Academy of St. Martin in the Fields: Program Notes

ACADEMY OF ST MARTIN IN THE FIELDS CHAMBER ENSEMBLE October 16, 2018 Notes on the Program

By Aaron Grad ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV Born in St. Petersburg, August 10, 1865 Died in Paris, March 21, 1936 IDYLL IN D MAJOR, OP. 14, NO. 1 Composed in 1886; 10 minutes With grooming from Balakirev (the ringleader of “The Russian Five”) and two years of lessons with Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Glazunov joined the highest ranks of Russian composers while still a teenager. In 1884, the year he traveled with a powerful Russian patron to meet Liszt in Germany, Glazunov drafted the original version of the Idyll for horn and strings. He later expanded the orchestration and published it in 1888 as the first of Two Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 14.

Glazunov composed the Idyll—a term for simple music with a peaceful, pastoral mood—to practice writing for the horn. The unaccompanied phrases evoke the instrument’s outdoor past, when its resonant leaps were used to transmit a signal, such as the start of a hunt.

JEAN FRANÇAIX Born in Le Mans, France, May 23, 1912 Died in Paris, September 25, 1997 OCTET FOR CLARINET, BASSOON, HORN AND STRINGS Composed in 1972; 25 minutes The French composer Jean Françaix, cutting against the stylistic trends of his day, applied his considerable talents to music filled with joy and lightness. His precocious start earned him a chance, at the age of 10, to take composition lessons with the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger, and he went on to study piano at the Paris Conservatoire. He produced more than 200 works in his lifetime, honing a graceful sound rooted in 19th century France but updated to reflect the refinements of Debussy, Ravel and the neoclassical side of Stravinsky.

Françaix’s Octet from 1972, dedicated to “the revered memory of Schubert,” mirrors the instrumentation of Schubert’s grand Octet. Following the Classical-era template mastered by Schubert (and Haydn and Beethoven before him), Françaix’s Octet opens with a slow introduction. With a lively theme based on intervals heard in the introduction, the clarinet starts the fast body of the movement in a particularly chipper Allegrissimo tempo. The same clarinet tune returns, in a fragmented form, to launch the playful Scherzo. After an Andante third movement with a singing quality worthy of Mozart, the finale makes a teasing entrance full of ceremonial pomp before relaxing into a vivacious waltz.

FRANZ SCHUBERT Born in Vienna, January 31, 1797 Died in Vienna, November 19, 1828 OCTET IN F MAJOR, D. 803 Composed in 1824; 60 minutes In his tragically short life, Franz Schubert never achieved anything close to the public platform he deserved. If he had, perhaps we would today be enjoying Schubert operas (his greatest unfulfilled ambition), or more symphonies (none of which were performed publicly in his lifetime). Instead Schubert created most of his music for his private circle of friends and patrons. Such was the case in 1824, when Count Ferdinand Troyer, an amateur clarinetist, commissioned a large work of chamber music. Troyer asked for something in the vein of Beethoven’s wildly popular Septet for clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and bass. Besides the self-evident charms of that Septet, there was also a personal connection to Beethoven; Troyer worked for the Archduke Rudolph, Beethoven’s former student and lifelong friend.

Schubert obliged with the Octet (D. 803), which added a second violin to Beethoven’s ensemble while keeping the same configuration of six movements. The hour-long score took Schubert only about a month to compose, and apparently his work habits were unflappable in that period. As one friend related to a mutual acquaintance in a letter, “Schubert has now long been at work on an octet, with the greatest enthusiasm. If you go and see him during the day, he says ‘Hello. How are you?’ and carries on working, whereupon you leave.”

Schubert finished the Octet on March 1, 1824, and in April it received a public performance in Vienna.

Besides Troyer on clarinet, the ensemble included the distinguished violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who had led the premiere of Beethoven’s Septet 24 years earlier. Even after a positive newspaper review for that high-profile premiere, no publisher took up the Octet, and it did not appear in print until Schubert had been dead for a quarter-century.

Just like Beethoven’s Septet, the Octet sets the stage with a slow introduction. The fast body of the first movement makes the most of the large ensemble’s range and power, coming close to the scope of a symphony. The slow second movement features the clarinet in the initial statement of a gorgeous melody, which soon becomes a duet with the first violin. The swaying and pulsing accompaniments from the second violin and viola resemble the textures Schubert mastered in the piano accompaniments for his songs.

A shorter work would typically have a scherzo or a minuet as a palette-cleansing movement, but the Octet follows the lead of Beethoven’s Septet and includes both, with their placement swapped (this structure aligns with the tradition of Mozart’s Serenades and their diverse and colorful movements).

Schubert played up the humor in his Allegro vivace movement that serves as a scherzo, using sudden harmonic shifts and abrupt dynamic changes to keep the music unpredictable.

The fourth movement is a well-mannered set of variations, with the tune lifted from one of Schubert’s earlier opera failures. Again, the clarinet and first violin are placed most often in the foreground, which surely satisfied the work’s clarinetist-patron. Other variations featuring horn and cello spread the attention out to the ensemble’s deeper voices.

As a bookend to the earlier scherzo, a regal minuet in a slower Allegretto tempo provides another refreshing diversion.

At the start of the finale, the rumbling tremolo and wandering harmonies of the slow introduction hint at a much darker world under the cheerful façade of the previous 50 minutes, something closer to the wrenching “Death and the Maidenâ€? String Quartet that Schubert composed in the weeks after the Octet.

The tension vanishes with the arrival of the Allegro section, providing a suitably grand and boisterous conclusion to this ambitious work of chamber music writ large.