Old Pine Street Church, 412 Pine Street, Philadelphia, Sunday, May 3, at 2:00 PM
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill 8855 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, Friday, June 5, 2026
Nielsen: Serenata in vano for clarinet, bassoon, French horn, cello, and double bass
Schubert: Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 99, D.898
Coleridge-Taylor: Quintet in F-sharp minor for clarinet and string quartet
Strauss (arr. Hasenöhrl): Till Eulenspiegel — Another Way! for violin, clarinet, bassoon, French horn, and double bass
PROGRAM NOTES
Carl Nielsen
Serenata in vano
The most renowned of Danish composers, Nielsen is best known outside his native land for his symphonies. He wrote pieces of all sizes in many genres, however, from songs to full-length operas. This “fruitless serenade” was composed in 1914 for a group of performers with this unusual instrumentation.
In the first movement, which is in waltz time, we hear the musicians arriving, presumably to serenade a young lady: first the strings, then the clarinet, then the bassoon and horn. The slow middle section is the serenade itself, initiated by the bassoon and continued by the clarinet. Finding the situation hopeless, the musicians exit to the strains of a remarkably cheerful march.
Franz Schubert
Piano Trio no. 1
In March, 1827, Schubert served as a torchbearer at Beethoven’s funeral. Though the two composers had had little direct contact, Beethoven’s passing changed the musical situation in Vienna and prompted Schubert to venture into new territory. Beethoven had transformed the trio for violin, cello, and piano from an accompanied piano sonata for amateurs into a large-scale chamber work for three accomplished performers. Schubert had not composed a full-length piano trio before, but at the end of 1827 he produced two imposing ones in quick succession, of which this is the first. He set it in the key of Beethoven’s last and greatest trio, the “Archduke,” op. 97, and commentators have noted several references to Beethoven in it besides the similarity in scope and layout. In their demands on the cellist, Schubert’s trios probably go beyond anything previously written for the ensemble, constantly giving it solos in a high register. (His piano writing is also different, with a fondness for full chords that were probably better suited to the instruments of his day than to the modern concert grand.)
The first two movements show us Schubert the great song writer. Like Beethoven in the “Archduke” trio, Schubert begins with an extended melody, a more exuberant one than the one in his model; the actual melodic line resembles one in Beethoven’s overture to The Ruins of Athens. Like Beethoven, Schubert makes his leisurely way to a second glorious tune, which begins with one of the aforementioned cello solos. The second movement begins with a more pensive melody, again first presented by the cello in a high register before it is repeated by the violin. After a turbulent middle section, the theme returns at the end.
In the last two movements, we hear the Schubert who could improvise dance music at the piano for his friends for hours on end—and who wrote down and published only a fraction of what he created. The third movement is in waltz time, with a lively opening section that returns after a more sedate middle portion. The finale begins with a cheerful contradanse and seems to flow along effortlessly from one good tune to another—but Schubert is slyly playing with the meter, shifting from groupings of four beats to groupings of three in a way that Beethoven would certainly have appreciated.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Clarinet Quintet
The London-born son of a medical student from Sierra Leone and an Englishwoman, Coleridge-Taylor showed an early aptitude for the violin and, despite his humble background, entered the Royal College of Music at the age of fifteen. There, he branched out into composition; his talent and his conservative orientation made him a favorite pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford. Whereas many of his contemporaries at the RCM (such as Holst and Vaughan Williams) were following paths being blazed by such radicals as Debussy, Coleridge-Taylor’s favorite composer was Dvořák. Coleridge-Taylor would gain international recognition for his settings of portions of Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, but his life was cut short by pneumonia just after his 37th birthday.
It appears that Coleridge-Taylor heard Stanford remark that any later clarinet quintet would have to feel the influence of the 1891 quintet by Brahms. Seeing this as a challenge, in 1895 the younger man proceeded to write a clarinet quintet that had no trace of Brahms about it. On seeing the score, Stanford’s reaction was “You’ve done it, me boy!” He tried to arrange for publication of the quintet, but that would not happen for almost eighty years.
Superficially, Coleridge-Taylor’s quintet and the one by Brahms have much in common. Both share a conventional four-movement layout, with similar approaches to form and harmony, and both are in minor keys. Where they contrast sharply is in mood and expressive content. While the Brahms quintet is deeply serious, the one by Coleridge-Taylor is remarkably cheerful and tuneful. Coleridge-Taylor enjoys playing with rhythm, using unpredictable phrase lengths, throwing in off-beat accents and shifting between groupings of two beats and groupings of three. This gives his quintet an air of spontaneity, even though undoubtedly everything in it was well calculated.
Coleridge-Taylor’s quintet opens with a few preparatory measures in the strings before the clarinet enters with the first real theme of the piece. This idea is worked out at some length before the second big theme arrives in the first violin. This division of labor will apply to the entire quintet. While the clarinet is the focus of attention, the clarinet part does not have the sort of display passages it would have in a concerto, and the other instruments—especially the first violin—each get a share of the musical interest. The second movement is slow and lyrical, with the violins muted to give it a more intimate tone. The following scherzo starts gracefully but builds to climaxes at several points. The finale is a lively movement based on a dance-like theme.
Richard Strauss (arr. Franz Hasenöhrl)
Till Eulenspiegel “einmal anders”
In 1954 Austrian composer Franz Hasenöhrl produced this Grotesque musicale, a condensed version of Richard Strauss’s 1895 tone poem Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. The arrangement contracts the piece to about half its length and reduces its large orchestral scoring to five instruments, though keeping the two principal soloists in the original, the clarinet and horn. Strauss, who was considered a mere trickster by the more conservative musicians of the day, undoubtedly identified himself with this prankster of late-medieval German legend. In addition to the antics of Till Eulenspiegel and of Strauss, this new version of the piece constitutes a further prank played on Strauss himself.