Welcome to the fifth concert of our Fortieth Season performed on February 26th, 2023 at Boston’s Jordan Hall. Our program includes three works for mixed ensembles comprised of three, four and five players. We begin with the second of three Piano Quartets by the fourteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, and end with the third of four published Piano Trios by Antonín Dvořák.
Mendelssohn’s work, written in 1823, is two-hundred years old this year; Dvořák’s, a mid-life offering from 1883, turns one hundred and forty. If these dates of composition sound familiar, it may be because they roughly frame the period we associate with the flourishing of Romanticism in Western Classical Music and the other Fine arts. (Beethoven, whose work pushed beyond the Classical models he inherited, died in 1825. Wagner, whose embrace of poetry, myth and endless melody in staging of his ideal of joining all the arts in the service of his massive stage works, died in1883.)
The Mendelssohn and the Dvořák works are in the home key of F minor, a place on the tonal spectrum that is often used to depict emotional movement from darkness to light. The composers also bend that tonal landscape to their own purposes: Mendelssohn referencing Beethoven’s Appassionata Piano Sonata and Serioso String Quartet in the same key (among other fragments), and Dvořák, mourning the loss of his mother, adopting the same rare key as Brahms’s great Piano Quintet in F minor from 1865, starting his trio with a melody in open octaves as Brahms had started the quintet.
Between the two is Entre Nous, the mercurial Quintet for Oboe and Strings commissioned in 2016 by the BCMS Commissioning Club from award-winning composer, David Rakowski. It was premiered on April 7, 2017 at Sanders Theatre as part of our mission to create, perform, and disseminate the great chamber music of our time and showcase our musicians and guests. The work is in three contrasting movements described by its composer:
“The first movement begins pizzicato, which speeds up and develops into an antsy fast music where the instrumentalists trade licks like they’re passing around a hot potato…the second movement is slow…and designed to highlight oboist Peggy Pearson’s marvelous playing [with] long lines against slow harmony…the finale is a devilish scherzo that develops entirely out of the opening tutti.“
On learning that the premiere of Entre Nous was scheduled to be performed on the same program as Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E-flat major, Op. 70, No. 2, David cleverly included a particular reference to the opening phrase of its gracious Allegretto movement in his devilish finale. He is not alone drawing on the canon in creation of the new.
We wish to express our continuing gratitude to our composers for nine wonderful pieces thus far, and to the many supporters of the Commissioning Club, and to our Board for making possible these works and performances here in Boston and beyond.
If you would like to know more about how you might become part of our efforts joining our Commissioning Club, please let us know by writing or calling.
Enjoy,
MT
