Brightmusic Chamber Ensemble

Gaetano Donizetti, Trio in F Major for Flute, Bassoon & Piano:  Donizetti (1797-1848) was a 19th Century Italian Romantic composer, primarily known for his bel canto operas.  At age 19, Donizetti improvidently joined the army.  After military authorities heard one of his operas, they honorably discharged him for the sake of art.  After hitting stride, he composed 31 operas in less than 12 years, including Anna Bolena in 1830, Lucia di Lammermoor in 1935 (“it rocked the house,” says David Dubal), and Don Pasquale in 1843.  He died at age 51, after enduring three years of syphilitic dementia.  Donizetti did write non-operatic works, including the wind-piano trio we will play tonight.  Written early in his career, this Trio “has an operatic flavor” to it [Wai Kit Leung], a prequel of things to come.

Franz Schubert, Auf dem Strom (“On the River”), op. 119, D.943:  Schubert (1797-1828) was a 19th Century Austrian Romantic composer.  Harold Schonberg called him “the first lyric poet of music,” but Schubert achieved no such recognition during his lifetime.  In his scant 31 years, he gave only one public concert a few months before his death.  Of his more than 600 songs, only 190 were published when he died.  Schubert’s lieder “fused the supple bel canto of Italian melodies with the emotional and spiritual profundity of German forms and harmonies … finding the fullest and highest possible expression for the deepest human emotions” [James Leonard].  Schubert wrote Auf dem Strom specifically for performance at his public concert on March 26, 1828, the first anniversary of Beethoven’s death.  The text by Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860) is “a poem of farewell” – to the shore, to daylight, to the poet’s love and perhaps to life itself.  In the music for the second verse, Schubert quotes the Funeral March from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony.  Appropriately, this song was sung at a memorial concert for Schubert on what would have been his 32^nd birthday.

Émile Paladilhe, Solo pour Hautbois (“Solo for Oboe”):  Paladilhe (1844-1926) was a French 19th-20th Century late-Romantic composer.  A child prodigy, he entered the Conservatoire de Paris at age 9, where he won prizes in piano and organ, including the prestigious Prix de Rome.  He composed in a variety of genres, including opera, piano and sacred music.  He wrote many mélodies, or French art songs, characterized by flowing melody lines.  He knew Georges Bizet as well as the elderly Charles Gounod, with whom he collaborated on some works.  Paladilhe composed Solo pour Hautbois in 1898. It is one of his most popular and widely performed works today.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, Four Hymns for Tenor, Viola & Piano:  Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) was a 19th-20th Century English composer.  He was “a big, burly, indestructible man who had one of the longest creative spans in history” [Schonberg].  He disdained the 19th Century German masters and early 20th Century Continental composers, in favor of 16th Century Tudor polyphony, Baroque counterpoint, French orchestration and English folk music.  “Solo songs make up a substantial part of Vaughan Williams’s output” [Staines ed.].  His Four Hymns set to music the poetry of Jeremy Taylor, Isaac Watts, Richard Crashaw and a Greek poem, written in about 200 A.D. and translated by Robert Bridges, then the Poet Laurate of England.  Vaughan Williams completed this work in 1914, but did not publish it until 1920, after the end of World War I, in which he served in the medical corps and the artillery. 

Madeleine Dring, Trio for Flute, Oboe & Piano:  Dring (1923-1977) was a 20th-Century English composer, singer and actress.  As a young woman, she studied violin, piano, composition and theatre at the Royal College of Music (Vaughan Williams was one of her teachers).  She married a professional oboist, who later played with the London Symphony Orchestra.  After her death, he published much of the music she had written but had not yet published when she died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage.  She favored shorter compositions, some of which were used as incidental music for theatre and British television in the 1960s.  Dring composed this Trio in 1968 for her husband.  In its United States premiere, he performed it with flutist Peter Lloyd and pianist André Previn.  The Trio continues to be one of her most popular works for recording and performance, including a live performance last year on the BBC.       

Benjamin Britten, Canticle III, “Still Falls the Rain. The Raids 1940. Night and Dawn,” op. 55:  Britten (1913-1976) was a 20th Century English composer who marched to his own drummer.  He “made his mark before World War II and never substantially changed his style” [Schonberg], even though this “went against the grain of the postwar era” [Alex Ross].  This song is based on a poem by then-living poet Dame Edith Sitwell, partly reflecting the bombing raids on London in 1940, and partly on the Passion of Christ.  Britten composed this work in 1954 for a concert the following year in Wigmore Hall in memory of his friend, Australian pianist Noel Newton-Wood.  It was premiered by vocalist Peter Pears, hornist Dennis Brain and Britten himself at the keyboard.  In the composer’s words, Sitwell’s poem bespeaks “courage and light seen through horror and darkness.” 

Francis Poulenc, Trio for Oboe, Bassoon & Piano, FP 43:  Poulenc (1899-1963) was a 20th Century French composer.  Manic-depressive, devoutly Catholic and openly gay, he wrote music that was “joyous and melancholy, sacred and profane” [John Burrows].  He became a member of the iconoclastic Les Six group of young composers whose music stressed lack of pretension, nostalgia and overt sentimentalism.  Poulenc believed that French music should be “leavened with that lightness of spirit without which life would be unendurable.”  About his own music, he once said, “Above all do not analyze my music – love it!”  He composed his Trio for Oboe, Bassoon & Piano in 1926 in Cannes, dedicating it to Manuel de Falla.  Brian Wise viewed this work as “the composer’s first true chamber work.”  Poulenc said, “I love my Trio because it sounds clear and is well balanced.”  Sprinkled throughout the work, critics have identified the composer’s quoting, paraphrasing or parodying Haydn, Mozart, Saint-Saëns, Duke Ellington and the military bugle call “Taps.”