ELGAR PIANO QUINTET

Memento was composed in memory of David Huntley, the charismatic Vice-President of Boosey & Hawkes in the United States, who died in 1994. This work was written for the concert given in his memory by the Kronos Quartet on 13 October 1994 (the other composers included Elliott Carter, Robin Holloway, Barbara Kolb and Aaron Jay Kernis). The Scottish connection with this piece is central to its musical language. According to Macmillan, Memento is ‘based on the modality of Gaelic lament music and the Gaelic heterophony of psalm-singing in the Hebrides.’

Nigel Simeone 2013

Duets: With moderate movement
Ostinato: Very fast
Solo: Very calm
Burlesque: Fast, con fuoco
Recitative and Passacaglia (La Serenissima): Slow – Slowly moving

This late and very private masterpiece was Britten’s last chamber work, completed in November 1975. It is also one of his very few works to contain self-quotations, from the opera Death in Venice. The structure is unusual (Britten contemplated calling it a ‘Divertimento’) and the five movements form an arch. Colin Matthews, who worked as Britten’s assistant on this quartet, has written that ‘the main weight [is] borne by the outer movements, while the middle movements are in the nature of intermezzi.’ The first movement is a melancholy Andante, while the brittle ‘Ostinato’ and ‘Burlesque’ frame the ‘Solo’, an Adagio of breathtaking restraint and luminous beauty. The Finale, ‘La Serenissima’, is an intimate hymn to Venice, a gentle Passacaglia (a favourite Britten form – in Peter Grimes and the Second String Quartet), but one which never finds repose: just as it seems to be settling on E major, Britten ends the work on a most enigmatic musical question mark.

Nigel Simeone 2013

Moderato – Allegro
Adagio
Andante – Allegro

Elgar’s Piano Quintet is one of his last large-scale works, dating from the same period as the Violin Sonata and the Cello Concerto. In October 1918, Elgar wrote to the critic Ernest Newman, telling him that the first movement of his Piano Quintet was ready: ‘I want you to hear it. It is strange music I think, and I like it – but it’s ghostly stuff.’ The work was to be dedicated to Newman. The first private performance of the complete work took place on 7 March 1919 at Severn House, Elgar’s London home. George Bernard Shaw was there, and his reaction was enthusiastic: ‘The Quintet knocked me over … This was the finest thing of its kind since [Beethoven’s] Coriolan.’ Shaw is presumably referring here to the dark, uneasy opening which certainly recalls the mood of Beethoven’s overture.

As the introduction gives way to the main Allegro another influence is apparent: the Piano Quintet by Brahms. It is presumably the sweeping, passionate drive of the musical argument in this movement – punctuated by some dramatic references back to the introductory music – that led the English musicologist and Elgar biographer Percy Young to describe it in the most glowing terms, declaring that it was ‘in some ways Elgar’s finest movement’. The work’s central Adagio begins with a tranquil viola solo, supported by the other strings. This expansive movement is crowned by a passionate climax of almost orchestral grandeur, before subsiding back to the gentler, calmer mood of the opening. After a brief introduction that becomes increasingly agitated, the main theme of the finale is a noble arching theme marked ‘with dignity, song-like’. Much of the movement is restrained and reflective, but at the close Elgar drives home his musical ideas to a powerful and thrilling conclusion.

Nigel Simeone © 2011