November 4, 2011 & November 6, 2011

Conradin Kreutzer

Ten years younger than Beethoven, Conradin Kreutzer was born in the Southwest German town of Messkirch. His career as an operatic composer and conductor took him to a number of posts in Germany and Austria, including several stints in the major Viennese theaters. Of his many operas, two works of 1834 were outstanding successes, Das Nachtlager von Granada (A Night's Shelter in Granada) and Der Verschwender (The Spendthrift). The latter is still performed occasionally in Vienna.

This "little quartet" for clarinet and strings contains only three movements, all of modest dimensions. It is cheerful, unpretentious, tuneful, and well crafted.

The first movement begins with a chord in the strings, followed by a short questioning phrase that is answered by the clarinet. This first phrase in the strings recurs constantly to hold the movement together; for instance, when the second theme arrives in the violin, the clarinet plays a countermelody using that idea.

The Andante grazioso has the character of an operatic number on some pleasant subject. The finale is a rondo with three episodes, the first one lively, the second a development of the rondo theme, and the third more serious in character to contrast with the final appearance of the main theme.

Jacques Bondon

Born in a small town near Marseilles, Bondon studied violin and painting in that city, then went to Paris to study composition with Charles Koechlin and Darius Milhaud. He enjoyed a long and successful career, holding numerous musical posts in Paris. Much of his work was for radio and film; he also composed concertos for a variety of solo instruments.

Le soleil multicolore (The multicolored sun) was composed in 1970 as a tribute to the first Apollo moon landing. The piece's scoring reflects that of Debussy's 1915 sonata for flute, viola, and harp, to be heard later this season. Like much of Bondon's music, this trio is composed in a repetitious style that emphasizes changes in texture and tone color. Though Bondon never belonged to any particular "school" of composers, his style here is akin to minimalism, a movement that was just getting under way when this piece was composed.

Antonín Dvořák

Dvořák composed his first piano quintet, also in A major, in 1872. Reportedly, when he tried to find this older piece in 1887 and failed to locate it (it was later recovered and published), he decided to compose this quintet, which is one of his masterpieces. It came to him quickly between mid-August and October 3 of that year, received its premiere the following January, and was in print within a few months. The quintet is in the same key as Schubert's 'Trout' quintet and, except for the second movement, just as sunny in mood.

As in his Symphony no. 8, composed two years later, Dvořák begins the quintet with a lovely singing melody in the cello answered by livelier material in the full ensemble. The movement is fully worked out, with a second theme that starts out songfully but transforms into a vigorous dance to conclude the main sections.

While the entire quintet has a strong flavor of folk music, both middle movements explicitly employ folk-dance idioms. The dumka (plural dumky) was originally a Ukranian lament, but Dvořák expands it to include sections of sharply contrasting material so that it alternates between despair and cheerfulness. Dvořák was quite fond of this form and later composed an entire piano trio, op. 90, that completely abandons the standard sequence of movements and consists simply of six dumky. The furiant was a lively Czech dance, though presented here in the form of a Schubertian scherzo with a slower middle section.

Like the first movement, the finale is conventional in form. A few preparatory measures lead to an ebullient main theme and the mood remains cheerful throughout.

Johannes Brahms

During the nineteenth century the string quintet with second viola or cello was overshadowed by the string quartet, but there are fine works of the type with second viola by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Bruckner, as well as Brahms. The combination was more suited to amateur than to professional performances. As composers made greater and greater demands on performers in their chamber music, the quintet lost its raison d'être and there have been few notable ones written in the last hundred years.

Brahms, whose principal instrument was the piano, found composing chamber music for strings without piano a struggle. Out of dozens of attempts, he published just seven works: two early sextets, three quartets from his middle years, and the quintets opp. 88 and 111 in 1882 and 1890, respectively. This second quintet is his last chamber work other than the four pieces with clarinet. (Brahms may have intended it as his farewell to composition altogether, though fortunately he changed his mind.) It preceded the clarinet quintet by only a year and shares with it a lushness of texture (as compared to a string quartet) resulting from having an additional part moving in the middle of the ensemble. On the other hand, the two quintets are completely different in mood: the one with clarinet is a work of deep melancholy, while this one with viola is one of Brahms's sunniest works.

In the very opening of the quintet Brahms creates a unique sound, with the four upper instruments playing a shimmering accompaniment over a wide-ranging melody in the cello. Later in the movement, when this theme returns, it passes quickly into the first violin and soars above the rest of the ensemble. The theme sets an optimistic tone for the entire movement, which is animated with a dancelike quality that may have been inspired by some of Bach's jigs.

None of the three other movements is terribly weighty or complex. The second movement is a set of three increasingly free variations on a sad, but not terribly sad, little theme. As is often the case with Brahms, the third movement is in the tempo of a slow minuet. Again, as one might expect of Brahms, the finale is the liveliest part of the quintet, a Gypsy-flavored movement that grows downright boisterous by the end.

Stephen C. Fisher

Stephen received his Ph.D. in the history and theory of music from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at Penn and at Widener University. Currently he is editing volumes of music for the collected works of both C. P. E. Bach and Joseph Haydn; he is also the editor of the Newsletter of the Mozart Society of America. His scholarly work has appeared in numerous journals as well as the New Grove Dictionary of Music and the New Grove Dictionary of Opera. He plays viola in a number of avocational groups performing orchestral, chamber, and theater music.