Brightmusic Chamber Ensemble

Kenji Bunch, String Circle for 2 Violins, 2 Violas and Cello:  Bunch (b. 1973) is an American violist and composer who lives in Portland, Oregon.  He attended The Juilliard School, where he received degrees in viola performance and composition.  For 12 years he taught viola, composition and chamber music at The Juilliard School Pre-College.  He currently teaches both viola and composition at Reed College and Portland State University.  He is also the head music theory teacher for the Portland Youth Philharmonic.  The New York Times named him “a composer to watch.”  His compositions have been performed by more than 50 American orchestras. Bunch seeks to combine “vernacular American influences with techniques from his classical training to create a unique vocabulary of New American music.”  String Circle was written in 2006 for pairs of violins and violas plus cello.  In the composer’s own words, “the title refers to the continuum of history and tradition that string instruments offer us.  Our country is particularly rich in a variety of approaches to string playing, so each of the work’s five movements offers tribute to a particular idiom of American music.” 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Clarinet Quintet in A Major, K.581 for Basset Clarinet, 2 Violins, 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 composed this four-movement quintet in 1789 for his friend Anton Stadler, a clarinetist with the court orchestra in Vienna.  It is a work of the mature Mozart, “perhaps Mozart’s most influential chamber work” [Julian Rushton].  It is a piece of music “in which form, expression, technique and taste are raised to unprecedented heights” [Schonberg].  Its lyrical melodies make it one of Mozart’s most popular chamber works.  Mozart composed it about the same time he was writing his opera Cosi fan tutte.  Brian Robins has said that this quintet “bask[s] in that same golden warmth and mellowness that characterizes much of Cosi.” 

Antonín Dvořák, String Quintet No. 3 in E-Flat Major, op. 97 (the “American”) for 2 Violins, 2 Violas and Cello:  Dvořák (1841-1904) was “the happiest and least neurotic of the later Romantics” [Schonberg].  Although he is best known for his symphonies and his cello concerto, he displayed considerable skill in writing chamber music.  He grew up in a poor Bohemian family and did not begin his formal musical training until age 16.  After two years’ study at the Prague Conservatory, he worked as an orchestral violist and a church organist and choirmaster, all the while composing.  The big break in his career came when Johannes Brahms read some of his works and began to champion him as a composer.  Dvořák’s reputation spread, leading to tours of England, Germany, Russia and, from 1892-95, the United States, where he was struck by the lack of public support for the arts: “The great American republic alone, in its national government as well as in the various governments of the states, suffers art and music to go without encouragement.  Music must go unaided, and be content if she can get the support of a few private individuals.”  Some things never change.  The opus 97 quintet is one of two that bear the nickname “the American.”  Dvořák composed it in the summer of 1893, while he was living in the United States, and was on an extended vacation in the Czech town of Spillville in Iowa.  There, Dvořák was introduced to American Indians and their culture.  (Having attended Buffalo Bill Cody’s “Wild West” show in New York City doesn’t count.)  The quintet is partly based on Native and African-American themes, although it is difficult to tell where they end and Dvořák’s own Czech infusions begin.  It is “full of wonderful, populist tunes, even though the panatonic origins may be more Slavonic than American” [Brian Wise].