Bright Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Flute Quartet No. 3 in C Major, K.285b (flute, violin, viola and cello): Mozart (1756-1791) learned to play the keyboard at age 3, started composing at age 5, and learned the violin at age 6 on a tour during which he and his child-prodigy sister performed all over Europe. He was “history’s first important professional ‘freelance’ musician” [David Dubal]. “There was literally nothing in music he could not do better than anybody else” [Harold Schonberg]. Mozart probably wrote the third of his four flute quartets in Vienna in 1781-82, shortly after he told his father he wanted to marry Constanze Weber, but before they married in August 1782, to his father’s displeasure. This is a melodious, two-movement quartet, in which the flute plays the primary role. Mozart adapted the second movement from the sixth movement of his Serenade No. 10 for Winds, K.361/370a.

César Franck, Sonata in A Major for Flute and Piano: Franck (1822-1890) was born in Belgium but lived most of his life in Paris. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at age 15 but did not teach there until much later in his life. He toiled in relative obscurity for a pianistic child prodigy, migrating from the piano to the organ at age 30. Deeply religious, he served as the organist of Saint-Jean-Saint-Francois and Saint-Clothilde in Paris. When he joined the faculty of the Paris Conservatoire at age 51, he was officially the professor or organ, but unofficially he was also a professor of composition. Influenced by Wagner more than he might have admitted, Franck’s harmoniously rich, modulating style had a great influence on French Romantic music, both through his own compositions and those of his protégés. Franck helped re-focus French music from opera to orchestral and chamber music, as well as music for the keyboard. He wrote this sonata in 1886, originally for violin and piano, as a wedding gift for the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. Franck’s student Vincent d’Indy described the sonata as “the first and purest model of the cyclical use of themes in sonata form.”

Craig Goodman, “Off the Beaten Path” – World Premiere (violin, cello, clarinet and piano): Guest artist Craig Goodman has composed 16 works for instrumental and vocal ensembles. Craig’s compositions are decidedly lyrical, always written with particular people and places in mind. He composed “Nationalparken” with the novelist Knud Sorensen to celebrate the opening of Denmark’s first national park, and “Eli’s Brother” for commemorative ceremonies in Lodz, Poland on commission from the City of Lodz. “Off the Beaten Path” is a single-movement composition that sets elements and themes beyond their habitual contexts, rendering the work both familiar and abstract, not unlike works by the Danish architect, Jorn Utzon, whose drawings and sketches have indeed affected the composition of this piece. Conversation fragments have also found their way into this work, giving the performers a chance for some provocative and amusing verbal exchanges.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “Magic Flute Fantasy,” arr. Michael Webster (flute, clarinet and piano): “Die Zauberflöte” (the “The Magic Flute”), K.620, was the last of Mozart’s 23 operas. He completed most of it in July 1791, except for the overture and a march, which he finished only two days before the premiere. Mozart was the first composer “to make comic opera transcend mere entertainment” [Schonberg]. The opera opened to packed houses on September 30, 1791, “by far the biggest success with which Mozart had been associated in Vienna” [Schonberg]. On December 5, Mozart was dead. It is said that, on his deathbed, Mozart attempted to sing Papageno’s aria “Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja” (“The Birdcatcher, That’s Me”) – the second work featured in this Fantasy crafted by contemporary American clarinetist and arranger Michael Webster. The Fantasy extracts portions of the Overture, the Finale and seven arias and choruses, ingeniously stitched together by other fragments of this ever-popular opera.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Flute Quartet No. 1 in D Major, K.285 (flute, violin, viola and cello): The manuscript of this quartet is dated December 25, 1777. The 21-year-old genius and his mother were in the third month of a European tour. Severe winter weather kept them in Mannheim, Germany on their way to Paris. While they wintered in Mannheim, Mozart fell in love with the 17-year-old Aloysia Weber (he later married her less beautiful, younger sister Constanze). Mozart also met an amateur flutist, Ferdinand Dejean, a surgeon for the Dutch East India Company, who commissioned this and Mozart’s second flute quartet. The first movement of this quartet is “melodious;” the second movement, written in B minor (a “rare key in Mozart”) is “slow” and “eloquent;” and the third movement features a “kittenish finish” [Julian Rushton].