About The Music

In the early 1980s, Kaija Saariaho experienced a shift in her musical outlook, switching from the strict serialism she had studied previously in the pursuit of something more eclectic and experimental. At IRCAM, the computer music research centre in Paris founded by Pierre Boulez in 1977, she began experimenting with different ways of creating sound, particularly with using electronics in the interrogation of sound’s properties, and used spectral composers such as Tristan Murail and Gerard Grisey as models. Early works from Saariaho’s new period included the Jardin Secret trilogy (1985-7), for tape alone and instruments with electronics, and Lichtbogen (1986), the first time Saariaho worked with computers in the context of purely instrumental music.

Saariaho’s Petals, written in 1988, was another work that resulted from that creative shift. Petals came directly from discarded or unused ideas she had in the creation of Nymphèa, the third of the Jardin trilogy, for string quartet and electronics. (“It was like she collected these petals and made them into a cello piece,” the cellist Anssi Karttunen, who premiered the piece, has said.)

For solo cello with or without electronics, in Petals there’s an emphasis on finding new sounds and textures through a variety of live techniques: varying the pressure, speed and placement of the bow on the instrument, changing the density of the sound through the use of harmonics, and playing with a mix of different types of vibrato. The electronics—consisting of a cellist playing through a microphone into a mixer, with the sound being put back the system via a reverb dial and a harmonizer—can be played live, or be pre-programmed. “If the sound is already 3-D,” Karttunen has said, the electronic element of Petals represents “the opening up of a fourth dimension.”

Hugh Morris 2024

In spite of embracing the latest technology with his pioneering film score, Saint-Saëns never came to terms with more progressive musical trends as he grew older. He could find ‘no style, logic or common sense’ in Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and was appalled by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (‘If that’s music, I’m a baboon’, he declared). Increasingly resistant to modernism, and viewed as something of a musical dinosaur, he turned instead to strict classical forms and traditional harmony, but always with beautifully-crafted results. In the last year of his life, Saint-Saëns wrote three sonatas scored for what he described to a friend as ‘rarely considered instruments’: oboe, clarinet and bassoon – and he had plans to write others for flute and cor anglais. The Bassoon Sonata, Op. 168, was the last of the three to be written, completed in June 1921 and dedicated to Léon Letellier, first bassoon of the Paris Opéra and the Société des concerts. Its three movements are a fluid and lyrical Allegro moderato, a delectable (and technically challenging) scherzo marked Allegro scherzando, and a final movement which begins with an expansive Molto adagio before a brief energetic section which brings the work to an energetic close.

Saint-Saëns wrote this piece for a series of concerts that he gave for the Red Cross in St Petersburg in April 1887. It is dedicated to Maria Feodorovna, Empress of Russia, and the composer wrote it for himself to play on piano with three other specific players in mind: flautist Paul Taffanel, oboist Georges Gillet and clarinettist Charles Turban. For the sources of the tunes, Saint-Saëns wrote to Julien Tiersot, the leading French expert on traditional music at the time, requesting suitable Danish and Russian themes. Before leaving for Russia, the work was rehearsed in Paris, and Saint-Saëns invited the singer and composer Pauline Viardot to hear the new piece, after which he travelled to Russia with Taffanel, Gillet and Turban.

Following a flamboyant introduction, Saint-Saëns introduces a succession of traditional themes, varies and repeats them, and occasionally mixes them together, all composed with his characteristic inventiveness and skill.

As well as being a prolific and extremely successful composer, Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) was a brilliant piano virtuoso and a hugely respected teacher whose pupils included Fauré and André Messager. Both of them recalled his gifts as a musical humourist: he would often lighten the serious mood of lessons with pastiches and caricatures. This tendency found its fullest expression in Le carnaval des animaux, now one of Saint-Saëns’s most famous pieces, but originally conceived as a private entertainment. A masterly parody (lampooning, among others, Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Saint-Saëns’s own Danse macabre), it was written for a Shrove Tuesday concert on 9 March 1886 given at the home of the cellist Charles-Joseph Lebouc, with Saint-Saëns and Louis Diémer as the pianists and Paul Taffanel as the flautist. Often rather severe and earnest in public, Saint-Saëns wanted to be known as a composer of serious pieces, so he was uncertain how a wider audience might react to his ‘grand zoological fantasy’, and apart from The Swan he did not allow any of Carnaval to be published during his lifetime. Performances were usually given among friends: two weeks after the premiere, it was played by the chamber music society called ‘La Trompette’ (for which Saint-Saëns had written his Septet), and on 2 April 1886 it was given at the salon of Pauline Viardot, by special request of Franz Liszt, on what turned out to be his last visit to Paris.

Composed in 1908, L’assassinat du duc de Guise was the first original film score by a major composer. The film was written by Henri Lavedan and directed by Charles le Bardy and André Calmettes; it was first shown by Le Film d’Art at the Salle Charras at 4 rue Charras, Paris, on 16 November 1908. Saint-Saëns had already left the city to spend the winter in Las Palmas and it was his pupil Fernand Leborne who conducted the performance. As for how Saint-Saëns went about writing the score, his first biographer Jean Bonnerot wrote in 1922 that it was composed ‘scene by scene, in front of the screen’.

Nigel Simeone

Les odeurs de Paris, probably composed in 1870 and subtitled a ‘grande marche’, is another delightfully daft piece, intended to evoke the smells of Paris with a ‘children’s orchestra’, including toy instruments – bird whistles, flageolets and ratchets – alongside piano, strings, trumpet and harp. Originally the score also called for ‘pistols’, but Saint-Saëns, probably wisely, deleted them.

Nigel Simeone

Originally called Fantaisie, the Morceau de concert was composed in October 1887 and a version with orchestral accompaniment quickly followed. It was dedicated to Henri Chaussier, inventor of a new type of valve horn (known as the ‘Cor Chaussier’), the specific instrument for which Saint-Saëns wrote this piece. It is in one continuous movement, divided into three distinct sections: a vigorous Allegro moderato in F minor gives way to a lyrical Adagio in A flat major followed by the concluding Allegro non troppo, which quickly moves from F minor to F major and a brilliant conclusion.

Nigel Simeone

Andantino
Ad libitum. Allegretto
Molto allegro

Composed in May–June 1921, this is one of three woodwind sonatas composed by Saint-Saëns at the very end of his life. It is dedicated to Louis Bas, first oboe of the Paris Opéra and the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. The opening has an eighteenth-century flavour and the whole work is notable for its restraint and classical poise. One of the most memorable moments in this exquisitely crafted piece occurs at the start of the second movement, where the oboe plays freely over arpeggiated chords on the piano before moving into an elegant triple-time Allegretto. The Finale, in quick compound time, is delicately written and witty.

Préambule. Allegro moderato
Menuet. Tempo di minuetto moderato
Intermède. Andante
Gavotte et Final. Allegro non troppo – Più allegro

Saint-Saëns wrote his Septet for the chamber music society ‘La Trompette’ and dedicated the work to its founder, Émile Lemoine. La Trompette gave the first performance of the ‘Préambule’ at one of its soirées in the rue de Grenelle in January 1880 and the complete work was given its premiere on in December 1880, with Saint-Saëns at the piano.

The dedicatee, Lemoine, noted down the origins of the piece on Saint-Saëns’s autograph manuscript: ‘For a long time, I’d been pestering my friend Saint-Saëns to compose something for our evenings at La Trompette, a serious work which included a trumpet mixed with the string instruments and piano which we normally had. At first he joked about this bizarre combination of instruments, saying that he would first write something for guitar and 13 trombones. In 1879 he gave me a piece for trumpet, piano, string quartet and double bass entitled Préambule which was played on 6 January 1880. It no doubt pleased Saint-Saëns because he told me afterwards that “you will have your complete piece and the Préambule will be the first movement”. He kept his word, and the Septet was played for the first time on 28 December 1880.’

The four movements give a clear indication of Saint-Saëns’s classical leanings and his fondness for ancient dance forms, but what gives the work its delightful individuality is the unusual mixture of instruments combined with particularly fertile melodic invention.

De Ushuaia a la Quiaca is the Argentinian equivalent of Land’s End to John o’ Groats and is part of the soundtrack of the movie ‘Motorcycle Diaries’. The film is a biopic about the written memoir of Ernesto Guevara, best known as the Marxist guerrilla leader Che Guevara. The composer, Gustavo Santaolalla, won a BAFTA for his work on this film and later went on to compose the music for other successful films such as ‘Brokeback Mountain’, ‘Bebel’ and most recently ‘The Last of Us’.

Allegro marciale in G minor (K.450)
Andante in C minor (originally Allegro, C sharp minor; K.247)
Allegro ma non tanto in C major (K.515)
Allegretto in G major (K.538)
Allegro moderato in B minor (K.377)
Allegro molto in G major (K.427)

The Scarlatti sonatas recorded by the great pianist Dinu Lipatti in the late 1940s, during the last few years of his short life, are among the most famous (and admired) of all Scarlatti records. What is much less well known is that in 1938–9, Lipatti also made arrangements of Scarlatti for wind quintet. Lipatti was primarily a pianist, but he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and Paul Dukas and these extremely ingenious transcriptions are in the spirit of neoclassical works like Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, though much less interventionist.

Even though Lipatti is generally faithful to his original sources, transcribing such idiomatic keyboard music for wind instruments required imagination and skill – and the finished results sound as much of the sound of the early twentieth century as they do the early eighteenth. These transcriptions were first performed during a radio broadcast on Romanian Radio in April 1940 (apparently the only time Lipatti appeared as a conductor). They were played in public in Paris later in the same year by the Quintette à vent de Paris, the ensemble for which Lipatti started to compose his own wind quintet in 1938 which was destined to remain unfinished.

Schnittke composed Hymnus II, for cello and double bass, in 1974. It is the second of four ‘Hymns’ written between 1974 and 1979 for unusual instrumental combinations (the first is for cello, harp and timpani, the third for cello, bassoon, harpsichord and bells). The music is marked by a kind of meditative stillness (briefly interrupted by a cello outburst), and, at the close, by an eerie, otherworldly quality as these two bass instruments seem to reach ever higher before fading into an uneasy silence.

Mondestrunken (Drunk with Moonlight)
Columbine
Der Dandy
Eine blasse Wäscherin
Valse de Chopin
Madonna
Der kranke Mond (The sick moon)
Nacht. Passacaglia (Night)
Gebet an Pierrot (Prayer to Pierrot)
Raub (Theft)
Rote Messe (Red Mass)
12. Galgenlied (Gallows Song)
Enthauptung (Beheading)
Die Kreuze (The Crosses)
Heimweh (Homesickness)
Gemeinheit! (Foul play!)
Parodie
Der Mondfleck (The Moon spot
Serenade
Heimfahrt (Journey home)
O alter Duft (O ancient fragrance)

The first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris in May 1913 may have provoked the most famous riot in musical history, but it wasn’t the only one. A few months earlier in Berlin on 16 October 1912, some members of the audience at the premiere of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire were enraged by what they heard. When Albertine Zehme – the actress who had commissioned the work from Schoenberg – appeared on the platform in a Pierrot costume, she was, according to one eyewitness ‘greeted by an ominous murmur from the audience. One could not help admiring her courage, as she went on from poem to poem, disregarding the hissing, booing and insults shouted at her and Schoenberg. There were also fanatical ovations from the younger generation, but the majority were outraged. A well-known virtuoso, his face purple with rage, shouted: “Shoot him. Shoot him,” meaning Schoenberg, not the poor undaunted Pierrot.’

What was it that caused such rage? While Schoenberg’s use of Sprechgesang (speech-song) was not new (both Schoenberg and Humperdinck had used it before), its other-worldly effect in Pierrot lunaire is something that must have been disconcerting. So, too, was the sense of disorientation (and unpredictability) of Schoenberg’s music. To listeners in 1912 it’s easy to see how this might have seemed downright peculiar, but to audiences today, Pierrot lunaire is a work of eerie beauty.

The earliest sketch for this quartet is dated 9 March 1907 and the work was completed in the summer of 1908. It was written at a turbulent time in Schoenberg’s private life – his wife Mathilde was having an affair with the painter Richard Gerstl – but the finished work was dedicated to her. The first performance was given at the Bösendorfer-Saal in Vienna on 21 December 1908. The occasion was recalled by the composer almost thirty years later, when he wrote that it caused ‘riots which surpassed every previous and subsequent happenings of this kind.’ He went on to admit that the riots were ‘a natural reaction of a conservatively educated audience to a new kind of music.’ This was a work Schoenberg identified as an important turning point in his creative development: a move away from reliance on traditional keys. As Schoenberg himself put it in a 1949 lecture – choosing his words carefully – the quartet marked ‘the transition to the second period, this period which renounces a tonal centre and is falsely called atonality.’ The composer’s irritation with the use of the ‘atonal’ label is understandable: as he pointed out in the same lecture, in every movement of the quartet ‘the key is presented distinctly at all crossroads of the formal organization.’ Even so, it was a work which shocked early audiences – and at the premiere the second, third and fourth movements were all interrupted by audience jeers and laughter until the coda of the fourth movement, which was heard without disturbance. As Schoenberg commented, ‘perhaps even my enemies and adversaries might have felt something here?’

As well as its harmonic innovations, perhaps the most startling aspect of this work is the addition of a soprano voice in the third and fourth movements, which are settings of two poems by Stefan George. The first movement is loosely in sonata form with five thematic ideas, all of them related to each other. Beginning clearly in the home key of F sharp minor before moving away into remoter harmonic territory, the movement eventually finds repose on quiet F sharp minor chords. The second movement is a kind of Scherzo marked Sehr rasch (very quickly) in D minor, but with frequent changes of tempo – and a Trio section which quotes the Viennese folk song ‘O du lieber Augustin’. The third movement, ‘Litanei’ (Litany) – the first of the two song settings – is loosely in E flat minor though highly chromatic. Schoenberg’s own account of the last movement, ‘Entrückung’ noted that it ‘begins with an introduction, depicting the departure from earth to another planet.’ From this literally other-worldly opening, the voice and instruments in this movement develop the music with a brilliantly imagined and highly expressive array of unusual sonorities before finally arriving on a sublime and radiant chord of F sharp major.

SCHOENBERG Arnold, Three Piano Pieces Op. 11

Schoenberg wrote a famous essay called ‘Brahms the Progressive’, and he drew much inspiration from the intimate sound-world of Brahms’s late piano pieces. But by 1909 he had started to abandon conventional tonality in favour of a free atonal language, without anchoring the music in traditional keys or harmonies. But through the use of recurring motifs, Schoenberg creates a unified work of extraordinary boldness. The composer likened his music to Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings, describing it as ‘an ever-changing, unbroken succession of colours, rhythms and moods’.

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

Alexander Schubert explores the nature of internet culture, using a website to allow the audience to co-compose the work especially for each performance – the audience can link to sound files, youtube videos, change text and instructions, just like a Wikipedia page, creating a work that reflects the memes and internet obsessions at the time of each performance.

http://www.alexanderschubert.net/index.php

Alexander’s own note:

Wiki-Piano.Net is piece for piano and the internet community. It is composed by everyone. At every time. The composition is notated as an editable Wiki internet page and is subject to constant change and fluctuation. When visiting the website wiki-piano.net everybody can see the current state of the piece and make alterations. The website allows the visitor to place media content, comments, audio and picture in the piece as well as traditional score editing. The concert performances of the piece take the current state of the website as the score. Hence no

performance will ever be the same. Through the editing process of the community new versions of the piece will constantly evolve.

Videos of Zubin’s previous performances of Wiki-Piano http://www.alexanderschubert.net/works/Wiki.php

Franz Schubert composed his Impromptu, D935, No.3, in 1827. It is another set of variations, the theme drawn from his own incidental music for the play Rosamunde (1823) which had already reappeared in the A minor String Quartet. With typical ingenuity, Schubert fashions a set of variations that are full of subtle surprises.

(C) Nigel Simeone

Adagio–Allegro–Più allegro
Adagio
Allegro vivace–Trio–Allegro vivace
Andante–variations. Un poco più mosso–Più lento
Menuetto. Allegretto–Trio–Menuetto–Coda
Andante molto–Allegro–Andante molto–Allegro molto

Schubert wrote no chamber music between 1821 and 1823, but made up for this hiatus in 1824 with three extraordinary masterpieces: the String Quartets in A minor and D minor (Death and the Maiden) and the Octet. He was commissioned to write the Octet by Count Ferdinand Troyer, a clarinettist who was also chief steward to Archduke Rudolf. Troyer asked Schubert to compose a work that could stand alongside Beethoven’s Septet, an immensely popular piece at the time. To Beethoven’s ensemble of clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello and double bass, Schubert added a second violin, giving himself the scope to explore sonorities that had almost orchestral possibilities. There are close similarities between the two works: both are in six movements, with the same key relationships between the movements, with a set of variations at the centre, and with both a Minuet and a Scherzo. But while Beethoven’s Septet was conceived as a kind of large-scale divertimento, Schubert’s Octet is more ambitious in scale and has a much greater (and more serious) expressive range.

Schubert completed the work on 1 March 1824. It was first performed privately at Troyer’s home (in Vienna’s Graben) soon afterwards and the first public performance was given in the Musikverein by an ensemble led by the great violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh on 16 April 1827. When the work was eventually published in 1851 it was shorn of the fourth and fifth movements and but it appeared complete in the Collected Edition in 1889.

The emotional range of the Octet is extraordinary for a work that appears, on the surface at least, to be quite benign. After the expansive but closely argued first movement, the sublime and tender clarinet melody that opens the slow movement has echoes of the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony (1822). The exuberant Scherzo, full of Schubert’s favourite dotted rhythms, is a complete contrast, though one that contains some surprising excursions into remote keys. The central variations are on a theme from Schubert’s early Singspiel Die Freunde von Salamanka (1815), the charming duet for Laura and Diego, ‘Gelagert unter’m hellen Dach der Bäume’ (‘Lying under the bright canopy of trees’) and the leisurely set of variations muse on aspects of the theme with unhurried inventiveness. The Minuet is markedly more relaxed than the Scherzo and contains some of the subtlest instrumental colouring in the whole work. The finale begins with stormy tremolos and a mood of foreboding that is seemingly dispelled when the main Allegro arrives, though in the course of this long movement there are more episodes of high drama (including a surprise return of the turbulent introductory music), until the exhilarating close – bringing to an end a work that 20th century composer Hans Gál described as ‘a romantic landscape whose delights are numberless’.

Allegro vivace
Andante
Scherzo: Presto
Theme and Variations: Andante
Allegro giusto

Silvester Paumgartner was a wealthy amateur cellist who lived in Steyr, Upper Austria, and an enthusiastic supporter of Schubert and his music. After playing Hummel’s Piano Quintet Paumgartner wanted a quintet for the same combination of instruments (violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano) from Schubert, who visited in the summer of 1819 (and again in 1823 and 1825). Paumgartner also wanted a work that included reference to Schubert’s song Die Forelle, The Trout, which had been composed in 1817. For Schubert, his visits to Paumgartner in the Upper Austrian countryside were a delight, a chance to make music, enjoy good company and revel in the spectacular scenery.

Willi Kahl, writing in Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music wrote that ‘the fundamental tone of the piece is defined by the persistence of a major key throughout’ – underlining that this is among Schubert’s most genial chamber works. The first movement is brilliant but never flashy while the Andante is the expressive core of the work, suggesting, Kahl believed, ‘a moonlit night-song from the Styrian landscape’. The Scherzo is muscular and energetic, with a more easy-going central Trio section. In the first three variations, the theme is heard in its original form (on a different instrument each time) and remains clearly recognisable in the more freely worked fourth and fifth variations. In the last variation, Schubert brings the Quintet back to the original song as the unmistakable figurations of the song’s piano accompaniment are heard for the first time, to utterly enchanting effect. The finale is amiable and untroubled (though not without a couple of surprises), bringing this most affable of works to a properly jubilant close.

In May 1838, the Viennese firm of Diabelli published Schubert’s last three piano sonatas. Schubert had originally intended to dedicate this trilogy of sonatas to the pianist and composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, but by the time they appeared in print Hummel, too, was dead and the publisher dedicated them instead to Robert Schumann, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of Schubert’s music. Schumann’s love of Schubert’s music had begun as a very private passion, as he wrote when reviewing the newly-published sonatas: ‘Time was when I spoke of Schubert reluctantly, and then only at night to the trees and the stars.’ In turn, Schumann’s great protégé Brahms wrote to his friend Adolf Schubring about Schubert, in words that could almost be a description of parts of Schubert’s A major Sonata in this concert: ‘Where else is there a genius like his, which soars with such boldness and certainty to the heavens, where we see the very greatest enthroned? He impresses me as a child of the gods who plays with Jove’s thunder and occasionally handles it in an unusual manner. But he plays in a region and a height which others cannot hope to attain.’

Composed in September 1828, two months before Schubert’s premature death, the A major Sonata opens with a noble first subject, soon contrasted with delicate triplets. Some typically adventurous harmonic excursions eventually arrive at the serene second subject. All this material is worked out in a spacious, unhurried sonata-form. The main theme of the slow movement (in F sharp minor) suggests a kind of cradle song, interrupted by a highly charged central passage full of dissonance and drama (pianist Alfred Brendel characterised it as ‘unease and horror’). The Schubert scholar Brian Newbould has written that in the delectable Scherzo, Schubert ‘uses the piano as percussionist and songster by turns’, while the finale combines elements of sonata form and rondo to create a sublime movement anchored by a gentle song-like main theme.

Nigel Simeone

1. Allegro
2. Andante con moto
3. Scherzando. Allegro moderato
4. Allegro moderato

Schubert composed the second of his piano trios in November 1827, the same month as he completed the great song-cycle Winterreise and nine months after the death of Beethoven in March 1827. This epic chamber work was, in fact, given one of its earliest performances at a concert by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna on 26 March on the anniversary of Beethoven’s death – one of the few occasions during Schubert’s lifetime when he enjoyed a major public success. Sadly this was not destined to last: the next known performance of the Trio was in January 1829, at a memorial concert for Schubert, who had died in November 1828. Just when Schubert’s music was at risk of slipping into neglect, it was Robert Schumann – an immensely perceptive critic as well as a composer of genius – who most regularly drew attention to the finest of Schubert’s chamber works. Schumann numbered this E flat Trio among the very greatest, describing it as his ‘last and most individual work of chamber music’ and comparing it with the more genial Trio in B flat major. Schumann wrote that the E flat Trio, which appeared in print just days before Schubert’s death, has travelled ‘across the ordinary musical life of the day like an angry thunderstorm … inspired by deep indignation and boundless longing … spirited, masculine and dramatic.’

In a letter to Heinrich Probst – the Leipzig publisher who had the foresight to publish the piece in 1828 – Schubert gave instructions for performances of the work: ‘Be sure to have it played for the first time by capable people, and particularly to maintain a continual uniformity of tempo at the changes of time signature in the last movement. The minuet at a moderate pace and piano throughout, the trio on the other hand vigorous except where p and pp are marked.’ The sheer scale of the work is extraordinary. Very few chamber works of the time unfold with such timeless nobility, but its length did attract some criticism at the time, and Schubert cut almost 100 bars from the finale before the first edition was issued.

NIGEL SIMEONE, 2010

Allegro
Andante
Scherzo
Presto

‘There’s nothing here at all: leave well alone and stick to writing songs.’ This was the damning verdict given to Schubert by violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh after he led a private performance of Death and the Maiden at the house of composer Franz Lachner in 1826. As the leader who had given the first performances of many of Beethoven’s string quartets, Schuppanzigh knew the possibilities of the form as well as anyone at the time, but Schubert’s daring and originality in this work clearly eluded him.

Death and the Maiden was Composed in March 1824 (its title was derived from an earlier song by Schubert of the same name used as the theme of the second movement and this profound and sometimes disturbing string quartet was not performed in public during Schubert’s lifetime. When it was first published in 1831 it soon attracted a much more positive response: the critic for the Vossische Zeitung (Berlin’s leading newspaper) wrote in 1833 of a work ‘abundant in originality’. Robert Schumann declared that ‘only the excellence of such a work as Schubert’s D minor Quartet – like that of many of his others – can in any way console us for his early and grievous death; in a few years he achieved and perfected things as no one before him.’

The four-movement structure may look conventional, but as well as the startling dramatic contrasts of the first movement, and the extraordinary song variations that constitute the slow movement, the Scherzo, with its tense syncopations is a brilliant reworking and expansion of one of Schubert’s German Dances (D790, No. 6) for solo piano. It’s a startling transformation.

The finale is equally remarkable: an unremitting Tarantella – the wild dance that traditionally wards off madness and death – structured as a large rondo, beginning with an austere statement of the main theme that is almost entirely bereft of harmony. The Prestissimo ending contains some of the most dramatic and exciting harmonic shifts in all Schubert, and pushes mercilessly towards a defiant, unsettling close.

Allegro con brio
Andantino
Menuetto. Allegro vivace
Allegro

Schubert’s sheer productivity in 1815, the year in which he turned 18 years of age, is nothing short of astonishing: over 150 songs, two symphonies, piano pieces, religious music and the present string quartet, written between 25 March and 1 April 1815, while Schubert was also working as an assistant teacher in his father’s school. According to a note in his own hand, the first movement was composed ‘in four and a half hours.’ There’s no mistaking the influences on the teenage Schubert in this music, particularly Beethoven’s Op.18 quartets and, above all, Mozart’s Symphony No.40.

But far from being merely derivative or imitative, this quartet is a notable example of Schubert experimenting with quartet structures, and starting to find his way as an original genius. Schubert expert Brian Newbould has noted that ‘Schubert’s way of plucking … principles from the repertoire all around him in his teenage years … is part of a positive, learning, and properly creative purpose.’ Newbould goes on to write that in this quartet, we find ‘things here that represent the first stirrings of inclinations that were to come to fruition in later works.’

Allegro ma non troppo

Adagio

Scherzo. Presto

Allegretto

‘Heavenly length’ was a term coined by Schumann to describe Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony, but it seems even more apt for the C major String Quintet that Schubert finished in 1828, two months before his death. His only string quintet, for string quartet with an extra cello – an instrumental combination pioneered by Luigi Boccherini, while Mozart (and Beethoven) preferred a second viola.

Schubert never heard the work played during his lifetime. He sent it to the publisher Probst in Leipzig on 2 October 1828, announcing proudly that he had ‘at last finished a Quintet for two violins, viola and two cellos’. But the reply was disheartening, suggesting that he’d have a better chance of success with some more songs or popular piano pieces. The first performance did not take place until 17 November 1850 when it was given in the small hall of the Musikverein in Vienna by a quintet led by Joseph Hellmesberger, and the Viennese firm of Spina eventually published the work in 1853. Reactions at the time were mixed, but the young Brahms fell under the spell of the music, and the original version of his Piano Quintet Op.34 – before it was extensively reworked for piano and strings –was scored for the same instrumentation as Schubert’s quintet, with two cellos (unlike Brahms’s later string quintets, which use the two-viola combination).

In a programme note on the String Quintet for an Aldeburgh Festival performance in 1955, Benjamin Britten wrote about some of the qualities he found most remarkable in the work: ‘Listening to it, as the beauties unfold one after another and the mood changes from light to darkness and back again to light, the overwhelming impression is of the wholeness of the music. Schubert’s effortless spontaneity is not only the result of his rapid and ‘instinctive’ writing; it is also the result of his miraculously mature understanding of form.’

The String Quintet opens with a first movement of expansive proportions. For Britten, in a brilliantly perceptive comment, the first few bars represented a kind of microcosm of what was to follow: ‘In the very opening bars of the Allegro ma non troppo, the mood and structure of the whole work can be heard in the serenity of the C major chord and its passionate crescendo towards the tragic diminished seventh and its gradual lessening of the tension.’ What is most memorable about this opening is not so much the thematic interest (though there’s plenty of that) but for the sense of anticipation, of expectancy that the music suggests. The second theme of this movement is one of Schubert’s most sublime inventions, a miracle of lyricism presented by the two cellos. The development starts with a particularly striking modulation into A major – a typically inspired surprise, while the movement ends with tranquil recollections of the second theme, its calm disturbed only by the fortissimo C major chord in the penultimate bar.

The Adagio is in the remote key of E major – transcendent and ethereal in its outer sections. Britten wrote of the slowly changing chords at the opening seeming ‘to hang motionless in the air while … flowing onwards’ as the first violin plays an expressive, slightly hesitant theme. The central section, in F minor, is a startling contrast: after serenity, suddenly the mood is wracked with turmoil – and uneasy hints of that even lurk in the reprise of the opening material, before stillness and peace are finally reached on the last E major chord.

The Scherzo is back in the home key of C major. The music is strongly driven by a kind rustic energy: Schubert makes the most of open strings with a theme that suggests hunting calls. After an

excursion into A flat major, the opening idea returns exultant before giving way to contrasting Trio section in D flat – ghostly and veiled in quality until the thrilling reprise of the Scherzo. The finale is a kind of Gypsy Rondo – with an obvious influence from Hungarian music. It begins in C minor before turning to C major. The second subject is a glorious lyrical theme that is soon decorated with triplet. The Quintet ends with a wilder reprise of the dance tune – and with one of the most memorable gestures in the entire Viennese Classical repertoire – a grinding, dissonant D flat resolving on to C.

Schubert’s String Trio in B flat major was composed in September 1816 and only its first movement survives complete (along with a fragment of a second). His only other venture into the medium of the string trio – a complete four-movement work this time – is in the same key and dates from exactly a year later. The earlier single-movement trio was written when the composer was nineteen years old, and this sunny and assured piece sounds almost like a tribute to Schubert’s great forebears Haydn and Mozart, and probably to Salieri too, with whom Schubert was studying at the time he wrote it. However, this substantial but charming sonata form movement is not an exercise in pastiche: there are several distinctive Schubertian harmonic touches, especially in the central development section.

We begin with a chase! In this ‘scherzo’ or musical joke you will hear eight musicians playing a game of musical hide and seek as they pass this cheeky tune around the group.

Hey Presto! We begin with a twitchy chase from Franz Schubert, which he told the string players should be played ‘presto’ meaning ‘very quick or very fast’. How does the sound change when each musician plays on their own? How do you feel when they all play the same tune together? This tense piece kicks off an exciting hour of music…

Schulhoff composed his Hot Sonata (subtitled ‘Jazz Sonata’) in 1930, while he was working on his opera Flammen. In a series of pieces from the 1920s, he was one of the first composers to attempt a serious integration of jazz idioms into concert works, and the Hot Sonata is a particularly impressive example. It was commissioned by the German radio station Funkstunde A.G. in Berlin and the commission specified that the music should meet ‘the particular musical requirements of radio’ – in short, that it should appeal to a large audience. The first performance was given in Berlin on 10 April 1930 by the American saxophonist Billy Barton with Schulhoff himself at the piano, and the Hot Sonata was published in August 1930 by Schott in Mainz.

In an advertisement for the new work, the firm announced that ‘today’s scant number of chamber music works for saxophone is augmented by this valuable composition. The name of Schulhoff guarantees the serious, artistic form of this sonata.’ This was not just publishing hyperbole: by 1930, Schulhoff had written several outstanding chamber works – including two string quartets and two violin sonatas – as well as a ballet (Ogelala), a jazz-inspired piano concerto and a number of piano pieces. The Hot Sonata is in four movements, with only metronome marks to indicate tempo. The first is moderately fast, the saxophone underpinned by a loping piano part which also introduces the deliciously spicy harmonies and syncopated rhythms that characterise the whole work. The short second movement is fast and scherzo-like. The third movement is a kind of blues, the opening saxophone melody marked ‘lamentuoso ma molto grottesco’ and this gives way to an ebullient finale.

Allegro moderato
Scherzo: Tempo di Menuetto
Andante
Allegretto

Clara Schumann composed her Piano Trio in G minor in 1846 at a time of considerable distress in the Schumann household: the Schumanns’ fourth child, Emil, was extremely sickly (he died the next year), and Robert’s mental health was giving cause for concern; and Clara herself suffered a miscarriage in the middle of composing the trio. It was written amidst all this personal and family turmoil between May and September 1846, mostly in Dresden but with some work on it during a much-needed break on Norderney, one of the East Frisian Islands. completing it a year before Robert’s first attempt at the form (he acknowledged its influence on his own work). The first movement is a passionately argued Allegro moderato in sonata form, opening with an ardent first subject on the violin, over a quiet but agitated piano accompaniment. The fluency and skill with which the musical argument is presented is unsurprising from such an experienced musician – Clara was one of the greatest pianists of the nineteenth century and one of the best educated – but what is truly remarkable is the originality and character of the musical ideas themselves, whether in the drama of the first movement, the elegant charm of the Scherzo–Minuet, the glorious song-like theme which dominates the Andante, or the Allegretto finale. This is another sonata form movement, but its development section also features a good deal of fugal writing. It is only in the last four bars that the music turns from G minor to G major – but there’s no easy sense of victory here, more – perhaps – a fleeting glimpse of happier times to come.

Schumann wrote his Violin Concerto in September and October 1853 for his friend Joseph Joachim. Though Joachim played it through with the Hannover Court Orchestra for the composer, he never performed it in public, coming to believe that it was the product of Schumann’s disturbed mental state at the time. Evidently Clara Schumann and Brahms agreed, as the concerto was not included in the edition of Robert’s collected works which they prepared. It was not until 1937 that the work was given its belated premiere. The slow movement is the expressive heart of the work, its main theme very similar to that of the Ghost Variations, though in a different key. Its intimate character – in the style of an intermezzo – lends itself very well to the present arrangement for piano trio.

Schumann composed his Arabeske in Vienna in 1839, having moved to the city from Leipzig the year before. It appears that he felt somewhat intimidated by Vienna’s immense musical history, and wrote in a letter that he wished to distance himself from any comparison with his predecessors, especially Beethoven. So this Arabeske is deliberately simple in style, even veering towards childish naivety: just a lightly decorated stream of notes, which has become a favourite addition to many great pianists’ programmes.

Robert Schumann wrote Bilder aus Osten (‘Pictures from the East’) for piano four-hands in December 1848, as a Christmas present for his wife Clara. According to a preliminary note by Robert in the first edition, the pieces were inspired by the poet Friedrich Rückert’s German translations of Arabic Maqāmāt (tales of Arabic life). The central character of Rückert’s selection, Abu Seid, was likened by Robert to Germany’s own folk character Till Eulenspiegel and Schumann wrote that his aim in these pieces was to ‘express oriental poetry and thinking in our own art, as has already been done in German poetry’.

Violinist Friedrich Hermann (1828–1907) studied with Felix Mendelssohn and Ferdinand David, played in the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and became professor of violin at the Leipzig Conservatory. His string quartet transcriptions of Bilder aus Osten demonstrate great skill in reimagining Schumann’s piano duets for entirely different forces, with thoroughly convincing results.

Robert Schumann composed the Davidsbündlertänze in August 1837 in the space of a few days, straight after his secret engagement to Clara Wieck whose ‘motto’ (taken from her Soirées musicales) is heard at the very start of the work. He later wrote to her that the eighteen ‘character pieces’ that comprise the Davidsbündlertänze ‘contain many thoughts of our wedding – they originated in the most splendid state of excitement I can ever recall’. Schumann believed that they were ‘more Clara’s than anything else I have written.’ There could hardly be a composition with a more personal inspiration, but Schumann dedicated the Davidsbündlertänze not to Clara but to Walther von Goethe, the poet’s grandson. Clara never played them in public during Schumann’s lifetime (it was not until 1860 that she played a selection of them) and the first known public performance of the complete work was given by Johannes Brahms, Schumann’s greatest protégé, at a concert in Budapest on 15 March 1869. The title refers to Schumann’s imaginary ‘League of David’: the impetuous Florestan and the more reflective Eusebius. Duality is apparent in the work’s changes of mood (from the exuberance of Florestan to the inward-looking Eusebius) and is underlined by an epigraph printed in the first edition of the score: ‘in each and every age, joy and sorrow are mingled’. Schumann told Clara that the entire work was supposed to represent a ‘Polterabend’ – a feast held on the eve of a wedding, but they had to wait another three years for their real wedding, which took place in September 1840.

Zart und mit Ausdruck (Tender and with expression)
Lebhaft, leicht (Lively, light)
Rasch und mit Feuer (Fast and with fire)

During a feverish period of composing activity in February 1849, Schumann wrote his Fantasiestücke Op. 73 in two days, and he offered them immediately to the publisher Luckhardt in Kassel. Composer and publisher moved quickly, and Schumann returned the corrected proofs by early June 1849. The original title had been ‘Soirée Pieces’, but this was changed before publication. Originally conceived for clarinet and piano, the suggested alternative scoring for violin or cello had probably come from the publisher, but it was one which the composer was very happy. The first performance of the original clarinet and piano version was given at a concert in Leipzig on 14 January 1850. The three movements are the most poetic examples of Schumann’s lyrical writing, particularly the first two. And even in the passionately animated third movement, the ‘fire’ is not that of anger but of elation.

Nigel Simeone 2024

In December 1836, Robert Schumann finished a ‘Sonata for Beethoven’ but revised it in 1838 and gave it the new title Fantasie. It was published in 1839 with a dedication to Franz Liszt. Schumann marks the first movement to be played with ‘imagination and passion’. It is a highly original reinvention of sonata form, with unconventional key relationships and structural innovations, notably the interlude placed at the moment when the recapitulation might be expected to arrive. The second movement depicts Schumann’s imaginary army of Davidsbündler marching against the Philistines. Dominated by obsessive dotted rhythms, this colourful movement ends with a vertiginous coda. The third movement is a complete contrast. It is poetic, restrained, and noble – and surely full of quiet longing for Clara. When Clara first received a copy of the Fantasie she wrote to Schumann that it made her ‘half ill with rapture.’ Just over a year later, on 12 September 1840, they were finally able to marry. Liszt was immensely proud of the dedication, considering the Fantasie to be among the greatest of Schumann’s piano works, but he never performed it in public. Only with the next generation of pianists – many of them pupils of Liszt and Clara Schumann – did the Fantasie take its rightful place as a pinnacle of the Romantic piano repertoire.

Zart und mit Ausdruck [Tender, with expression]
Lebhaft, leicht [Lively, light]
Rasch und mit Feuer [Quick and passionate]

Schumann’s three Fantasy Pieces Op.73 were sketched very quickly – in just two days on 11 and 12 February 1849 – and he wrote them to enchant: on the original manuscript, Schumann calls them “Soirée Pieces” (Soiréestücke). He was eager to hear them tried out: on 18 February, less than a week after finishing the work, a rehearsal was held chez Schumann in Dresden. Clara played the piano and was joined by the clarinetist Kroth from the Court Orchestra. Though intended for clarinet, the pieces were published six months later in alternative versions for violin and cello, and later in arrangements for other instruments – including flute, oboe, viola and double bass. Schumann was fascinated at the time by the possibilities of combining different solo instruments with piano, and worked with extraordinary speed during February 1849: the day after finishing the Fantasy Pieces he started the Adagio and Allegro for horn. As Clara herself put it, “all the instruments are having a turn” – and the very same day that the Fantasy Pieces had their first run-through, Schumann began one of his most astonishing instrumental experiments: the Konzertstück for four horns and orchestra.

The three Fantasy Pieces were intended to appeal to professional players and to talented amateurs. Far from composing showpieces for the clarinet, Schumann uses a musical language that has a feeling of intimacy and tenderness, recalling the style and sound world of some of his most expressive solo piano pieces. One later performance deserves a special mention: a private concert in Rüdesheim in which Brahms and the great clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld played both of Brahms’s late Clarinet Sonatas, ending their recital with Schumann’s Fantasy Pieces. Heinz von Beckerath later recalled that though it took a little while for him to appreciate Brahms’s masterpieces, “the Schumann pieces were delightful”.

Nature was always a potent source for composers, and this recital includes several pieces which were inspired by the sights and sounds of the natural world. Robert Schumann (1810–1856) composed the Gesänge der Frühe, Op.133, in October 1853, just after completing his Violin Concerto. The five pieces were described by Clara Schumann in her diary as ‘dawn-songs, very original as always but hard to understand, their tone is so very strange’. This elusive mood is apparent in the first piece, marked Im ruhigen tempo. A chorale-like theme, occasionally coloured with Schumann’s characteristic harmonic dissonances, the music was described by Schumann himself as ‘impressions at the approach and growth of the morning, but more as an expression of feeling than painting.’

Nigel Simeone

In February 1854, Schumann’s mental health was in a steep decline; at the end of that month he attempted suicide and, after being rescued from the river, asked to be admitted to the psychiatric hospital in Endenich, where he was to remain until his death. The ‘Ghost’ Variations were composed in the midst of this traumatic crisis. Dogged by increasingly disturbing visions, on the night of 17 February he claimed to hear angels singing a theme which he immediately wrote down – though in fact it is very similar to the slow movement of his Violin Concerto, composed six months earlier. A few days after this vision, Schumann started to compose a set of variations on the ‘angel’ theme, writing out a fair copy on 27 February. Before finishing it, he left the house and threw himself into the Rhine. After being brought home, he finished the work the next day. It was the last music he wrote. A year later, Clara Schumann had a copy made which she gave to Brahms (who subsequently composed variations on the theme as his Op.23). It is impossible to imagine the harrowing circumstances in which Schumann wrote this work which comprises a theme followed by five variations. Apart from the copy made for Brahms, Clara kept the work entirely private and it was not published until 1939.

I. Von fremden Ländern und Menschen [Of Foreign Lands and People]
II. Kuriose Geschichte [A Curious Story]
III. Hasche-Mann [Blind-Man’s Bluff]
IV. Bittendes Kind [A Pleading Child]
V. Glückes genug [Happy Enough]
VI. Wichtige Begebenheit [An Important Event]
VII. Träumerei [Dreaming]
VIII. Am Kamin [At the Fireside]
IX. Ritter vom Steckenpferd [A Knight on a Hobby Horse]
X. Fast zu Ernst [Almost Too Serious]
XI. Fürchtenmachen [Frightening]
XII. Kind im Einschlummern [A Child Falling Asleep]
XIII. Der Dichter spricht [The Poet Speaks]

Schumann wrote Kinderszenen in February and March 1838. He told the composer Carl Reinecke that they were ‘reminiscences for those who have grown up’ though he also had young players in mind – including his own children. Clara saw them in yet a different light, as intimate love poems: ‘It’s true, isn’t it, that they belong only to the two of us? They are so simple, so heart-warming, so very much you’. Whatever their original inspiration, these pieces capture a kind of lyrical fantasy world, from games to dreams, ending with the solemn moment when ‘The Poet Speaks’. Franz Liszt wrote to tell Schumann that playing Kinderszenen to his young daughter was ‘one of the most invigorating joys of my life.’

Writing to a Belgian friend in 1839, Schumann wrote that of all his piano pieces, ‘I love Kreisleriana the most’, though he went on to admit that ‘only Germans will understand the title.’ In the same letter, he explained that ‘Kreisler was created by E.T.A. Hoffmann, an eccentric, wild and ingenious musician. There are many things about him you will like.’ The volatile mood-swings of Kreisleriana and the almost improvised feeling of some pieces are brilliantly imaginative musical evocations of the fictitious Kreisler’s personality. By turns passionate, intimate, capricious, dream-like and dramatic, Schumann wrote the pieces for Clara Wieck (whom he was to marry in 1840). Schumann told her that in Kreisleriana ‘you will play the main role, and I wish to dedicate it to you. You will smile so sweetly when you recognize yourself in them.’ Ultimately, the dedication was changed (Clara was afraid that accepting it would risk worsening the strained relations with her father), and the first edition, published in 1838, had an inscription from Schumann ‘to his friend F. Chopin’. Although Chopin’s reaction to the work was lukewarm, the following year he reciprocated by dedicating his Second Ballade to Schumann.

Nigel Simeone

Lebhaft, nicht zu schnell
Lebhaft und sehr markiert
Ruhiges Tempo, mit zartem Ausdruck
Lebhaft, sehr markiert

Schumann wrote his Märchenerzählungen (‘Fairy Tales’) for the unusual combination of clarinet, viola and piano in October 1853. Whether he chose these instruments with Mozart’s ‘Kegelstatt’ Trio in mind is uncertain, though it was the only other significant work for that particular ensemble. The pieces are haunting and enigmatic: if these miniatures were intended to depict particular stories, Schumann never said. Soon after finishing Märchenerzälungen he had a catastrophic breakdown and spent the last years of his life in an asylum. The pieces are dedicated to Albert Dietrich, who studied with Schumann and was a friend of Brahms. All three collaborated on the F-A-E Sonata for Joseph Joachim.

1. Allegro brillante
2. In modo d’una Marcia
3. Scherzo: Molto vivace
4. Allegro ma non troppo

Immediately after finishing his three string quartets, Schumann turned to a genre that was much rarer at the time: a quintet for piano and strings. His first sketch, dated 23–28 September 1842, is an outline of the complete work, and it has several surprises. Two are particularly startling. The first is that Schumann originally intended the quintet to be in five movements – with an Adagio between that March and the Scherzo. The second is that there is no hint of the fugal coda using themes from the first and last movements that crowns the finale. (Less important but no less surprising is the location of this manuscript. It was given by Schumann to his French friend Jean-Joseph Bonaventure Laurens and for more than a century it has been one of the treasures of the Municipal Library at Carpentras in the South of France). By 12 October 1842, Schumann had completed the work in its final four-movement form, and dedicated it to his wife Clara. Despite the apparent speed, the work cost Schumann a great deal of effort and left him exhausted – he wrote in his diary that ‘I spent most of the month pretty much without sleep. The music had kept me overly agitated.’

The first performance was given privately at Schumann’s house a few weeks later, on 29 November – by which time Schumann had not only recovered his strength but had found the time to compose a companion masterpiece: the Piano Quartet Op. 47 (dated 26 November 1842). A second private performance was scheduled in December, but Clara fell ill. Mendelssohn stepped in and the story goes that he sight-read the piano part. He also made a few suggestions about revisions, which Schumann duly made in time for the first public performance, on 8 January 1843, with Clara at the piano. One early enthusiast was Wagner, who wrote to Schumann in February 1843: he ‘liked the Quintet very much: I asked your lovely wife to play it twice. I still vividly recall the first two movements in particular … I see where you are headed and assure you that I want to head there too – it is our only salvation: Beauty!’

An extraordinary anecdote about Schumann’s Piano Quintet involves several giants of nineteenth-century musical life in June 1848. Liszt was passing through Dresden and announced that he would like to pay a surprise visit to the Schumanns and to hear the Piano Quintet. At very short notice, Clara rounded up four string players for the evening and all was ready at 7 p.m. Liszt eventually showed up two hours late, with Wagner in tow. Liszt’s biographer Alan Walker has described what followed as ‘a dreadful scene’: Liszt dismissed the quintet: ‘No, no, my dear Schumann. This is not the real thing at all; it’s just provincial music.’ During the dinner that followed, the atmosphere worsened still further when Liszt made some disparaging remarks about Mendelssohn (who had died the previous November). Schumann exploded and stormed out of the room. Liszt made his apologies and left, and Clara wrote in her diary that ‘I have done with him forever’. Liszt’s recollection tallies with Clara’s: he remembered ‘a very agitated evening’. The dedication of Liszt’s Sonata in B minor to Schumann in 1854 is usually thought to be a reciprocal gesture for Schumann’s dedication of the Fantasy Op. 17 in 1836, but perhaps it was also a peace offering to a musician he always held in high regard. If that was the intention, it didn’t work: by the time the first edition of the Sonata appeared in July 1854, Schumann himself was in a lunatic asylum, and Clara resented having the thank Liszt for a work she thought ‘dreadful’. There’s a bittersweet irony to this story: in 1839, a composer friend urged Schumann to try his hand at ‘some chamber music: trios, quintets or septets’. That friend was Franz Liszt.

Nigel Simeone 2010

Schumann spent much of the summer of 1847 at work on his D minor Piano Trio – the work was sketched in June and the movement were completed in August and September. It was probably written as a response to the Trio that his wife Clara had composed the previous year. The first private performance was given on 13 September with Clara at the piano – it was her birthday, and just six days after Schumann had finished the finale. In the first movement (marked ‘with energy and passion’) the music alternates between the volatile minor-key opening and a more serene theme in the major. A remarkable and innovative feature of this movement is Schumann’s writing for the instruments: during a wonderfully evocative passage in the central development section the strings are instructed to play on the bridge (‘sul ponticello’) while the piano uses the una corda (left-hand) pedal. The effect is extraordinary. For all its apparent straightforward high spirits, the second movement – a Scherzo – gave Schumann a lot of trouble, especially the central Trio section where the three instruments play a rising and falling scale-like theme in imitation. The slow movement is back in a minor key, and is marked ‘with intimate expression’. Its opening theme (on the violin) unfolds hesitantly at first, but this initial idea grows into a long, sinuous melody. As in the famous Piano Quintet (written in 1842), the finale of the Trio includes a transformation of the theme that opened the first movement, but now the mood is exultant and untroubled.

Sehr lebhaft
Mit innigem Ausdruck
In mässiger Bewegung
Nicht zu rasch

Schumann’s Second Piano Trio was initially sketched in 1847, while he was still finishing the Op.63 Trio, but it was not completed until nearly two years later, in April 1849. Written in the pastoral key of F major, it is a very different work from its much darker and more dramatic predecessor. The reason for this is immensely touching: when Schumann began work, it was the tenth anniversary of his secret engagement to Clara, and the Trio is full of allusions to their first love. As Joan Chisell wrote: ‘no further guesses are needed as to why the first two movements are threaded with the opening phrase (“In the depths of my heart I keep a radiant image of you”) of his love-song Intermezzo (from the Eichendorff Liederkreis Op.39) written for Clara just before their eventual long-delayed marriage in 1840.’ The first movement, in quick triple time, is both lively and ardently lyrical, while the song-like slow movement is a radiant outpouring of adoration. The third movement Scherzo is in a minor key, gentle and wistful. After this nostalgic interlude, the finale ends the work in a state of almost untroubled elation. For Clara Schumann this piece remained a great favourite among her husband’s works – partly, no doubt, because of its intimate private messages, but also because it shows Schumann at his most effortlessly inventive. The first performance was given in their house on 29 April 1849, in a private concert that also included the première of Schumann’s Spanisches Liederspiel for four solo voices and piano, and Clara subsequently played it on many occasions.

Schumann’s Second Piano Trio was initially sketched in 1847, while he was still finishing the Op. 63 Trio, but it was not completed until nearly two years later, in April 1849. Written in the pastoral key of F major, it is a very different work from its much darker and more dramatic predecessor. The reason for this is immensely touching: when Schumann began work, it was the tenth anniversary of his secret engagement to Clara, and the Trio is full of allusions to their first love. As Joan Chisell wrote: ‘no further guesses are needed as to why the first two movements are threaded with the opening phrase (“In the depths of my heart I keep a radiant image of you”) of his love-song Intermezzo (from the Eichendorff Liederkreis Op. 39) written for Clara just before their eventual long-delayed marriage in 1840.’ The first movement, in quick triple time, is both lively and ardently lyrical, while the song-like slow movement is a radiant outpouring of adoration. The third movement Scherzo is in a minor key, gentle and wistful. After this nostalgic interlude, the finale ends the work in a state of almost untroubled elation. For Clara Schumann this piece remained a great favourite among her husband’s works – partly, no doubt, because of its intimate private messages, but also because it shows Schumann at his most effortlessly inventive. The first performance was given in their house on 29 April 1849, in a private concert that also included the première of Schumann’s Spanisches Liederspiel for four solo voices and piano, and Clara subsequently played it on many occasions.

Nicht schnell
Einfach, innig
Nicht schnell

Having written pieces for clarinet and horn early in 1849, Schumann finished what he called his ‘most fruitful year’ with the Three Romances for oboe and piano, completed at Christmas 1849. Like the Fantasy Pieces for clarinet, the Romances were written for domestic performance, described by the American musicologist Stephen Hefling as ‘Poetic Hausmusik’. But in Schumann’s case, there’s a reflective quality that invests these pieces with a depth that goes beyond their modest purpose.

Schumann’s Waldszenen, Op.82, dates from 1848, just after finishing his opera Genoveva, the last act of which takes place in a forest. The woodland inspiration evidently persisted and the new set of pieces was completed in January 1849, with the last of them, ‘Vogel als Prophet’ (‘The Prophet Bird’) added as an inspired afterthought. One early review captured the spirit of these pieces, delighting in ‘the enigmatic rustlings, the distant melodies, the mystical flowers in this magical forest.’

Nigel Simeone

Andy Scott is a Northwest (UK) based composer, saxophonist and educator with a distinctive musical voice that encompasses elements of jazz, world and contemporary classical styles. He is a founder member of the Apollo Saxophone Quartet and teaches at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.

One of Andy’s most popular compositions, ‘Salt of the Earth’ started life as a three-movement Concerto for Tuba with Brass Band! Andy has arranged the piece for a number of ensembles and soloists, and in this case was delighted to continue his collaboration with the AGQ, with Mike Baker undertaking the arranging duties.

The composer writes “Influenced heavily by jazz & latin music, ‘Salt of the Earth’ is fast and furious. The main melody moves over changing chords that are underpinned by a pedal note before the release of a montuno-inspired B section. Moving away from chord changes, the introduction, bridge and coda are written as two virtuosic single-line parts.

The title of the piece was inspired by the salt mining industry in my home county of Cheshire East. Underground networks of roads stretch for miles, whilst overground, huge football pitch-size salt mountains provide a surreal landscape.”

Andy Scott is a composer and saxophonist who worked on several occasions with composer Richard Rodney Bennett, and Respectfully Yours was written in memory of Bennett, who died in December 2012. For Scott himself, ‘it was appropriate to write a piece that was melodic with jazz-influenced harmony that I think of as a simple “thank you” to Richard Rodney Bennett, for being an inspirational musician and a kind and generous person.’ Originally written for euphonium and piano, Scott subsequently arranged it for saxophone and piano. Over tender, melting piano harmonies, the saxophone weaves a lyrical melody in music that is both reflective and heartfelt.

Entr’acte was written in 2011 after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 2 — with their spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet. It is structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further.

From Caroline Shaw Editions.

Caroline Shaw

Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. She has worked with a range of artists including Rosalía, Renée Fleming, and Yo Yo Ma, and she has contributed music to films and tv series including Fleishman is in Trouble, Bombshell, Yellowjackets, Maid, Dark, and Beyonce’s Homecoming. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.

Plan and Elevation

I have always loved drawing the architecture around me when traveling, and some of my favourite lessons in musical composition have occurred by chance in my drawing practice over the years. While writing a string quartet to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, I returned to these essential ideas of space and proportion — to the challenges of trying to represent them on paper. The title, Plan & Elevation, refers to two standard ways of representing architecture — essentially an orthographic, or “bird’s eye,” perspective (“plan”), and a side view which features more ornamental detail (“elevation”). This binary is also a gentle metaphor for one’s path in any endeavor — often the actual journey and results are quite different (and perhaps more elevated) than the original plan.

I was fortunate to have been the inaugural music fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 2014-15. Plan & Elevation examines different parts of the estate’s beautiful grounds and my personal experience in those particular spaces. Each movement is based on a simple ground bass line which supports a different musical concept or character. “The Ellipse” considers the notion of infinite repetition (I won’t deny a tiny Kierkegaard influence here). One can walk around and around the stone path, beneath the trimmed hornbeams, as I often did as a way to clear my mind while writing.

Shostakovich composed this miniature single-movement work for two pianos in 1954, just after completing his Tenth Symphony. It was written for his son Maxim, then a teenager studying the piano at the Moscow Conservatory. He gave the first performance with another student, Alla Maloletkova, on 8 November 1954; soon afterwards Shostakovich father-and-son made the first recording. It opens with a slow introduction in which stern, austere octaves contrast with a chorale-like idea, before launching into a sardonic Allegretto. Slow and fast sections alternate until a final dash to the close. Though some of the material is of a serious nature, much of the Concertino is quite playful, as befits a work originally conceived for young players. For Shostakovich, it must have come as a welcome relief after the Tenth Symphony, one of his most concentrated and fiercely argued masterpieces.

Nigel Simeone

Prelude
Fugue
Scherzo
Intermezzo
Finale

After giving the premiere of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No.1 in 1938, the members of the Beethoven Quartet suggested to Shostakovich that he should write a quintet. He spent much of 1939–40 on his edition of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, but in July 1940 he started work on the Piano Quintet, writing to Vasily Shirinsky (second violinist in the Beethoven Quartet) on 16 July: ‘Three days ago I started composing a piano quintet’, and again on 6 August suggesting himself as the pianist: ‘I would very much like to play it with you. Although I have never performed in public in such an ensemble, I think that it will be possible.’ Shostakovich completed the work on 14 September 1940 and gave a trial performance with the Glazunov Quartet in Leningrad the following month. In November he began rehearsing with the Beethoven Quartet for the official premiere in Moscow on 23 November. Before that, on 12 November, they performed the work for the Stalin Prize committee. According to Dmitri Tsyganov, first violinist of the Beethoven Quartet, the Moscow premiere was ‘without exaggeration, a triumph’, adding that ‘as our encore we repeated the intermezzo and the finale, and then the Scherzo, so we played almost the whole piece twice.’ Shostakovich was elated by this success, confiding to a friend that after the concert he had been ‘wandering the streets of Moscow – my soul filled with bliss.’ Several more immensely successful performances and a Moscow Radio recording followed over the next few weeks, and in May 1941 the Piano Quintet was awarded the Stalin Prize. While Shostakovich was thrilled to have one of his works greeted with such enthusiasm, there was at least one dissenting voice: Prokofiev grumbled that ‘so young a composer, at the height of his powers, should be so much on his guard, and calculate every note so carefully. He never takes a single risk and one looks in vain for a daring impulse, a bold venture.’ The Quintet is in five movements. The Prelude opens in a grandly rhetorical style, and this is followed by a long and thoughtful fugue. Coming as a complete change, the Scherzo third movement finds Shostakovich in A boisterous, rustic mood. The Intermezzo recalls the style and mood of Bach’s instrumental arias, the melody unfolding over a steady ostinato bass line. The sonata form Finale begins with a gently witty idea which is followed by a much rowdier tune, first heard in octaves on the piano. In a delightful surprise, the work ends quietly.

Nigel Simeone

Andante moderato
Allegro con brio
Largo
Allegretto

Shostakovich started his E minor Trio in late 1943, as a successor to his recently-completed Eighth Symphony. It began as a tragic wartime work but a few days before finishing the first movement, it became a response to a much more personal tragedy: the death in February 1944 of his “closest and most beloved friend”, Ivan Sollertinsky, a Jewish musicologist who had introduced Shostakovich to the music of Mahler. Shostakovich was devastated: he had “no words to express the pain that racks my entire being.” For or several months, he could find no music either, but in July he started to compose again, finishing the work on 13 August. The first performance followed in November and despite the private grief that motivated the work, and the inclusion of bitter, disturbing Jewish inflections in the finale, the trio won official approval, winning the Stalin Prize in 1946.

Andante
Allegretto furioso
Adagio –
Allegretto – Andante

Shostakovich’s Tenth Quartet was composed in July 1964, and dedicated to his close friend Miecysław Weinberg (1919–96). Written in the space of eleven days, its four movements are often uneasy, its moods ranging from ambivalence to anger. Based on two main ideas, the first movement opens with an unadorned violin melody and the music develops quite freely: Gerald Abraham described it as ‘one of those movements so characteristic of Shostakovich, which it is foolish to try to refer to any conventional form’, adding that the ideas ‘develop freely … as a plant develops.’ The second movement, marked Allegretto furioso is filled with rage, its opening theme, in descending whole-tones is a familiar Shostakovich fingerprint (similar to passages in the Eighth Quartet and the first movement of the Fifth Symphony). The anger here is palpable, and Judith Kuhn wrote that this music was ‘perhaps the most successful and exciting of the composer’s attempts to use the string quartet to depict large-scale conflict.’ It sustained intensity is astonishing. The Adagio is Passacaglia (ground bass), a favourite form for Shostakovich, here used to powerful expressive effect. At the end of the movement, the passacaglia theme passes from the bass to the first violin, ending on a sustained note which is held over into the start of the concluding Allegretto. This begins with a dance-like theme (a kind of Trepak, reminiscent of Mussorgsky), but as the movement develops, earlier themes from the quartet return, including the passacaglia theme which is combined with the trepak, as well as material from other movements. The quartet ends with all four instruments in the upper register, fragments of motifs dissolving into near silence.

The first performance was given on 20 November 1964 in the Moscow Conservatory, repeated the next day in the Glinka Concert Hall in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), played on both occasions by the Beethoven Quartet.

Nigel Simone 2025

Moderato
Allegretto–Adagio–Allegretto

Shostakovich completed his Twelfth Quartet on 11 March 1968 and the same day he wrote to Dmitri Tsyganov, first violinist of the Beethoven Quartet, which had, since 1938, worked very closely with the composer, and given the first performances of all his quartets apart from the first. In his letter to Tsyganov, Shostakovich wrote: ‘Tomorrow is your sixtieth birthday. I have just completed a quartet and I ask you not to refuse the honour of accepting my dedication to you.’ This quartet is cast in two movements which demonstrate the composer’s increasing fascination with incorporating twelve-tone techniques into his musical language, while remaining anchored in traditional keys: Shostakovich himself described the work as being in D flat major. The opening Moderato begins with a ghostly cello theme which opens with a 12-note row, but this immediately resolves on to the home key of D flat. Much of the musical argument in this movement involves finding ways of reconciling the tension between atonal themes and conventional tonality. The writing is often sparse, and the opening idea is contrasted with a rather nervous and tortured waltz-like second theme. There is a sense of the composer relishing the creative challenges posed by using elements of twelve-tone writing, and of finding ways to subsume those techniques into his own musical language. This becomes even more apparent in the very expansive second movement. The result has been described by Elizabeth Wilson as music of ‘unrelenting force and intensity’; and to create this extraordinary movement, Shostakovich made extreme demands on his players: not only in terms of technical virtuosity but also the range of colours and effects required.

Any kind of overt espousal of twelve-tone techniques was likely to attract the wrong kind of attention from the authorities: the Soviet position on the Second Viennese School was hostile. Probably feeling the need to forestall official criticism, Shostakovich explained his intentions in an article about the new work, writing that ‘if a composer sets himself the aim of writing purely dodecaphonic music at all costs, then he is artificially limiting himself. But using elements of this system can be fully justified when dictated by the actual compositional concept.’

Shostakovich was particularly pleased with what he had achieved in this remarkable quartet. He told Tsyganov that it worked ‘splendidly’, and that it was ‘more of a symphony than a chamber work.’ The private premiere was given by the Beethoven Quartet on 14 June 1968 at the USSR Composers’ Club in Moscow, followed by the official first performance at the Moscow Conservatory a few months later, on 5 November 1968. On that occasion, Shostakovich presented Tsyganov with the autograph manuscript.

Nigel Simone 2025

Shostakovich began his Third String Quartet in January 1946 but made no progress beyond the second movement until May when he went with his family to spend the summer at a dacha near the Finnish border. According to Beria (head of the Soviet secret police) in a letter to Shostakovich, this retreat was a personal gift from Stalin. It was a productive summer and the quartet was completed on 2 August 1946. The same day Shostakovich wrote to Vassily Shirinsky, second violinist of the Beethoven Quartet: ‘I have never been so pleased with a composition as with this Quartet. I am probably wrong, but that is exactly how I feel right now.’ The Beethoven Quartet gave the first performance at the Moscow Conservatory on 16 December 1946. Though there was an ominous silence from official critics, Shostakovich’s reputation was still high among the nation’s leaders: on 28 December he was given the Order of Lenin and each member of the Beethoven Quartet received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. Just a year later the Third Quartet was denounced in the journal Sovetskaya musika as ‘modernist and false music.’

Although Shostakovich had no overt programme in mind, he invested a great deal of private emotion in the work – sufficient, as Fyodor Druzhinin (violist of the Beethoven Quartet) recalled, for the music to move the composer to tears when he attended a rehearsal in the 1960s, twenty years after he had written it. The start of the first movement, in F major, recalls the Haydn-like mood of the Ninth Symphony (completed in 1945) and this is followed by a contrasting idea, played pianissimo. The development includes some turbulent fugal writing, injecting a sense of unease that hovers over the rest of the movement. The Moderato con moto (in E minor) is based on a series of sinister ostinato figures and frequent repetitions while the third movement is a violent scherzo in G sharp minor. The Adagio is an extended passacaglia (ground bass) that gives way to a Moderato in which some kind of resolution is found in the closing bars, ending with three pizzicato F major chords.

Nigel Simeone

Largo
Allegro molto
Allegretto
Largo
Largo

The Eighth String Quartet is often considered to be a kind of musical autobiography, permeated throughout with Shostakovich’s musical monogram, D–S–C–H (D, E flat, C, B). In an interview with Elizabeth Wilson, the cellist Valentin Berlinsky (a founder member of the Borodin Quartet) said that it was ‘a landmark, the summing up of a whole period in the composer’s life. The quotations from the composer’s previous works give it the character of autobiography.’

The quartet was composed very quickly (from 12 to 14 July 1960) during a visit to Gohrish, near Dresden. The printed dedication is ‘In memory of the victims of fascism and war’. To his friend Isaak Glickman, Shostakovich wrote – in a letter dripping with irony – that it was ‘ideologically flawed and of no use to anybody’. But what followed was a remarkable and much more personal revelation: ‘When I die, it’s unlikely that someone will write a quartet dedicated to my memory, so I decided to write it myself. One could write on the title page: “Dedicated to the author of this quartet” … And the quartet makes use of themes from my own works.’ But for all the sardonic mood of this letter, the composer was in an extremely emotional state when he composed it. He told Glickman that ‘the pseudo-tragedy of the quartet is so great that, while composing it, my tears flowed abundantly.’

Just after his return from Dresden he played the work through to a friend in Moscow, admitting that it would be his ‘last work’ and even hinting that it was a kind of suicide note. He had just been coerced into joining the Soviet Communist party and was in a mood of utter despair. In other words, for Shostakovich, it seems that the real ‘victim’ he had in mind when composing this quartet was himself. Like the Third Quartet, the Eighth is in five movements, played without a break. These constitute a deeply moving and sometimes harrowing tapestry of violently shifting moods and musical self-quotations, all held together by the DSCH motif which seems to haunt the whole work.

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

Moderato
Allegretto
Adagio

Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata was his last work, composed in June–July 1975, a few weeks before his death. As in the famous 8th String Quartet, there is a complex network of quotations, including from his own works, and also from Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. Composer Ivan Sokolov reports on Shostakovich’s phone calls from his hospital bed to the viola player Fyodor Druzhinin to whom he was to dedicate the work: ‘In one conversation, noted down immediately afterwards by Druzhinin, Shostakovich suggested titles for each of the three movements: Novella, Scherzo and Adagio in memory of Beethoven.’ Druzhinin gave the first performance on 25 September 1975, on what would have been the composer’s sixty-ninth birthday, and the work was heard in public for the first time a few days later, in the small hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic on 1 October 1975.

The loosely programmatic titles given by the composer to Druzhinin are helpful. The first movement, ‘Novella’, begins with the open strings of the viola and it is a free-flowing structure in which tension is created by the contrast between the austere open sound of fifths (later fourths) and the use of the twelve-note theme heard in the first entry by the piano. The ‘Scherzo’, marked Allegretto, takes as its starting point music from a much earlier operatic project based on Gogol’s The Gamblers that Shostakovich abandoned in 1942. The character is close to that of a march apart from the eerie and mysterious Trio section. After an introductory viola solo, the finale introduces a quotation from the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, but this long movement also explores Shostakovich’s own works.

Biographer David Fanning has pointed out that the later part of the movement includes ‘note for note quotations, mainly found in the piano left-hand part, from Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto and all fifteen of his symphonies in sequence.’ Fanning concludes from this that ‘there could scarcely be a clearer indication that Shostakovich knew – or at least suspected – that this would be his last work’

Andante–Allegro molto moderato
Vivace
Adagio di molto
Allegretto (ma pesante)
Allegro

In February and March 1909, Sibelius came to London to conduct concerts of his own music and it was during this stay that he composed most of the Voces intimae (Intimate Voices) quartet. He first stayed at the Langham Hotel (across the road from Queen’s Hall) but asked his friend Rosa Newmarch to find cheaper lodgings where he could also work in silence. She found quiet rooms for him in Kensington and having installed him, ‘left the composer to settle down (as I hoped) to write his string quartet, Voces initimae.’ Word travelled in the neighbourhood that a composer was staying, emboldening one elderly lady to play Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata repeatedly, as a sign of solidarity. Newmarch intervened, there was no more Beethoven, and Sibelius was able to make good progress on the quartet in Kensington.

According to his diary, he began the second movement on 16 February, and sketched the third on 25 February. Work continued throughout March (at the end of which he left London) and the quartet was finished in Berlin on 15 April. The first performance took place a year later, on 25 April 1910, in Helsinki.

Voces intimae is a characteristically bold exploration of musical form: there are five movements (including two scherzos), with a highly expressive slow movement at the centre. There has been speculation about the title and the likeliest explanation is that it has some connection with the fear of death which Sibelius confided to his diary in London. It was clearly a personal reference that will probably remain a mystery, but it is entirely apt for a work that embodies such an intense musical dialogue between the four instruments.

This work, my second for piano trio, was inspired by a study of Monarch butterfly migration patterns, as well as by elements from Ravel’s Trio and my own song setting “Diving Girl” from the cycle Streets and Rivers. The work’s title is derived from the three movement titles as follows:

Butterflies
Remember
A Mountain

Butterflies Remember A Mountain was commissioned by the Philharmonische Gesellschaft Bremen. It is dedicated with admiration to the trio of Nicola Benedetti, violin, Leonard Elschenbroich, cello, and Alexei Grynyuk, piano.

The Royal Philharmonic Society commissioned Angela Elizabeth Slater as one of its 2021/22 Composers to write this work for Ensemble 360 at Music in the Round’s Sheffield Chamber Music Festival.

The Light Blinds for clarinet quintet explores the drama in extremes of light and darkness, charting a path through the spaces created by the tension of these opposing states. It draws on a short poem that I wrote whilst travelling home from a Music in the Round concert in 2021, following a day exploring the natural landscape around Sheffield.

The first material I wrote for this work was a short solo clarinet fragment, which is heard in the opening of the second section, exploring the line ‘The Light Blinds’. I used this material to shape and construct the rest of the piece, with this short 7/8 material acting as a central organising principle; the entire structure and pitch content emerges from it. This clarinet material is essentially veiled through it being stretched and texturally displaced within the quartet before being revealed in crystalline contrast with the solo clarinet against pulsing harmonics in the quartet. This ‘light blinds’ material becomes increasingly agitated, collapsing in on itself to form and explore the line ‘the dark engulfs’. Here the quartet concentrates on the lowest tessituras of their instruments and is accompanied by the bass clarinet, moving between dramatic and fragile multiphonics and aggressive rumbling material that pulls us further into the depths.

The dark engulfs
and the light blinds
in neither a sight
is seen in clarity
a blur, desperate to find a firm grip
in focus

Poem by Angela Elizabeth Slater

Moderato assai
Allegro, ma non agitato
Finale. Presto

Smetana noted down the tragic circumstances in which he composed the Piano Trio in his catalogue of works. He described it as ‘written in memory of my first child, Bedřiška, who enchanted us with her extraordinary musical talent, and yet was snatched away from us by death, aged four-and-a-half years.’ The grieving Smetana wrote this work – his only piano trio – between September and November 1855, and it was first performed in Prague on 3 December with the composer at the piano. Given that the work was written as a memorial, the surprise is that this trio contains no slow movement – and it’s certainly possible (as musicologist Basil Smallman suggested) that Smetana had to modify an earlier scheme that included one owing to pressure of time.

Two features of this trio are noteworthy: one is the powerful motto theme first heard at the very start – an idea that unifies much of what follows – and the other is Smetana’s use of popular Czech dance forms: the second movement is a Polka and the finale is based on the Skočná, a rapid jig-like dance. The reviews of the first performance included some negative comments about the work’s rhapsodic structure, and its use of folk elements that deviated from the abstract ‘purity’ expected in chamber music at the time. Smetana was understandably upset by this, but he was greatly heartened by the positive reaction to the work by a revered colleague: Franz Liszt.

Allegro vivo appassionato
Allegro moderato à la Polka
Largo sostenuto
Vivace

In 1874 Smetana fell ill with an infection that led within months to total deafness. For peace and quiet he moved to the village of Jabkenice in Central Bohemia, and it was here that he produced this overtly autobiographical quartet in 1876. Smetana supplied his own commentary on the work. It opens with ‘the call of fate (the main motif, first heard on the viola) into the struggle of life. The love of art in my youth; inclination towards romanticism in music as well as in love and life in general; a warning about my future misfortune – that fateful ringing of the highest tones in my ears which told me of my coming deafness.’

The second movement (à la Polka) brings back, according to Smetana, ‘memories of the merry time of my youth’, while the third ‘reminds me of the beauty of my first love for the girl who later became my faithful wife. The struggle with unhappy fate, the final achievement of my goal.’ For the fourth movement Smetana wanted to depict: ‘the recognition of a national awareness of our beautiful art, the pleasure derived from it and the happiness of success along the way until a terrible-sounding high tone starts ringing in my ear (in the quartet a high E) … as a warning of my cruel fate.’

The first performance took place in Prague on 29 March 1879. During his last years, Smetana’s behaviour became increasingly erratic. Early in 1884 he was moved to an asylum in Prague where he died a few months later.

Allegro
Scherzo. Allegro
Adagio
Finale. Vivace

In 1813, Louis Spohr moved to Vienna where he became leader of the orchestra at the Theater an der Wien. Haydn’s friend and erstwhile patron Johann Tost gave Spohr an open-ended commission to compose as much chamber music as he liked, and the result was a remarkable group of works including five quartets, two quintets, the Octet and the present Nonet. The Nonet is scored for violin, viola, cello bass, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn and Tost particularly asked Spohr to bring out the individual colour and character of each instrument. Spohr does just that, and in a tightly controlled structure.

One of the most remarkable features of the Nonet is the close integration of its thematic material: the first four notes of the Allegro dominate the whole of the first movement, and the same motif recurs in the Adagio and, more fleetingly, in the Finale. The Scherzo (in D minor) is permeated by a different rising motif heard right at the start of the movement, and the two Trios provide contrast both in key (D major and B flat) and instrumental textures. The originality of Spohr’s music has been rediscovered in recent years, and his impact on the composers of his own time was immense. The Victorian composer and musicologist Sir George Macfarren wrote that ‘few, if any composers have exercised such influence on their contemporaries.’

In the 1890s Charles Villiers Stanford was the foremost English composer with an international reputation. But long before 1922 when he composed his Fantasy for Horn Quintet, his fame had been eclipsed by Edward Elgar, whose own success was in no small part down to Stanford – Elgar’s music had been included in a number of high-profile concerts conducted by Stanford. Stanford appears to have been badly affected by his younger colleagues success, and in 1904 they had a particularly spiteful fall-out via their regular correspondence.

As a result, Stanford became increasingly disillusioned with the English music scene. It is not known who the Fantasy for Horn Quintet was composed, or whether it ever received a public performance (though it may have been intended for students at the Royal College of Music). Like those quintets from Schumann and Liszt on which it may have been modled, it has a central theme, heard at the beginning in the cello and horn, which re-occurs as a foundation for other material.

Karlheinz Stockhausen began his series of Klavierstücke in 1952 while he was studying with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire. Klavierstück VII was composed in 1954 (a year after he left Paris) and extensively revised in 1955. One of the most remarkable features of the piece is the use of silently depressed keys allowing sympathetic vibrations to be set up. The result is that different sonorities are created by the same pitch – a technique that can be heard throughout the work.

In September 1944, Richard Strauss wrote to his friend Karl Böhm, telling him that he had been working on an Adagio for string instruments, which would probably become an Allegro since he couldn’t ‘remain very long at a Brucknerian snail’s pace’. Early in 1945, Strauss gave the new piece a name – Metamorphosen – and completed a version for seven string instruments, a score that was only discovered in 1990. Whether Strauss ever intended this for performance is questionable, but it serves as a fascinating comparison with the final version for 23 solo strings that was completed on 12 April 1945, just two weeks after the septet score. Metamorphosen was first performed on 25 January 1946, by the Collegium Musicum Zurich under Paul Sacher who had commissioned it. According to Michael Kennedy, Strauss conducted two of the rehearsals and he was in the audience for the premiere. Metamorophosen is an overwhelmingly powerful lament for Strauss’s native city of Munich – which had been all but destroyed by more than 70 bombing raids – especially its Opera House. The introductory chords and the falling theme heard near the opening are the most important components of a work marked by the most fluid and complex counterpuntal development. On the last page of the score, Strauss has written ‘In Memoriam!’ and the falling theme appears over a quotation in the bass from the Funeral March of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. Thus ends one of the most moving and profound of all Strauss’s works.

Nigel Simone 2014

Stravinsky composed part of his elemental masterpiece, The Rite of Spring, on his family estate in the Ukraine, but the work was completed in the Swiss village of Clarens, overlooking Lake Geneva, with spectacular views of Mont Blanc and of the Swiss Alps down the Rhone Valley. Coincidentally, Clarens was also where Tchaikovsky had composed his Violin Concerto forty years earlier. The famous premiere, on 29 May 1913, took place at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The riot that ensued was largely the result of engineering by Serge Diaghilev, an impresario who learned early on that all publicity was good publicity for his Ballets Russes. By inviting a large group of students to sit alongside the regular subscribers, and by putting The Rite of Spring at the end of the first half of the programme – straight after the Chopin ballet Les Sylphides – the work had maximum shock value. Stravinsky was furious that his score couldn’t be heard, but delighted when its first concert performance in Paris a year later was greeted with such enthusiasm that he was carried through the streets afterwards. A few weeks before the first night, Stravinsky had played through the work in his piano four-hands arrangement with Debussy, and it was in this form that the work first appeared in print. It is a work that has never lost its power to astonish – and in this four-hand arrangement it loses nothing of its rhythmic daring and what Messiaen called its “magic power”.

Composed in 1914, Stravinsky revised these pieces in 1918 when he dedicated them to the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet. The first performance was given in Paris in May 1915 by a quartet which included the composer Darius Milhaud playing violin, while the 1918 version had its premiere in London on 13 February 1919. The work comprises three short movements without titles or tempo markings. Though the dimensions of the pieces are slight, Stravinsky managed to baffle (and infuriate) early critics with the unusual sound effects and performance markings in places, and the deliberate absence of any conventional forms or traditional thematic development. Instead, the mood is by turns stange and grotesque. The second piece was inspired by the comedian Little Tich (Harry Relph) whose jerky stage act had impressed Stravinsky during a visit to London in 1914. The result might almost be described as an anti-quartet, and as the critic Paul Griffiths later remarked, these little pieces are ‘determinedly not a “string quartet”. The notion of quartet dialogue has no place here, nor have subtleties of blend: the texture is completely fragmented, with each instrument sounding for itself.’

Nigel Simeone

This spiky, short piece of music was created in Russia at the same time Suk wrote the piece we heard earlier. Stravinsky uses the plucking technique we heard in the Meredith and Beethoven, as well clashing notes and unexpected changes in pulse and speed. Stravinsky keeps us guessing what he’ll do next!

This spikey, short piece of music was created in Russia at the same time Suk wrote the piece we heard earlier. Stravinsky uses the plucking technique we heard in the Meredith and Beethoven, as well clashing notes and unexpected changes in pulse and speed. Stravinsky keeps us guessing what he’ll do next!

On page 10 of the Goya sketchbook generally known as the Witches and Old Women album, there is an image captioned by a single word: ‘Visiones’. An elderly couple dance, apparently suspended mid-air in an awkward embrace: his attention seems elsewhere; she may be picking his pocket. The pen-strokes are few, and the ink and wash technique makes the image seem as though momentarily conjured out of smoke. But without a doubt they are dancing, this strange couple, ready to step off the page, so alive is the penmanship. Peeking out from behind a fold of the lady’s skirt or the man’s cloak is a grinning face, all sunken eyes and wrinkled skin, laughing at – what? The dancers, the viewer, the world?

As I drew together materials for this clarinet trio, Goya’s vision haunted my dreams. It’s not the piece but it drew the piece into its orbit: three odd characters, bound together in dance. There is a kind of beauty there, I think, and elegance, and poise, and some sweet melancholy. But also obsession and violence and no way out. As I shaped the piece, these ideas shaped my thinking.

There are three sections:

#1: Cello and clarinet circle each other in repeated microtonal lyrics, while the piano, completely separate, taps out ecstatic pirouettes in the extreme upper register.

#2: A fragment of the lyric figure becomes something approaching a lullaby; the three instruments combine to create a single expanding harmonic texture, which, increasingly mechanical, gets stuck in irregular loops. The process repeats. Then repeats again.

#3: A distorted memory of what has gone before. The piano is now the melodic lead; the cello a crazed, fragmentary virtuoso, unable to find a ‘pure’ tone; the clarinet restricted to a simple pattern of soft multiphonics. The spinning dance intrudes, then overwhelms.

From martinsuckling.com

Josef Suk, a student of Antonín Dvořák and later his son-in-law, was a composer with a distinct artistic voice and strong ties to Czech musical heritage. His composition, the “Meditation on an Old Czech Chorale,” pays homage to the Bohemian patron saint, St. Wenceslas, and was written when a member of the Bohemian String Quartet to supplement the obligatory playing of the Austrian national anthem (after 1914) with a more distinctively Bohemian piece, and prayer for the wellbeing of the Czech people.

The “Meditation on an Old Czech Chorale’” is a single-movement for string quartet, which was later expanded into a version for string orchestra, adding a double bass line, and later still adapted for violin and organ. Suk‘s use of the violin as the leading voice enhances the expressive nature of the piece, allowing for moments of spiritual contemplation. The work commences with a solemn and tender introduction, featuring the initial statement of the hymn melody. Through subtle variations, this simple melody moves from serene introspection to intense and soaring passages as a recurring motif. The piece reaches a climax with the violin in its highest register, conveying a profound yearning. It gradually fades away, into tranquility.

This piece was written at the start of the first world war and is full of the drama and sadness of a scary time. But it ends full of hope with long notes seeming to climb into the air. Look and listen out for all the times the musicians play across the strings to make two or more notes sound at once — a technique called double stopping.

After coming off the back of a 4 month stint writing a slightly mad piece for symphony orchestra filled with drum grooves, riffs and polyrhythms galore, I jumped straight into this piano trio without really catching my breath. Having spent time listening to and being inspired by the simplicity of composers such as Max Richter and Philip Glass, I took this piece as an opportunity to relax into some meditative sounds and explore repetitive textures, mainly through improvisation at the piano.

Coincidentally, I was writing this piece in February/March during the approach to the spring equinox and couldn’t help but notice the evening skies gradually becoming brighter and more colourful with each passing day. I then began to see how the piece mirrored this transition from dark to light, starting with cold, slow moving harmonies that gradually blossom into brighter tonal centres and faster moving material, giving the piece a sense of optimism towards the end.

Aileen Sweeney, 2025

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About The Music

About The Music: S

SAARIAHO Kaija, Petals

SAINT-SAËNS Camille, Bassoon Sonata

SAINT-SAËNS Camille, Caprice sur des Airs Danois et Russes, Op.79

SAINT-SAËNS Camille, Carnival of the Animals

SAINT-SAËNS Camille, L’assassinat du duc de guise

SAINT-SAËNS Camille, Les odeurs de Paris

SAINT-SAËNS Camille, Morceau de concert for horn and piano

SAINT-SAËNS Camille, Oboe Sonata in D, Op.166

SAINT-SAËNS Camille, Septet Op.65

SANTAOLALLA Gustavo (arr. V Bessas), De Ushuaia a la Quiaca

SCARLATTI Domenico, Six Sonatas arranged for wind quintet by Dinu Lipatti

SCHNITTKE Alfred, Hymnus II for cello & double bass

SCHOENBERG Arnold, Pierrot Lunaire

SCHOENBERG Arnold, String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10

SCHOENBERG Arnold, Three Piano Pieces Op. 11

SCHOENBERG Arnold, Verklärte Nacht Op.4 for string sextet

SCHUBERT Alexander, WIKI-PIANO.NET

SCHUBERT Franz, Impromptu in B flat D935 No.3

SCHUBERT Franz, Octet

SCHUBERT Franz, Piano Quintet in A major D667, ‘The Trout’

SCHUBERT Franz, Piano Sonata No.20 in A D959

SCHUBERT Franz, Piano Trio No.2 in E flat

SCHUBERT Franz, String Quartet in D minor, D.810 Death and the Maiden

SCHUBERT Franz, String Quartet in G minor, D173

SCHUBERT Franz, String Quintet in C D956

SCHUBERT Franz, String Trio in B flat D471

SCHUBERT Octet (excerpt for ‘Close Up’)

SCHUBERT String Quartet in D Minor (excerpt for ‘Close Up’)

SCHULHOFF Erwin, Hot Sonata

SCHUMANN Clara, Piano Trio in G minor, Op.17

SCHUMANN Robert (arr. Isserlis), Violin Concerto (mvt.2)

SCHUMANN Robert, Arabesque in C major Op.18

SCHUMANN Robert, Bilder aus Osten, Op.66

SCHUMANN Robert, Davidsbundlertänze Op.6

SCHUMANN Robert, Fantasiestücke, Op.73

SCHUMANN Robert, Fantasy in C Op.17

SCHUMANN Robert, Fantasy Pieces Op.73

SCHUMANN Robert, Gesänge der Frühe No.1

SCHUMANN Robert, Ghost Variations for piano

SCHUMANN Robert, Kinderszenen Op.15

SCHUMANN Robert, Kreisleriana Op.16

SCHUMANN Robert, Märchenerzählungen Op.132

SCHUMANN Robert, Piano Quintet Op.44

SCHUMANN Robert, Piano trio in D minor Op.63

SCHUMANN Robert, Piano Trio in F major, Op.80

SCHUMANN Robert, Piano Trio No 2 in F Op.80

SCHUMANN Robert, Three Romances for Oboe and Piano

SCHUMANN Robert, Waldszenen (extracts) Einsame Blumen, Verrufene Stelle, Freundliche Landschaft, Vogel als Prophet

SCOTT Andy (arr. M Baker), Salt of the Earth

SCOTT Andy, Respectfully Yours

SHAW Caroline, Entr’acte

SHAW Caroline, The Ellipse from Plan and Elevation

SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri, Concertino in A minor for two pianos, Op. 94

SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri, Piano Quintet in G minor Op.57

SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri, Piano Trio No.2 in E minor Op.67

SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri, String Quartet No.10, Op.118

SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri, String Quartet No.12, Op.133

SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri, String Quartet No.3 in F major Op.73

SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri, String Quartet No.8

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

SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri, Viola Sonata Op.147

SIBELIUS Jean, String Quartet Op.56 ‘Voces Intimae’

SIERRA Arlene, Butterflies Remember a Mountain

SLATER Angela Elizabeth, The Light Blinds

SMETANA Bedrich, Piano Trio in G minor

SMETANA Bedřich, String Quartet No.1 in E minor ‘From my Life’

SPOHR Louis, Nonet Op.31

STANFORD Charles Villiers, 3 Dante Rhapsodies Op.92 No.1 ‘Francesca’

STANFORD Charles Villiers, Fantasy for Horn Quintet in A minor

STOCKHAUSEN Karlheinz, Klavierstück VII

STRAUSS Richard, Metamorphosen, preliminary version for string septet ed. Rudolf Leopold

STRAVINSKY Igor, The Rite of Spring (arr. Stravinsky for piano four hands)

STRAVINSKY Igor, Three Pieces for String Quartet

STRAVINSKY Igor, Three Pieces for String Quartet (excerpt for ‘Close Up’)

STRAVINSKY Three Pieces for Clarinet (excerpt for ‘Close Up’)

SUCKLING Martin, Visiones (after Goya)

SUK Josef, Mediation on the Old Czech Chorale

SUK Josef, Meditation on an Old Czech Chorale (excerpt for ‘Close Up’)