BIRDS & BAGATELLES

Ensemble 360

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Wednesday 22 January 2025, 7.00pm

Tickets:
£22
£14 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s 

Past Event
Wind musicians of Ensemble 360

BEAMISH The Naming of Birds (12’)
ZEMLINSKY Humoresque (4’) 
BARBER Summer Music (12’) 
LIGETI Six Bagatelles (12’)
NIELSEN Wind Quintet (25’) 

This concert of playful music for wind quintet, performed by members of Ensemble 360, promises to transport you to an English meadow, the Danish countryside, and a sultry New York summer.  

 A staple of the wind repertoire, Nielsen’s Quintet was inspired by his fellow musicians and reflects the character of each instrument, playfully hinting at friendships and chatter between the players. Sally Beamish’s The Naming of Birds draws on the natural world as inspiration, while Barber’s Summer Music evokes a languid summer’s day in this programme full of melodious twittering and jaunty dance tunes. 

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Browse the full programme online, explore the seasons with our digital brochure or download a copy of our 2025 brochure.

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BEAMISH Sally, The Naming of Birds

I wrote this piece while also working on Knotgrass Elegy, an oratorio which uses a text by Donald Goodbrand Saunders describing the threat that modern farming methods pose to birds. The birds’ Latin names are chanted by a children’s chorus. While making the sketches for this large scale piece, I became fascinated by the close relationship that the Latin names (and often common names too) have with the actual sound of the bird. I began to notate the birdsongs with that in mind, and these five short movements for wind quintet emerged, each featuring a different member of the quintet as a soloist. 

Perdix perdix (the partridge) horn 

Vanellus vanellus (the lapwing) oboe 

Carduelis cannabina, emberiza calendra (the linnet, the corn bunting) flute/piccolo 

Tyto alba (the barn owl) bassoon 

Pyrrhula pyrrhula (the bullfinch) clarinet 

The work was commissioned by the Reykjavik Wind Quintet, and first performed at the Matt Thompson Hall, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, on 27th April 2001. 

Sally Beamish 2001 

ZEMLINSKY Alexander Von, Humoreske

Zemlinsky was a Bruckner pupil, encouraged by Brahms, admired by Mahler (whom Alma married after a passionate fling with Zemlinsky, her composition teacher), a close friend of Schoenberg (who married Zemlinsky’s sister), one of the most interesting opera composers of his age, and an outstanding conductor who devoted much of his energy to promoting new music. Zemlinsky was forced to flee Vienna by the Nazis, and in 1939, shortly after arriving in New York, he composed the Humoreske, subtitling it a Rondo and describing it as a ‘Schulstück’ (literally a ‘school piece’) for wind quintet. Hans Heinsheimer, an old acquaintance and fellow refugee who had worked for Universal Edition in Vienna, asked the composer to write a piece for a series of newly-composed works for younger players that he wanted to publish. Despite increasingly precarious health, Zemlinsky completed the piece, and the result is a charming work lasting just over four minutes. It was to be one of the last things Zemlinsky wrote: just after finishing it he suffered a massive stroke and moved to Larchmont, where he died in a nursing home three years later.

 

Nigel Simeone © 2010

BARBER Samuel, Summer Music

In 1953, Samuel Barber was commissioned to write a new work for the Chamber Music Society of Detroit, the fee to be paid for not in the usual way but by contributions from the Detroit Symphony audience. Originally, he was asked for a septet (three wind, three strings and piano) but settled on the scoring for wind quintet after hearing performances and attending numerous rehearsals by the New York Wind Quintet who offered a great deal of technical advice about writing for this instrumental combination. In spite of this close collaboration, the first performance had been promised to Detroit and was given there by Detroit Symphony principals on 26 March 1956 when it was enthusiastically received, one local critic noting that the audience was delighted by ‘its mood of pastoral serenity.’ Following the premiere, Barber again worked with the New York Wind Quintet, making some cuts and putting Summer Music into its final shape. After performances in Boston and on a tour of South America, the New York ensemble played it at Carnegie Hall on 16 November 1956. Since then, the work has become established as cornerstone of the twentieth-century wind quintet repertoire. Cast in a single movement, the mood is mostly quiet and rhapsodic, and as for the title, Barber wrote that ‘it’s supposed to be evocative of summer – summer meaning languid, not killing mosquitoes.’ 

 

© Nigel Simeone 

LIGETI György, Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet

Allegro con spirito 
Rubato, lamentoso 
Cantabile, molto legato 
Vivace. Energico 
Adagio. Mesto – Allegro maestoso (Béla Bartók in Memoriam) 
Vivace. Capriccioso 
 

During the war, most of Ligeti’s immediate family perished in Nazi concentration camps, but he was able study at the Budapest Conservatoire, where his teachers included Zoltán Kodály. In 1951–3 Ligeti wrote a set of piano pieces called Musica ricercata from which he selected six to arrange for woodwind quintet. The influence of Bartók, especially of piano pieces like Mikrokosmos, is apparent throughout – and the fifth movement is explicitly written as a tribute to the composer whose music most inspired the young Ligeti when he was growing up in a repressive regime. The other composer whose music comes strongly to mind in the fourth and sixth of the Bagatelles is Stravinsky. Ligeti’s style was to change rapidly within a few years, after he moved to the more liberal cultural climate of Vienna. But the Bagatelles give an enjoyable indication of how skilful a composer he was at the start of his career.  

 

Nigel Simeone © 2014 

NIELSEN Carl, Wind Quintet

Nielsen composed his Wind Quintet in 1922 for the Copenhagen Wind Quintet, whose Mozart playing had inspired him. As well as this work, Nielsen planned to write concertos for each of the members of the group but only completed those for flute and clarinet. He wrote it during a three-month stay in Gothenburg, immediately after completing the Fifth Symphony. In a letter to a friend he wrote that ‘the externals are very modest, but the technicalities are for that reason all the more difficult’, and he told he wife that it he was ‘greatly amused’ by the challenge. In his is own programme note on the work, Nielsen wrote:

 

‘The quintet for winds is one of the composer’s latest works, in which he has attempted to render the characters of the various instruments. At one moment they are all talking at once, at another they are quite alone. The work consists of three movements: a) Allegro, b) Minuet and c) Prelude – Theme with Variations. The theme for these variations is the melody for one of Nielsen’s spiritual songs, which has here been made the basis of a set of variations, now merry and quirky, now elegiac and serious, ending with the theme in all its simplicity and very quietly expressed.’

 

Nigel Simeone

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