SHOSTAKOVICH, MOZART & MORE

Ensemble 360 & Members of the Elias Quartet

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Thursday 22 May 2025, 2.00pm

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

Book Tickets
Ensemble 360 musicians

SHOSTAKOVICH Two Pieces for String Octet (10′)  
MOZART Quintet for Piano and Wind in E flat K452 (20′)  
POULENC Oboe Sonata (13’)  
SCHOENBERG Verklärte Nacht (30′)  

With Ensemble 360 once again joined by members of the Elias String Quartet, this is an expansive programme of some of the most exciting writing for strings from the 20th century, interspersed with two very different, but equally glorious, works for piano and wind.  

Mozart’s majestic Quintet was, according to a letter he wrote to his father shortly after its first performance, a piece he considered one of the finest he had ever written. Poulenc’s profound and stylish late Oboe Sonata is an elegy both to its dedicatee Prokofiev and a farewell to life itself, being the composer’s final work. Early pieces shot through with spirituality and revolution (by Shostakovich and Schoenberg, both of whom celebrate anniversaries in 2025) bookend this concert.  

 

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SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri, Two pieces for string octet, Op.11

1. Prelude: Adagio
2. Scherzo: Allegro molto

This early work was completed in July 1925, just after Shostakovich had finished his First Symphony. It was dedicated to the memory of his poet friend Volodya Kurchavov and first performed at the Stanislavsky Theatre in Moscow on 9 January 1927. Originally Shostakovich envisaged a suite (in five movements), but he abandoned that scheme, settling on the present two-movement structure: an eloquent slow movement followed by a Scherzo which is full of forward momentum one moment, and quiet reflection the next. The driving energy soon wins out, and the music hurtles towards a frenetic close. At the time, Shostakovich expressed the view that the Scherzo was ‘the very best thing I have written’.

Nigel Simeone 2024

MOZART Wolfgang Amadeus, Quintet for Piano and Wind in E flat K452

Largo – Allegro moderato
Larghetto
Allegretto

In a letter to his father on 10 April 1784, Mozart described his new Quintet for Piano and Wind as ‘the best piece I have ever written’. Completed on 30 March 1784 it was given its première just two days later on 1 April, at a ‘grand musical concert’ for the benefit of the National Court Theatre in Vienna. The extraordinary programme consisted of two Mozart Symphonies (almost certainly the ‘Haffner’ and the ‘Linz’), an ‘entirely new concerto’ played by Mozart (either K450 or K451, both recently finished), a solo improvisation, three opera arias and the first performance of an ‘entirely new grand quintet’. It was probably the presence of wind players for the symphonies that prompted Mozart to write one of his most original chamber works for this occasion.

While the first movement is designed on almost symphonic lines (complete with substantial slow introduction), it has a gentler sensibility and textures that recall the kind of dialogue between piano and wind that are such a feature of Mozart’s mature piano concertos. After a slow movement that makes the most of the song-like expressiveness of wind instruments, the finale is a sonata rondo – in essence a theme that returns repeatedly within a developing context – that was also much favoured in the piano concertos. The Quintet is highly original in terms of how it is put together, and the daring with which Mozart explores unusual sonorities.

Nigel Simeone © 2011

POULENC Francis, Oboe sonata

Élégie. Paisiblement sans presser
Scherzo. Très animé
Déploration. Très calme

Poulenc described the elements of the Oboe Sonata – his last major work – as follows: ‘The first movement is elegiac, the second scherzando, and the last a sort of liturgical chant.’ The form of the Sonata is slow–fast–slow with its most original feature being the finale, a deeply-felt ‘Déploration’. This eloquent tribute was dedicated to the memory of Serge Prokofiev, but it was first performed at the Strasbourg Festival on 8 June 1963 by Pierre Pierlot and Jacques Février as a memorial to Poulenc himself who had died earlier in the year.

© Nigel Simeone 2015

SCHOENBERG Arnold, Verklärte Nacht Op.4 for string sextet

Verklärte Nacht, composed in 1899, is one of Schoenberg’s earliest masterpieces, written in a language that owes much to both Wagner and Brahms, two of the predecessors he most admired. In this ravishingly beautiful sxtet (which Schoenberg later arranged for string orchestra), he uses Wagnerian leitmotifs, and he was clearly influenced by the sound world of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. But when it comes the work’s formal construction, Brahms is the dominant influence. Themes are developed by variation, by combining with other themes, and by fragmenting or dissolving them. This is a process that Schoenberg himself admired so much in the music of Brahms – a techinque he called ‘developing variation’. So while the use of leitmotifs suggests a Wagnerian kind of musical narrative – aptly so for a work that tells a story without words – we hear Brahms in the approach to development, tonality and form that Schoenberg uses to create a single movement lasting half an hour.

The work is programmatic, taking its title from a poem by the Symbolist writer Richard Dehmel (1863–1920), a kind of German Aubrey Beardsley. When Dehmel’s collection Weib und Welt (which includes the poem Verklärte Nacht ) was published, it caused a scandal, and Dehmel was tried for obscenity and blasphemy. Though he was acquitted, the court demanded that all copies of the book should be burned.

In Dehmel’s Verklärte Nacht, a man and a woman pass through a moonlit landscape. She confesses to carrying a child that is not his; bathed in light, he tells her that she must have the child, and bear it as their own. At the end of the poem, ‘He clasps her round her strong hips. Their kisses mingle in the night air.’ This erotic text was not only Schoenberg’s inspiration, but also guided the structure of the work which is thus a kind of tone poem for string sextet. The first performance took place on 18 March 1902 in the Vienna Musikverein when it was played by the Rosé Quartet with Franz Jelinek and Franz Schmidt – the latter a cellist as well as a distinguished composer.

Nigel Simeone, 2014

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