James Gallway Program Notes

Poulenc: Sonata for Flute and Piano, FP164 Master of the mood swing, inconsistent and even selfcontradictory, Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) nevertheless developed an utterly personal idiom that marked him as him and nobody else. He dwelled amid the heady leavens of twentieth-century innovation but remained unfermented.

There would be no flings with the Second Viennese School, no screeds, no agendas, no edicts, no manifestos.

His style wouldn’t even change very much over the years.

“I know perfectly well that I’m not one of those composers who have made harmonic innovations like Stravinsky, Ravel, or Debussy,” he wrote in 1942, “but I think there’s room for new music which doesn’t mind using other people’s chords.”

Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge was a lavish benefactress of contemporary chamber music, especially via her partnership with the Library of Congress and its accompanying foundation. Barber, Bartók, Britten, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Respighi all benefited from her commissions.

After her death, the Coolidge Foundation asked Poulenc for a chamber work in her honor for a 1956 festival.

Poulenc phoned the eminent French flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal: “You know how you’ve always wanted me to write a sonata for flute and piano?

Well, I’m going to.” He did. The world premiere took place in 1957 at the Strasbourg Festival with Rampal on flute and the composer on piano. An immediate success, the sonata quickly became bedrock flute repertory.

It’s a surprisingly dark-hued work, at least in its first two movements.

The first-place Allegretto malinconico has its chipper moments, but for the most part savors of sighing figures, descending lines, and an overall minor-key cast. The Cantilena: Assez lent, one of Poulenc’s most touching and intimate creations, is a plaintive chanson in a deliberately uncomplicated style, the piano part mostly in softly pulsing chords against the longbreathed and intensely private flute line. The concluding Presto giocoso is nothing less than a romp, cast in breathlessly short phrases in an exuberant dance-hall style, contrasted with a distinctly more lyrical central section that revisits the introverted nature of the first movement before recapping the original kicky energy. With a fleeting backward glance at somber matters just past, the sonata ends with the musical equivalent of a baton twirl.

Fauré: Fantasie in E minor for Flute and Piano, Opus 79 When Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) died he was barely known outside his native France. A young Aaron Copland wrote an elegy in The Musical Quarterly in which he decried that “perhaps no other composer has ever been so generally ignored outside his own country, while at the same time enjoying an unquestionably eminent reputation at home.” As always, Copland knew his hawks from his handsaws. “Fauré is the Brahms of France,” he declared, emphasizing that despite the glaring differences between the music of the two masters, Fauré “possesses a genius as great, a 20

style as individual and a technique as perfect.”

Fauré wrote his Fantasie, Opus 79 for the 1898 flute-playing competition— a.k.a. flute examinations—at the Paris Conservatory. (The Conservatory’s practice of commissioning brand-new compositions for examinations has gifted posterity with some wonderful stuff—consider Debussy’s exquisite Clarinet Rhapsody.) Fauré’s friend and colleague Paul Taffanel, flutist extraordinaire and Conservatory professor, took care of whatever tweaks were needed to render the Fantaisie suitable for the occasion. Fauré came to despise the piece, but he would seem to have been a minority of one, then as now. The Fantaisie opens with a prime specimen of Fauréan melancholia by way of a limber minor-key melody over subtly shifting harmonies, before engaging in a jaunty and chipper march, threaded through with dazzling flute passagework.

Chaminade: Concertino in D major for Flute and Piano, Opus 107 Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944) started big and ended small.

She studied with some of the major figures of the day, although as a woman in the nineteenth century her options were relatively constrained. She got by nonetheless, via her well-crafted piano compositions and songs, not to mention her fine piano playing—although she fared better in the United States than on her home turf. As a composer she never really evolved past the late-Romantic idiom, despite living in an era of downright volcanic musical change. Time and attention passed her by, and most of her music died with her.

Her one successful bid for posthumous fame is the Concertino for Flute, Opus 107, which she composed for those ubiquitous Paris Conservatory yearly examinations that have produced so many interesting pieces for so many instruments. A fine, well-crafted piece, the Concertino earns its popularity by virtue of its superb flute writing and its ingratiating lyrical afflatus.

F. Doppler: Andante and Rondo for Two Flutes and Piano, Opus 25 The Dopplers, Karl (1825–1900) and Franz (1821–83), must have been quite a sight in their joint flute concerts: Left-handed Karl held his flute in a mirror image of his right-handed brother, creating a fine symmetry. The Dopplers were frequent participants in a European concert scene dominated by composer-virtuosos who barnstormed hither and yon, playing a mix of original compositions and audience-pleasing fare such as opera potpourris.

The Dopplers were an indubitably class act, responsible 21

musicians who founded a major Hungarian orchestra, composed wellreceived operas and concert works, and settled down to solid appointments— Franz as principal flute in the Court Opera and professor at the Vienna Conservatory, and Karl as Capellmeister in Stuttgart. Even if they weren’t headliners, both graced the profession as exemplars of first-rate artists amid the hurly-burly of nineteenth-century concert life.

The Andante and Rondo is one of the numerous pieces that Franz ­composed for the brothers’ European tours. The Andante is cast in the cavatina/cabaletta structure popular in operatic arias of the era, in which a lyrical, ornamented cavatina is contrasted by a display of high-spirited virtuosity in the cabaletta. The Rondo, as the name implies, interleaves three instances of a spirited gypsy-flavored reprise with two lyrical contrasting episodes.

Harty: In Ireland, Fantasy for Flute and Piano Posthumous fame, ever fickle, has left the distinguished multi-talented Irish musician Hamilton Harty (1879–1941) with a lower profile than he deserves. Everything about him breathes first-class quality, from his superb training by his musician father, to his early successes in the brutally compe­ titive London scene, to his prominent conductorial posts.

No less than Joseph Szigeti premiered his Violin Concerto in 1909; he was appointed the permanent conductor of Man­ches­ter’s Hallé Orchestra in 1920, then beginning in the 1930s moved on to the major London orchestras. A potent advocate of contemporary British composers, he introduced his Manchester audiences to works by Bax, Moeran, and Walton in addition to Continental worthies such as Sibelius, Casella, and Richard Strauss. He conducted the first English performances of symphonies by Mahler and Shostakovich, in addition to the world premiere of Walton’s First Symphony—which he gifted posterity in a vibrant 1935 recording with the London Symphony Orchestra.

It’s sad that most of Harty’s compositional output has faded to obscurity; judging from the smattering of recordings that aim to resuscitate works such as the Violin Concerto, Irish Symphony, Variations on a Dublin Air, and the early hit A Comedy Overture, a lot of fine stuff remains neglected. Among those worthies we find In Ireland, a fantasy originally cast for flute and piano and later for flute, harp, and orchestra. “In a Dublin street at dusk, two wandering street musicians are playing,” reads the header on the score for the 1918 work. What follows is a delectable procession of fetching ballads and rousing dances, all convincingly Irish thanks to Harty’s razor-sharp ear for the folk music of his homeland.

Traditional: Three Irish Folk Songs (arranged by David Overton) David Overton (b. 1942) has spent a long and distinguished profession in law while pursuing a side career as an arranger for The King’s Singers, 22

Vienna Choir Boys, and particularly Sir James Galway, for whom he has arranged these three Irish folk songs: Spinning Wheel, She Moved Through the Fair, and The Star of the County Down.

P. Morlacchi: Il pastore svizzero, for Flute and Piano Poor Pietro Morlacchi, poster boy for obscure Romantic composers. He doesn’t have an entry in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He’s not even in Wikipedia. Almost nothing is known about him except that he was apparently a perfectly decent composer and flutist. Frequently confused with Francesco Morlacchi, a solid opera composer who served for decades as Capellmeister in Dresden, Pietro was born in Switzerland in 1828, studied in Milan in the 1840s, and died (somewhere) in 1868.

Il pastore svizzero (The Swiss Shepherd) is the one work that has earned Morlacchi a glimmer of posthumous light.

Il pastore svizzero opens with an accompanied cadenza (an improvisatory solo passage) of sorts before launching into its main melody, a slightly melancholic affair savoring of operatic arias; a return to the cadenza-like opening leads directly to a series of increasingly virtuosic variations on a sturdy “Canzonetta svizzera.” The whole gains energy, eventually culminating in a Scherzetto that brings this highly effective recital piece to a rousing close.

F. Doppler/K. Doppler: Rigoletto Fantasie for Two Flutes and Piano, Opus 38 Following the fashion of early- to mid-nineteenth century touring virtuosos, the Doppler brothers included potpourris of popular opera tunes in their concerts. As did their superstar colleague Franz Liszt, the Dopplers came up with a powerhouse fantasy built out of tunes from Verdi’s tragic 1851 opera Rigoletto, including the Duke’s ever-familiar “La donna è mobile” and, of course, Gilda’s starry-eyed declaration of first love, “Caro nome,” treated to a sequence of ever-more flamboyant variations.—SCOTT FOGLESONG

SCOTT FOGLESONG is a Contributing Writer to the San Francisco Symphony program book.

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