Origines & départs: French music for clarinet and piano | Album Booklet

MAXIMILIANO M A R T ÍN FR EN CH M U S I C FO R CL A R I N E T & P I A N O

Scott Mitchell piano

MAXIMILIANO MARTÍN

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) Clarinet Sonata in E flat major, Op. 167 1

I. Allegretto

[4:42]

2

II. Allegro animato

[2:04]

3

III. Lento

[4:26]

4

IV. Molto allegro

[5:30]

Ernest Chausson (1855–1899)

Andante et Allegro

[9:05]

Francis Poulenc (1899–1963)

Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, FP 184

5

FR EN C H M U S I C FOR CL A R I N E T & P I A NO Scott Mitchell piano

With thanks to Donald and Louise MacDonald, The Wind Section in Edinburgh and Buffet Crampon in Paris Recorded on 24 & 25 June 2021 in Perth Concert Hall Producer/Editor: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Design: John Christ Booklet editor: Henry Howard Cover photography: Jen Owens Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com

@ delphianrecords

6

I. Allegro tristamente

[5:22]

7

II. Romanza

[5:07]

8

III. Allegro con fuoco

[3:16]

9

Eddie McGuire (b. 1948)

Elegiac Waltz

[3:21]

10

Gustavo Trujillo (b. 1972)

Souvenir*

[5:04]

11

Gabriel Pierné (1863–1937)

Canzonetta, Op. 19

[4:10]

12

Philippe Gaubert (1879–1941)

Fantaisie

[7:41]

13

Claude Debussy (1862–1918)

Petite pièce, L. 120

[1:48]

Arthur Honegger (1892–1955)

Sonatine, H. 42

14

I. Modéré

[2:44]

15

II. Lent et soutenu

[2:42]

16

III. Vif et rythmique

[1:12]

Total playing time

@ delphianrecords @ delphian_records

*

*premiere recordings

[68:25]

Notes on the music Camille Saint-Saëns became something of a musical dinosaur in the years after World War I, appalled by recent developments in music. In the last year of his life, he composed three sonatas for woodwind instruments (oboe, bassoon and clarinet), writing to a friend in April 1921 that he was ‘putting my last ounce of energy into giving seldom considered instruments an opportunity to be heard’. The Clarinet Sonata in E flat major was composed in May–June 1921 and dedicated to Auguste Périer, professor of clarinet at the Conservatoire from 1919 until his death in 1947 and principal clarinet of the Opéra-Comique. The sonata was published

by Durand in November 1921, a month before Saint-Saëns died. It’s a beautifully crafted piece, in a style that suggests a return to classicism. As expected from a composer of Saint-Saëns’s accomplishment, the distinctive characteristics of the clarinet are exploited with consummate skill. The Allegretto (in E flat major) opens with an undulating piano part over which the clarinet weaves an easy-going melody which gives way to a more florid section before serenity returns. The second movement is a Scherzo (in A flat major) with something of the formal elegance of a Baroque dance. Its central section, much of it over a piano drone, is notable for some wide leaps in the clarinet part. The Lento (in E flat minor) begins with both instruments in a low register, the music dark and serious. After a

fortissimo outburst on the piano (a succession of arpeggiated chords), Saint-Saëns lets the light in: the colour changes completely as the main theme is now transformed into the upper register. A brief piano interlude leads into the finale, Molto allegro, starting with tremolos over which the clarinet enters with a flamboyant flourish that eventually covers three octaves.

After a thorough working-out of several ideas, Saint-Saëns comes full circle with a reprise of the opening of the first movement to bring the sonata to a peaceful close.

The partisans of César Franck often had unkind words for what they considered a lack of depth in Saint-Saëns’s music (though he, like Franck, was happy to use cyclic forms in a work such as his Third Symphony).

Ernest Chausson was a member of Franck’s circle, but this generous, art-loving and independently wealthy man was also a close friend of Debussy, at any rate until they fell out in 1894 over a trivial criticism Chausson made of Debussy’s String Quartet. Chausson’s Andante et Allegro is an early work from 1881, written during Chausson’s years as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers included Massenet and Franck.

Chausson came relatively late to music: he was 24 when he entered the Conservatoire having abandoned his first career in law (chosen to please his father). The influence of Massenet is clear in the elegant melodic writing, and

there’s a Franck-like seriousness of purpose, particularly in the Andante. The influence of Chausson’s professors is one thing, but this idiomatically written piece sounds like neither of them: instead, it shows the early promise of a creative voice which was to become more distinctive over the next few years.

Gabriel Pierné was born in Metz. Like Chausson, he studied with both Franck and Massenet, and was appointed Franck’s successor as organist at the church of SainteClotilde. Pierné demonstrated his dramatic gifts early on with Edith, a ‘scène lyrique’ set at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, which won the coveted Prix de Rome for composition in 1882. This enabled him to spend four years at the Villa Medici in Rome where he was joined two years later by the winner of the 1884 competition, Debussy. Pierné was also a conductor with wide musical sympathies. He became director of the Concerts Colonne in 1910, giving the world premieres of Debussy’s Images and the first suite from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. On 25 June of the same year, Pierné conducted the world premiere of Stravinsky’s Firebird for Diaghilev’s Ballets russes at the Paris Opéra. This brilliant and versatile musician also composed numerous small instrumental pieces. The Canzonetta, Op. 19 was written in 1888 and published the following year with a dedication ‘à mon ami Ch[arles] Turban’. One of the leading

clarinettists of his time, Turban (1845–1905) was a member of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire and a friend of Saint‑Saëns: on 9 March (Shrove Tuesday) 1886 he played the clarinet in the private premiere of Le carnaval des animaux.

Philippe Gaubert came from a modest background (his father was a cobbler and his mother a dressmaker) and rose to prominence in Paris not only one of the most celebrated flautists of his day but also a noted conductor and composer. He wrote the Fantaisie for clarinet and piano in 1911, with a dedication to his friend Prosper Mimart, professor of clarinet at the Paris Conservatoire from 1904 until 1918. A year earlier, Mimart had been the dedicatee of Debussy’s Première rhapsodie and, in fact, both works were originally composed as test pieces for the Conservatoire’s annual concours. After a rather stately opening, Gaubert develops the initial theme in a more rhapsodic way, wrapping it in fragrant impressionistic harmonies. A brief return to the simplicity of the opening leads to a faster second section, marked Allegramente.

The free-flowing structure of the piece brings a dreamy recollection of the opening before a fast and technically demanding close.

Claude Debussy was a composer who brought out the worst in Saint-Saëns, drawing some of his most reactionary criticisms. He declared

Notes on the music that ‘Debussy created no style; he cultivated the absence of style as well as the absence of logic and common sense.’ Happily, SaintSaëns’s most famous pupil, Gabriel Fauré, saw things rather differently. In 1909, at Fauré’s request, Debussy joined the council of the Paris Conservatoire and in 1910 he was appointed to serve as an adjudicator for the woodwind concours. In January 1910 he completed the clarinet and piano version of the Première rhapsodie which was printed in the spring, in time for the competitors to learn it as the test piece. The concours took place in July and shortly beforehand Debussy wrote another piece for the competition, described on the title page of the manuscript as ‘Petite Pièce (Morceau à déchiffrer pour le concours de clarinette de 1910)’. Published at the end of 1910 as Petite pièce, with no mention of its original purpose as a sight-reading test, it is an attractive and rather intriguing miniature by a composer who was then at the height of his powers: just before and after writing it, he completed the two books of Préludes for piano.

Some of the most talented composers of the generation after Debussy found themselves brought together in an improbable alliance as the Groupe des Six, a name coined by the critic Henri Collet but encouraged by Jean Cocteau who saw himself as a leader of the Parisian avant-garde in the years after World War One. Three of its most famous members – Poulenc,

Milhaud and Honegger – remained friends all their lives, but it’s a sign of their integrity and individuality at the start of their careers, in the 1920s, that they never sounded like each other, even when they were most closely associated with Cocteau’s plans for a kind of musical group-think. Arthur Honegger, Swiss, Bach-loving and serious-minded, was perhaps the most unlikely member of Les Six, though in the Sonatine he gets closer than usual to its nonchalant aesthetic. Honegger composed the second and third movements in October– November 1921, initially planning to write a set of miniatures. He only decided to turn them into a sonatina after adding the first movement in July 1922. The work is dedicated to Werner Reinhart, the generous philanthropist and amateur clarinettist for whom Stravinsky had written his Three Pieces in 1918. The opening Modéré begins with a brooding idea which gives way to a spiky central section to create a bittersweet mood, the music flirting with polytonality before settling on a serene final chord. The slow movement is a lyrical clarinet cantilena, coloured in places by uncompromising dissonances, while the short finale, Vif et rythmique, is pure fun, spiced up by clarinet glissandos and hints of ragtime.

Francis Poulenc became an increasingly serious composer during the 1930s, and his re-conversion to Roman Catholicism following a pilgrimage in 1936 to the shrine

of the Black Madonna at Rocamadour proved to be a turning point, giving him the courage to produce music often notable for its intensity and astonishing beauty, while still happy to produce other pieces of a much lighter disposition: he described himself as being both ‘moine et voyou’ – monk and hooligan – and that duality is apparent in much of his music. The Sonata for Clarinet and Piano is one of his last pieces. Poulenc finished it in autumn 1962 and dedicated it to the memory of his friend Honegger. The first performance turned out to be a memorial to Poulenc as well: he died on 30 January 1963.

The work was commissioned by Benny Goodman who gave the premiere at New York’s Carnegie Hall on 10 April 1963, with Leonard Bernstein at the piano. The work is often tinged with sadness, even in livelier moments: the first movement is marked Allegro tristamente, its opening by turns angular and melancholic. A slower section, marked ‘Très calme’ provides contrast and consolation before a return to the opening.

The central Romanza is a deeply-felt lament.

By contrast, the finale is high-spirited and exciting. In 1950, the Saturday Review asked Poulenc to explain the essence of French music and his description seems to suit the Clarinet Sonata particularly well: ‘Sombreness and good humour are not mutually exclusive. French composers, too, write profound music, but when they do,

it is leavened with the lightness of spirit without which life would be unendurable.’

The two remaining pieces on this recording have strong autobiographical resonances for Maximiliano Martín. Concerning his choice of the Elegiac Waltz by Eddie McGuire, he writes: It is about where I live, where I am now at this stage of my life – the present. I have known Eddie’s music since I came to Scotland and I always found it very expressive and personal.

Even though the piece was written years back it was exactly what I wanted for this recording: a beautiful short piece with Scottish touches.

The music is straightforward but its melodic contours have echoes of Scottish traditional music. It was first published in 2002 as one of a series of new compositions for clarinet within the technical reach of younger players.

In July 2018, Maximiliano Martín gave the first performance of the Clarinet Concerto No. 1, ‘Travesía’ (Crossing) by Gustavo Trujillo which was specially written for him. Souvenir for clarinet and piano was completed in 2021, using material derived from the concerto. This recording is its world premiere. It has close personal connections for Maximiliano Martín:

Notes on the music Gustavo and I are from the same village in Tenerife, La Orotava, and we go back a very long way.

Souvenir is basically a piece reflecting themes from the concerto – a piece that means a lot to me because it includes themes from the folklore tradition of Tenerife. We have an incredibly rich folklore in the Canaries and the piece reflects themes from those well-known Canarian folk songs. This piece is basically about me, about my background, about my traditions and about the music that was in my mind when I grew up.

© 2022 Nigel Simeone Nigel Simeone is a musicologist whose many interests include French music, Janáček, Bernstein, opera and conducting. His next book is on the musical relationship between Ralph Vaughan Williams and Adrian Boult.

He appears regularly on BBC Radio 3 and writes for the Royal Opera House, the Wigmore Hall and the BBC Proms.

Spanish clarinettist and international soloist Maximiliano Martín combines his position of Principal Clarinet of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra with solo and chamber music engagements and masterclasses all around the world.

Martín has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in many of the world’s most prestigious venues and festivals including the BBC Proms, Edinburgh International Festival, Cadogan Hall and Wigmore Hall in London, and across the world from Tenerife to Washington DC, South Africa and Korea. Highlights of the past years have included concertos with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, European Union Chamber Orchestra, Orquesta Real Filarmonía de Galicia, Orquesta Filarmónica de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Orquesta del Principado de Asturias, Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife and Macedonian Philharmonic Orchestra, with conductors such as Brüggen, Ticciati, Manze, Antonini, Swensen, Zacharias, Schuldt and González.

He performs regularly with ensembles and artists such as London Conchord Ensemble, Hebrides Ensemble, Doric and Casals String Quartets, Francois Leleux, Pekka Kuusisto, Alexander Janiczek, Llŷr

Williams, Kris Bezuidenhout, Scott Mitchell and Julian Milford.

His recent disc of Nielsen, Copland and MacMillan Clarinet Concertos with Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife and Lucas Macías, Caprices and Laments (Delphian DCD34250) was been released in 2021 to great critical acclaim; for Delphian he has also recorded music by Nigel Osborne with Hebrides Ensemble (DCD34198) and Born in Dirt an’ Din with Mr McFall’s Chamber (DCD34210).

His extensive discography includes Mozart and Weber Clarinet Concertos with SCO, the Strauss Duett-Concertino with Robin Ticciati and Peter Whelan, two recital discs Fantasia and Vibraciones del Alma, Mozart Divertimenti with the SCO Wind Soloists, Messiaen’s Quatuor piur le fin du temps with Hebrides Ensemble, Brahms Clarinet Sonatas with Julian Milford, Mozart and Brahms Clarinet Quintets with the Badke Quartet, two discs with London Conchord Ensemble, and Stephen Dodgson chamber music with Karolos Ensemble.

Martín is also active in the field of education, giving masterclasses including at the Royal College of Music, Royal Northern School of Music, Conservatorio Superior de Canarias, UC Davis University in San Francisco and Malmö Academy of Music (Sweden). He is Visiting Professor at the University of Kangnam

in Seoul, South Korea. Recently Martín has been appointed Honorary Professor of Woodwind at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is one of the Artistic Directors of the Chamber Music Festival of La Villa de La Orotava, held every year in his home town.

Maximiliano Martín is a Buffet Crampon Artist and plays with Buffet Tosca Clarinets.

© David Charles

© Jen Owens

Biographies

Scotland-based pianist Scott Mitchell has performed extensively as a chamber music pianist and accompanist throughout Great Britain, Europe, South America and the Middle East. As a result of his varied chamber music activities he performs regularly at St John’s Smith Square, Purcell Room and the Wigmore Hall in London. He has also appeared at many of the world’s major festivals including Edinburgh and the Festival Wiener Klassik. As a recording artist Scott Mitchell has released CDs on a number of labels, and has recorded Dave Heath’s Piano Concerto, ‘The Passionate’, with the BBC Concert Orchestra.

He is a regular performer on BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM and has also appeared on Channel 4 and the satellite Arts Channel.

Scott Mitchell has performed with John Wallace (trumpet), Michael Collins and Emma Johnson (clarinets), Raphael Wallfisch (cello),

Andrew Watkinson (violin), Richard Watkins (french horn), James Bowman (countertenor) and Andrew Kennedy (tenor), and also with the Duke Quartet. He performs regularly in duos with flautists Wissam Boustany, Katherine Bryan, Lorna McGhee, Ruth Morley and Yvonne Robertson, as well as clarinettists Maximiliano Martín and John Cushing, and cellist Sarah Oliver. In competitions he has been awarded the Liza Fuchsova Prize for an outstanding chamber music pianist and Eric Rice Memorial Prize for an outstanding accompanist, both at the Royal Overseas League Music Competition in London.

Scott Mitchell is a Senior Staff Accompanist and Senior Lecturer in Piano Accompaniment at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow where he was recently made a Fellow and where he also teaches piano at the Junior Department. He was until recently the accompanist at Napier University in Edinburgh and also one of the founding members of the Cantilena Festival on Islay, a Festival for strings taking place on that island every summer.

Also available on Delphian Caprices and Laments: Nielsen – Copland – MacMillan Maximiliano Martín, Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife

Knotwork: music for clarinet quartet Fell Clarinet Quartet

DCD34250

DCD34065

The benevolent shadow of Mozart meets a strain of emotional turbulence in Carl Nielsen’s unforgettable, at times inscrutable Clarinet Concerto, while Aaron Copland’s concerto – composed with the genre-crossing expertise of Benny Goodman in mind – brings a vein of lyrical sadness together with the verve of mid-century popular idioms from both the USA and Brazil. James MacMillan’s Tuireadh, meanwhile, is a single-minded outpouring of grief, raising instruments to an almost vocal quality of expression in a lament for the victims of the Piper Alpha oil-rig fire.

From the vigour of Graham Fitkin’s Vent and the flamboyance of Piazzolla to the refinement of two pieces by Eddie McGuire, alongside earlier music by Pierre Max Dubois and Alfred Uhl, the Fell Clarinet Quartet have created an inspired programme of superbly realised works from both the history and present of this still-young medium.

‘Martín finds endless colour, rhythmic bite and charmed lyricism … fine orchestral playing under conductor Lucas Macías Navarro’ — The Scotsman, January 2021, FIVE STARS

‘Their style is electrifyingly unanimous … deliciously judged extremes of timbre – both the ice-cool virtuosity and moody whispers that colour in equal measure’ — The Scotsman, April 2008

Rory Boyle: music for clarinet Fraser Langton, James Willshire, Rosalind Ventris

Bohemian Rhapsodies Fell Clarinet Quartet

DCD34172

DCD34083

Building on the legacy of Rory Boyle’s own youthful studies as a clarinettist and pianist, the works on this new portrait disc span a near forty-year compositional period, from the Sonatina (a gift to Boyle’s teacher Lennox Berkeley) to Dramatis Personae and Burble, written for the present performers. Fraser Langton’s communicative flair in this music – with its striking rhythmic energy and refreshing absence of sentimentality – is infectious, while pianist James Willshire already has an acclaimed solo album of Boyle’s piano music to his credit. Together, and joined by Rosalind Ventris on viola in the concluding trio, they bring to life the composer’s inventiveness, humour, and unfailing sense of melodic line.

Bartók reworked for four reed instruments, newly composed klezmer, seventeenth-century Hungarian dances: in their second recording for Delphian, the Fell Clarinet Quartet journey through Central and Eastern Europe, lending a wonderfully suggestive reediness to a wide stylistic variety of laments and dances.

‘an outstanding player with a huge expressive range … Both composers are fortunate indeed to have such an advocate’ — International Record Review, May 2003

‘They make a distinctive sound, pungent and perky, superbly captured in this full-bodied recording … Lenny Sayers’ klezmer medleys bristle with virtuoso thrills’ — The Times, July 2010 ‘… probably closer to the rustic origins of [Bartók’s] Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm than the composer envisaged. The introductory “Ostinato” is a dazzling, animated miniature which crams more into two minutes than some composers manage in a symphony’ — The Independent, June 2010

Also available on Delphian Mozart: Sonatas k 304, k 378 & k 454 (YCAT Vol 2) Olivier Stankiewicz oboe, Jonathan Ware piano

Oliver Iredale Searle: Pilgrim of Curiosity RSNO Wind Ensemble; Carla Rees Baroque flute

DCD34245

DCD34270

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the craft of transcription (or ‘arrangement’) reached its zenith. Many popular works – for instance, favourite arias from operas – were offered to the public in domestically playable versions for solo keyboard, or else in chamber music formats frequently featuring the flute, violin, or another treble melody instrument. Title pages of published works often specified alternative performing forces, and Mozart himself sometimes reworked his own music for different instruments. Thus taking its place in a now somewhat buried tradition that has its roots in the composer’s own time, this cherishable recording by LSO principal oboist Olivier Stankiewicz reimagines three of his best-loved violin sonatas for oboe and piano.

A key presence in Glasgow’s musical life as composer and teacher, Oliver Iredale Searle is revealed in this first album devoted to his work as a poet of place and of sensation. Three works for wind ensembles vividly evoke journeys and their destinations, in a panoply of sights and sounds stretching from Chicago to Italy, the Balkans and East Asia – and forging unexpected connections between them. The wind principals of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra provide performances of exceptional calibre, while Carla Rees’s passionate commitment to building a contemporary repertoire for Baroque flute shines through in a solo piece that she commissioned and premiered.

‘1942’: Prokofiev – Copland – Poulenc Benjamin Baker violin, Daniel Lebhardt piano DCD34247

Since winning First Prize at the 2016 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York, New Zealand-born violinist Benjamin Baker has established a presence across the globe, with acclaimed solo, chamber and concerto appearances on five continents. His Delphian recording debut sees him joined by regular duo partner Daniel Lebhardt in a programme of three powerful works which were all begun in 1942.

Each marked in its own way by a world at war, these sonatas show three of the twentieth century’s most individual composers engaging themes of private loss, political uncertainty and music’s enduring ability both to reflect and to transcend circumstance.

‘Baker and Lebhardt are superb partners, with a rare passion and energy’ — Apple Music, April 2021

New in September 2021 La Fauvette Passerinette: a Messiaen premiere, with birds, landscapes & homages Peter Hill piano DCD34141

In 2012, leading pianist and Messiaen scholar Peter Hill made a remarkable discovery among the composer’s papers: several pages of tightly written manuscript from 1961, constituting a near-complete and hitherto unknown work for piano. Hill was able to fill in some missing dynamics and articulations by consulting Messiaen’s birdsong notebooks, and here sets this glittering addition to Messiaen’s piano output in the context both of the composer’s own earlier work and of music by the many younger composers on whom Messiaen was a profound influence – from Stockhausen and Takemitsu to George Benjamin, who like Hill himself worked closely with the composer in the years before his death.

‘Hill’s poetry and sense of colour are stronger than ever’ — BBC Music Magazine, October 2014, INSTRUMENTAL CHOICE

DCD34280