Brightmusic Chamber Ensemble

Camille Saint-Saens, Piano Quartet No. 2 in B-flat Major, op. 41 for Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello:  Saint-Saens (1835-1921) was “probably the most awesome child prodigy in the history of music” [Harold Schonberg].  At age 10, he concluded his debut piano recital by offering to play any of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas as an encore, from memory.  He entered the Paris Conservatory at age 15, and at age 22 was appointed organist of La Madeleine, a post he held for 20 years. Liszt said that Saint-Saens was the finest organist he had ever heard.  Berlioz opined that “He knows everything but he lacks inexperience.”  He did everything: piano, organ, composing, conducting and teaching.  As a composer, he was prolific and versatile, writing symphonies, concertos, chamber works, operas vocal music an solo works for piano and organ.  Saint-Saens long life spanned the transition from Romanticism to Modernism.  A revolutionary in his early years, he seemed an archconservative as an elder.  At age 85, he wrote to his former student Gabriel Faure that, at his age, “it was one’s right to say no more – and probably one’s duty.”  Then he changed his mind and, in the year that he died, wrote instrumental sonatas.

Franz Schubert, Piano Quintet in A Major, D.667 (“Die Forelle” or “The Trout” Quintet), for Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello and Double Bass: Schubert (1797-1828) lived a “tragically short life” in Vienna.  Thus, Robert Dubal began his characterization of this unlikely fount of Romantic music. Schubert stood only 4’11” tall, was chubby, had poor eyesight and was painfully shy.  His career as a schoolmaster lasted only four years.  He contracted syphilis at age 26 and lived only five more years.  When aristocratic patronage was dying, “this most noncommercial of the great masters was … fortunate enough to have a network of friends who realized that he was a genius.”  Schubert idolized Beethoven, who read some of Schubert’s works and asked to meet the young Schubert.  Schubert met his idol on Beethoven’s deathbed, and shortly thereafter served as one of the torchbearers at Beethoven’s funeral.  Schubert once supposedly said, “I am in the world only for the purpose of composing,” and during the remaining 20 months of his own life, compose he did.  The “Trout Quintet” dates from an earlier, and happier, period in Schubert’s life. It was written on commission from a cellist patron who heard Schubert’s work when he and a friend were on a walking tour in Upper Austria during the summer of 1819.  The Quintet’s five movements burst with joy and vitality. Its nickname comes from its signature Movement IV, in which Schubert quotes his own 1817 song “Die Forelle” (The Trout), and then adds five variations on the song.  This Quintet was Schubert’s earliest chamber music masterpiece and has been one of his most lasting.  It is, as Deutsche Gramophoneput it, “certainly the best-known piece of music to be named after a fish.”