six sonatas for various instruments dedicated to his wife Emma and proudly signed, “Claude Debussy, musicien français.” Debussy only finished three of the sonatas: one for cello and piano and the present sonata for flute, viola and harp, both from 1915, and the familiar sonata for violin and piano from 1916-17. Debussy had written little chamber music before this, his one other major chamber work being his string quartet, composed over twenty years earlier.
Debussy’s musical interests were diverse. He was one of the first non-Russians fully to appreciate Mussorgsky, and he was enchanted by Asian music. His music shows these influences. Instead of creating a sense of forward motion, as does most Western music from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Debussy’s music tries to achieve stasis. His melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic patterns tend to be repetitious and to succeed one another rather than to create a feeling of progression. Though this sonata is technically in the key of F major, it lacks the strong sense of departure from and return to the home key that was a feature of most music from the previous era. Indeed, it takes nearly a full minute for the first F major chord, the first consonant chord of the piece, to arrive.
The scoring of this sonata may also owe something to Debussy’s interest in the sound of Asian music; flute, viola and harp was an unusual combination at the time, and it seems less so now only because other composers have taken it up under the inspiration of this work. It is not just the choice of instruments that is untraditional; Debussy also uses them in a peculiar way. Much of the time the flute and viola act as one instrument, either playing in alternation or doubling in octaves, creating a sort of flute-viola with a tone quality that favors the flute in high registers and the viola in low ones.
The first two movements of this sonata both begin and end with slow, lyrical music but have faster middle sections. The last movement is quick throughout, though even here the motion is all on the surface; underneath the rapid figuration there is a sense of stasis, or even timelessness.
Ernő Dohnányi
Serenade in C major
Dohnányi and his colleagues Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály were the leading creative figures in Hungarian musical life in the decades before World War II. After the war Dohnányi emigrated to the United States, where he joined the faculty of Florida State University. (His grandson Christoph made his career as a conductor in this country, with a distinguished tenure as musical director of the Cleveland Orchestra.) Simultaneous careers as a pianist, a conductor, and an administrator kept Dohnányi’s catalog of compositions to moderate size, and his conservative, Romantic orientation caused his work to be overlooked for much of the twentieth century, though performances of his music are increasingly common now.
Dohnányi was a musical prodigy whose Piano Quintet, op. 1, written at the age of eighteen, drew the praise of Brahms, who was a major influence on the young composer’s style. This Serenade, dating from 1905, is still in the Brahmsian vein. It also, however, looks back to Beethoven’s Serenade, op. 8, which was written for the same three instruments and which also begins with a little march. As one might expect from the model, none of the four following movements is terribly long or involved, though all are high in quality: a lyrical Romanza, an energetic Scherzo, a particularly lovely set of variations, and a cheerful rondo finale that refers back to the opening march.
Albert Roussel
Sérénade
As a composer, Roussel was a late bloomer. Before devoting himself to composition, he had served as an officer in the French navy, and he interrupted his musical career to work as an ambulance driver during the First World War. Today he is best remembered for the compositions he wrote after the war, when he turned away from the Romantic influences in his earlier work in favor of an energetic Neoclassicism—Stravinsky without the rhythmic complexity. This Sérénade, composed in 1925 for a Parisian quintet with this instrumentation, is a good sample of his later style.
After a few introductory measures, the flute plays the cheerful main idea of the first movement; throughout the piece the flute will primarily play a melodic role while the harp generally has a subordinate position. Midway through the movement faster material arrives, eventually to combine with the opening idea. The second and longest movement begins with the harp silent and the flute playing the melody; when the harp finally enters with a flourish the flute drops out and the cello takes the lead. Only toward the end of the movement does the entire quintet play together. In the finale it is the viola that first comes in with the syncopated main idea, though everyone else has a chance to play it as the movement proceeds, with the harp getting its turn at the very end of the piece.