Program notes by Eric Bromberger

Langsamer Satz (Slow Movement) (1905)
ANTON WEBERN
Born December 3, 1883, Vienna
Died September 15, 1945, Mittersil

Webern entered the University of Vienna to study musicology in the fall of 1902, when he was 19, and two years later he began composition lessons with Schoenberg; these private studies would continue until 1908. Early in his work with Schoenberg – in 1905 – Webern wrote a movement for string quartet as a composition exercise, and this is called today simply Langsamer Satz: “slow movement.”

Listeners who usually flee at the thought of Webern may be surprised by this music. Composed before Webern had abandoned tonality, the Langsamer Satz makes clear just how deeply rooted he was in the music of late nineteenth-century Vienna. In fact, hearing this music without knowing its composer, one might well guess either Brahms or Mahler. The influence of Brahms (dead only eight years when the Langsamer Satz was written) can be felt in the lush sound and the romantic theme-shapes; the influence of Mahler (then director of the Vienna Opera and composing his Seventh Symphony) appears in the scrupulous attention to sound and the intensity of the development. The harmonic language is quite traditional (this music begins in C minor and progresses to the relative major, E-flat), as is the form. This eleven-minute movement is based on two themes; both of these develop, and the music moves to a climax, resolving quietly on fragments of the opening idea.

Particularly striking is the expressiveness of this music. We have so much come to think of Webern as the supremely intelligent and detached manipulator of tone rows and complex canons that it may surprise some to hear the romantic arc of these themes and to sense the intensity of feeling in the music. The score is littered with such performance markings as “very warm,” “with deep feeling,” “expressive” and “very calm.”

Webern probably never heard this music. He wrote it as an exercise, and doubtless he and Schoenberg went over it in some detail, revising and refining. But the Langsamer Satz remained unpublished, and the manuscript was eventually discovered in the Webern archives that musicologist Hans Moldenhauer established at the University of Washington. The first known performance took place in Seattle on May 27, 1962, over half a century after the music was written and seventeen years after the composer‘s death.

Summer Music, Opus 31 (1956)
SAMUEL BARBER
Born March 9, 1910, West Chester, PA
Died January 23, 1981, New York City

Though he will always be remembered for a piece he composed for strings, Samuel Barber wrote deftly for wind instruments. From his fairly small catalog of works (only 48 opus numbers), two specifically feature winds: the Capricorn Concerto of 1945 and Summer Music, composed ten years later. That title suggests the music‘s character, which is light and somewhat in the manner of a serenade. Scored for standard wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and French horn), the twelve-minute Summer Music is in one movement made up of contrasting sections. Commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Detroit, it was first performed in that city on March 20, 1956.

A problem facing every composer who writes for winds is to achieve a variety of sound within the limitations of breath, sonority and range common to these instruments. Barber handles this problem by writing to each instrument‘s particular strengths. One recognizes immediately that this music is written specifically for winds (rather than, say, for strings): phrases are short, rhythms complex and unusual and the sonority dry, at times almost pointillistic.

Barber‘s instructions in the score are a lot of fun. He uses the standard Italian tempo indications, but phrasing instructions – some quite specific – are in English. Among these, Barber keeps reminding his players that the music should be “slow and indolent” and “unhurried” (appropriate in a piece called Summer Music); he asks at one spot that the music sound “Joyous and flowing,” and several times he instructs the clarinet to play “freely, with arrogance.”

The languorous beginning gradually moves ahead, and soon the oboe sings the long main theme. There follows a very fast passage, with the four woodwinds staccato and chattering. The rapid alteration of these fast and slow sections recurs throughout, and Barber achieves some unusual sounds by pairing groups of instruments and contrasting their sounds. The climax, which Barber specifies should sound “exultant,” features huge swirls of sound. The music calms, then rushes ahead to the quiet close, which seems almost a murmur.

Concertino for Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, Two Violins, Viola and Piano (1925)
LEOŠ JANÁČEK
Born July 3, 1854, Hukvaldy, Moravia
Died August 12, 1928, Moravska Ostrava, Czechoslovakia

Three different events came together to inspire Janáĉek to compose his Concertino, and all three happened right around his 70^th birthday in July 1924. That month Janáček composed his Mládí (“Youth”), a work for wind sextet that got him thinking not only about being young but about how much he enjoyed composing for this sort of large chamber ensemble. Early in November 1924 his opera The Cunning Little Vixen was premiered in Brno. That opera took Janáĉek into the world of wild animals – it celebrated the natural world and embraced the larger cycles of life. And later that same month, Janáček heard a performance of his The Dairy of One Who Vanished by Jan Heřman, and he liked the performance so much that he resolved on the spot to write something for Heřman. To the pianist he wrote: “You played my Dairy as I have never yet heard it played . . . Under the wonderful impression . . The main themes for my future concerto came to me while walking. From here to the full working out of them is a long way. Much thinking!”

The “future concerto” that Janáček envisioned for Heřman would turn out to be the Concertino, which he composed in the spring of 1925, as he approached his 71^st birthday. The Concertino has been described as “a chamber piano concerto” scored for piano plus clarinet, bassoon, horn, two violins and viola. That ensemble is in effect a tiny orchestra (it has woodwind, brass and string sections), but Janáček uses this ensemble in such unexpected ways that the Concertino remains – despite its central piano part – a piece of chamber music.

But there is more to this music than a virtuoso chamber composition. Janáček felt that it was in some way an heir to Mládí, and the youthful spirits of that work made their way into the Concertino; the composer at one point considered calling it Spring. And the natural world of The Cunning Little Vixen appears here as well: Janáček said that each of the four movements was in some way inspired by his own youthful encounter with a wild animal, and he was specific about what each of those animals was doing in its respective movement. One need not know any of this to enjoy the Concertino, and listeners should not regard the four movements as tone poems, but an awareness of the forces that helped shape this music will enliven our sense of how a supposedly aging composer was able to write such fresh and imaginative music.

Janáček may have seven players on the stage, but in the opening Moderato he uses only two of them: the piano and the horn. Janáĉek said that this movement was inspired by a youthful memory of blocking a hedgehog from getting into its lair, and he said that the horn‘s “grumpy” response to the piano‘s firm opening line depicts the animal‘s frustration. The piano has a second subject, marked both pianissimo and dolcissimo, and this alternates with the piano‘s opening statement.

The second movement, marked Più mosso, is scored only for piano and E-flat clarinet. Janáček commented: “The squirrel was chatty (while jumping) from tree to tree among the branches. But once in the cage, she screeched like my clarinet...” This movement is full of rhythmic energy, and the clarinet‘s saucy tune seems to have its origin in folk music. The center section is built on trills and swirls, and the opening material returns to round the movement out. At the end comes a surprise: the entire ensemble joins in for the last five measures.

Of the third movement, marked Con moto, Janáček said: “With a bullying expression the stupid bulging eyes of the screech-owl, tawny-owl and other critical night-birds stare into the strings of the piano.” This movement too is in ternary form, and its great chords might seem to echo the squawks of owls. At the center comes an extended cadenza for the piano.

Janáček noted that the final movement represented a meeting of all these animals, and he said of the piano here: “Someone has to be the organizer.” This Allegro has been described as a variation-movement, but it takes awhile for the central theme to be announced by the piano. This is the movement that uses all seven instruments most fully, and finally we hear something that approaches an orchestral sonority. The ending is as quick and unexpected as everything else in this surprising music.

Audiences may approach the Concertino in many ways: as a miniature piano concerto, as an evocation of the natural world that was so important to Janáček, or as an example of his late style, in which tiny bits of theme are extended, contracted, and developed in imaginative ways. And through all of it shines the youthful energy of its 70-year-old creator.

Overture on The Flying Dutchman as performed by a Terrible Health Resort Band at 7:00 am at the Village Fountain (1925)
PAUL HINDEMITH
Born November 16, 1895, Hanau
Died December 28, 1963, Frankfurt

Paul Hindemith had a wicked sense of humor, and this is one of his wickedest pieces. Hindemith wrote this piece, whose title says it all, sometime in the 1920s. It is not a parody of Wagner but a parody of a bad performance of Wagner. Hindemith had made his career as a practical musician –concertmaster of the Frankfurt Opera, violist in a string quartet, and member of an early-music group – and he was all too aware of the life of professional musicians and of how, at its lower extreme, that life can become a matter of incompetence, artistic compromise, and – worse – not caring. Hindemith had played in a number of regional orchestras as a young man and knew from experience the kinds of musical shortcuts such ensembles could take (not too mention how incompetent they could be).

In this piece Hindemith re-scores Wagner‘s Overture to The Flying Dutchman for string quartet, but it is not a literal transcription (it lasts only about half the length of Wagner‘s original). What we get instead is a version of the Wagner overture full of the kind of playing that drove the young Hindemith crazy. From the first instant the ensemble is wildly out of tune (A grinds against G#, C# against D), and things go downhill from there: modulations go nowhere, a theme that was performed correctly on its first appearance goes awry when it returns, the musicians get lost and wander and so on. At the climax, things go completely insane: Wagner is left behind, and the music plunges into a wild waltz that is part-Johann Strauss, part-Richard Strauss. Finally the ensemble wrenches matters back to Wagner, and the performance ends with an emphatic admission of defeat.

Mozart‘s A Musical Joke is a satire of bad composers, full of the sort of bad compositional practices that went right up Mozart‘s nose. The present piece is a satire of bad performers – untalented, uncaring, unaware – that Hindemith had to deal with, and he takes a savage revenge across the brief span of this music.

Octet in B-flat Major (1920)
MAX BRUCH
Born January 6, 1838, Cologne
Died October 2, 1920, Friedenau

In 1891 Max Bruch became a professor of composition at the Berlin Academy, and he remained there for nearly twenty years – he retired in 1910 at the age of 72. Bruch spent the rest of his life (which included the period of World War I) in Berlin, and he continued to compose in his final years. In his final decade Bruch turned to a genre he had largely avoided to this time, chamber music, and from these final years came three large-scale works: two string quintets and a string octet. They remained unpublished at the time of his death (and for some years afterward), and when they finally appeared they were published without opus numbers.

Bruch composed his Octet in B-flat Major in January-February 1920, just as he turned 82 and only a few months before his death – it was virtually his final composition. Any octet for strings must inevitably be compared to Mendelssohn‘s Octet in E-flat Major of 1825, but Bruch makes an important change in his ensemble. Rather than writing for Mendelssohn‘s four violins, two violas and two cellos, Bruch substitutes a doublebass for the second cello. That change gives added depth and resonance to the already-full weight of an eight-instrument ensemble, and there are many moments in Bruch‘s Octet when the music approaches an orchestral sonority.

The work is in three movements. The beginning breathes an air of quiet nobility, underlined here by having the husky sound of the viola lead the way. Marked Allegro moderato, this movement is not at a particularly fast pace, and despite more animated secondary material and several big climaxes, the music never reaches a level of strain in its intensity. This is an extended sonata-form movement, Bruch alternates his material deftly, and finally the music drives to a full-throated conclusion.

The real jewel of this music is its central Adagio, which features Bruch at his best – there is a nice melodic sense in this movement, expressive and rich in sonority. Over dark, muttering opening rhythms, the first violin sings its long-lined (and gorgeous) opening idea. The rising, aspiring second theme is also presented by the first violin, and these build to a series of climaxes before the movement falls away to its quiet close.

The tremolo-like beginning of the Allegro molto finale establishes the quasi-orchestral sound and mood of this music from the first instant. Even the noble second idea, announced by the cello, does little to dispel the sense of a big sound and big manner in this quick-paced movement, and over its closing moments Bruch‘s Octet drives to a truly sonorous conclusion.

It is hard to believe that this music could have been written in 1920. At age 82 Bruch seemed unaware of the new currents in music. Instead, he looked back to the great tradition of German romantic music in the nineteenth – century – the tradition of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms – as he wrote this music. It is as if Bruch, thrust into an alien world that had brought a devastating war to Germany and a threatening dissonance to music, turned to the past and spoke that comforting language one final time.