NWS welcomes back alumnus Jonathan Fischer, now Principal Oboe of the Houston Symphony, for an intimate concert of chamber music. The program includes evocative works by University of Miami’s Valerie Coleman, Felix Mendelssohn, Benjamin Britten and more.

 

NWS thanks its 2020-21 donors.

 

Program

Valerie Coleman

Red Clay & Mississippi Delta for Woodwind Quintet (2010)
Approximate duration: 6 minutes

Valerie Coleman was named Performance Today’s 2020 Classical Woman of the Year, underscoring her immense contributions as a composer, performer and educator in American music. As the founder and longtime flutist of Imani Winds, Coleman has made a lasting imprint on the modern wind quintet repertoire, including this work that Imani Winds recorded on their 2016 album Startin’ Sumthin’. The composer wrote the following description.

Red Clay & Mississippi Delta is short work that combines the traditional idea of musical scherzo with living in the South. It references the background of my mother’s side of the family that hails from the Mississippi Delta region, from the juke joints and casino boats that line the Mississippi River to the skin tone of kinfolk in the area: a dark skin that looks like it came directly from the red clay. The solo lines are instilled with personality, meant to capture the listener’s attention as they wail with “bluesy” riffs that are accompanied by the rest of the ensemble. The result is a virtuosic chamber work that merges classical technique and orchestration with the blues dialect and charm of the South. 

              — Valerie Coleman

Howard Hanson

Pastorale for Oboe, Harp and Strings, Op. 38 (1949)
Approximate duration: 7 minutes

When Howard Hanson became first American composer to be awarded the Rome Prize in 1921, he used his three-year residency in Italy to study under Ottorino Respighi, a master of lush orchestral color and Romantic grandeur. Hanson returned to the United States to become the director of a conservatory recently founded by the philanthropist George Eastman (the inventor of roll film and the Kodak camera), and over the next 40 years Hanson built the Eastman School of Music into one of the finest training grounds in the world. Besides continuing to compose his own music in a neo-Romantic vein, Hanson’s advocacy as a teacher and conductor made him a trendsetter for the entire field of American composition, as when he led the Rochester Philharmonic in the first performance from a major orchestra of the pioneering Black composer William Grant Still, debuting the Afro-American Symphony in 1931.

In 1949 the U.S. Secretary of State appointed Hanson to serve as a delegate to the UNESCO Conference in Paris, which coincided with the centennial of Chopin’s death. He was in excellent international company, with his music appearing alongside new works by Villa-Lobos (representing Brazil) and Martinů (representing Czechoslovakia) among other noted composers. Hanson’s contribution was this Pastorale, originally composed for oboe and piano and then expanded to feature oboe with harp and strings. It was a sign of the musical times in those years after World War II that even an ostensibly bucolic piece throbs with plaintive intensity.

Karel Husa

Divertimento for Brass and Percussion (1959)
Approximate duration: 11 minutes

After studying piano, violin and composition in his native Prague, Karel Husa earned a scholarship from the French government to train in Paris, where his teachers included Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger. Husa’s String Quartet No. 1 and other early works  gained notice around the world, and in 1954 he was offered a faculty position at Cornell University, a post he held for 38 years.

Husa became an American citizen in 1959, the same year he reworked selections from his Eight Czech Duets for piano four-hands into the Divertimento for brass and percussion. The piano duets were written in a style accessible to students and amateurs, with simplified rhythms and textures that lend themselves well to the heft of a brass ensemble. Parts for two percussionists expand the expressive range, whether in the Stravinsky-esque dance rhythms of the Scherzo or the soothing Song, decorated with tinkling glockenspiel. The longest and most robust movement is the closing Slovak Dance, accelerating from a hesitant tuba melody to intense volleys between the timpani and trumpets.

Benjamin Britten

Phantasy Quartet, Op. 2 (1932)
Approximate duration: 13 minutes

Benjamin Britten was a true musical prodigy, composing prolifically as a child and excelling at piano and viola. In 1927 his viola teacher introduced him to the composer Frank Bridge, who agreed to give Britten private lessons. Britten lost some of his youthful swagger working with Bridge—he later wrote, “I, who thought I was already on the verge of immortality, saw my illusions shattered”—but he emerged from the demanding lessons with new rigor and technique to match his natural inventiveness.

Britten entered the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1930. His lessons there with the conservative-leaning composer John Ireland were unremarkable, but he relished his discovery of European trendsetters including Schoenberg and Stravinsky. A Sinfonietta from 1932 became Britten’s official Opus 1 (superseding the hundreds of opus numbers he logged in his youth), followed by the Phantasy for oboe, violin, viola and cello, written for the oboe virtuoso Leon Goossens. The Phantasy received its first performance on BBC Radio in 1933, and it brought Britten into the international limelight with a 1934 performance at a festival in Florence.

Britten shaped the Quartet as a palindrome, with the cello beginning and ending the work with a halting march figure. The muted string trio elaborates the march, and then the oboe enters with a simple and tender theme intoned over dry plucks. The intensity builds until crunching chords and a virtuosic oboe swoop release into a series of linked episodes, including a matched pair of sections with a smoky, Spanish flavor.

Felix Mendelssohn

Quartet No. 6 in F minor for Strings, Op. 80 (1847)
Approximate duration: 24 minutes

Upon returning from a trip to London in the spring of 1847, Felix Mendelssohn was greeted with tragic news: his beloved sister Fanny had died suddenly from a stroke. That summer in Switzerland, Mendelssohn poured his grief into the String Quartet No. 6 in F minor. He then suffered a stroke himself that October and died the next month at the age of 38, leaving the quartet as his last major work.

Quivering tremolo bow strokes and rapid changes in dynamics create a simmering tension in the first movement that hardly relents for the duration of the Quartet. In the second movement, the rather fast tempo and three-beat pulse are in line with Mendelssohn’s signature scherzos, but here the insistent accents and searching harmonies create far more angst and turmoil than is found in his effervescent, elfin constructions from happier times.

Fanny Mendelssohn was an accomplished composer, especially of songs, and the peaceful “song without words” that serves as this quartet’s slow movement stands as a tribute to the enduring bond the siblings formed through music. Moving back into turmoil for the Finale, trills and slurred tremolo figures echo the disquieting textures from the first movement. At the end, the rhythms morph into triplets that recall the Italian tarantella, a manic folk dance that, legend has it, could ward off death after a bite from the poisonous tarantula.

-- © 2021 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.