Brightmusic Chamber Ensemble

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “Kegelstatt” Trio in E-flat Major, K.498 (for viola, clarinet and piano):  Mozart (1756-1791) completed this work on August 5, 1786 at the age of 30.  He dedicated it to one of his piano students, Franziska Jacquin, whose parents were close friends of the Mozarts.  It was probably performed for the first time in the Jacquins’ home, with Franziska at the piano, Mozart on the viola and Anton Stadler on the clarinet.  Mozart admired Stadler and composed a number of other works for him and his instrument.  This trio has been called “dense and cerebral” – “one of his most perfectly integrated compositions, with [a balanced] interplay among the three instruments” [All Music Guide].  It avoids virtuosity in favor of the lyrical qualities of the viola and the clarinet.  The trio’s nickname derives from a note Mozart made on the first page of the autograph score of another work he had finished for basset horns about a week before this one:  “Vienna, 27 July 1786 while playing skittles.”  Mozart certainly enjoyed skittles – lawn bowling – so later publishers of this trio couldn’t resist the temptation to imply that he had composed it while he was bowling.  Well, if anybody could have done that, it would have been Mozart.

Max Bruch, Romance for Viola and Piano in F Major, op. 85:  Bruch (1838-1920) was one of the most prominent practitioners of 19^th-Century German Romanticism.  He continued to practice that Romanticism proudly into the 20^th Century, notwithstanding Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Debussy and others.  He composed instrumental and choral music for the concert hall, theater and church.  He was also a conductor and, from 1891-1910, a professor of composition at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik.  His music was, like that of Brahms and Mendelssohn, conservative in form and harmony, but it reflected “deep thoughtfulness and melodic richness” [David Dubal].  While surly in disposition, Bruch created beautiful music.  He composed this work in 1911 at age 73, one year after he composed “Eight Pieces,” which Brightmusic performed in November 2011.  Bruch released the Romance in two versions, one for viola and orchestra and the other for viola and piano.  He dedicated it to Maurice Vieux, the principal violist of the Paris Opera and Conservatorie orchestras.  This one-movement work is “one of his most outstandingly beautiful creations” [Derrickson].

Robert Schumann, “Märchenerzählungen” (“Fairy Tales”), op. 132 (for viola, clarinet and piano):  Schumann (1810-1856) was not accepted as an immortal until after his death.  “Few major composers have been so disliked in their own time, and even fewer have been as little performed” [Harold Schonberg].  What a complex man Schumann was: a man of literature as well as music, a music critic (the “discoverer” of Brahms) as well as a composer and conductor.  No match at the keyboard for his virtuoso wife Clara, he commanded her love and devotion in a relationship that reflects as much storybook romanticism as it does tragedy.  Today, Schumann would probably be diagnosed as manic-depressive.  He composed his Fairy Tales only four months before his final breakdown and suicide attempt, which sent him to an asylum near Bonn for two years, where he died of starvation at age 46.  The composition of this lighthearted work followed his meeting of the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms and his trumpeting of Brahms to the world in his music journal.  The Fairy Tales is literary but not programmatic; none of its movements evokes a particular fairy tale.  Each of the four miniatures calls upon the listener for a parallel literary act.  The work is, in the words of John Palmer, “rhapsodic in structure and tempered with an awareness of Viennese, Classical-era rhetoric.”  It is one of the final musical gifts of “the most elusive of the Romantic composers” [David Dubal]. 

Guillaume Lekue, Piano Quartet in B Minor (for violin, viola, cello and piano), completed by Vincent d’Indy after Lekue’s death:  Lekue (1870-1894) was born in Belgium.  He began to compose in 1885.  His family moved to France in 1879 and Paris in 1888.  Lekue studied with César Franck until Franck’s death and thereafter with one of Franck’s protégés, Vincent d’Indy.  In his few short years, Lekue composed enough works for orchestra, voice and chamber ensemble to fill nine CDs.  His best-known work is a violin sonata commissioned by Eugène Ysaÿe, premiered less than a year before Lekue died of typhoid fever contracted from a contaminated sorbet, one day after his 24^th birthday.  He began to work on his Piano Quartet in late 1892, but he had not finished it when he died.  His friend and teacher d’Indy completed the second movement.  Lekue intended the Quartet to be a grand work, probably in three movements.  It will be, he said, “a thing of beauty [and] audacity, beside which my violin sonata will be but a penny toy.”  Lekue would have been gratified by the words of critic Jerry Dubins, who has described the first movement as an “outpouring of emotions so intense, so personal, so private, and so painful it almost hurts to listen to it,” and the second movement as a work of  “heart-throbbing sadness and breathtaking beauty inexpressible in words.”