“Music is the best means we have of digesting time.”
–W.H. Auden
Our fourth concert of 2023, and seventh of the Fortieth Anniversary season, takes place within the acoustical splendor of First Church in Cambridge, Congregational in Harvard Square. We hope our program, consisting of pieces long and short, old and new, selected with this space in mind, may provide moments of enjoyment and reflection on the nature of Music—the art that unfolds sounds to tease our emotions and delight the senses in time (and) space. Our enjoyment is enhanced by the presence of others as we are transported beyond the present into dialogue both past and future consecutively and simultaneously, and left to consider the joy of our real journeys in the presence of the imaginary.
Eric Nathan’s Just a Moment (2021), played with a live audience for the first time on the East Coast, is scored for two oboes placed at a distance to respond antiphonally. In his video introduction Mr. Nathan describes how two oboists are placed at opposite ends of a vast space calling to each, catching the final note of a phrase and sending it back to the other. The dialogue is both intimate, and at times joyful. Given the presence of two oboes on the program and this extraordinary space, this piece was a natural choice. [For this listener, another piece in our repertoire makes a similar reference to intimacy and distance: Schubert’s Shepherd on the Rock, in which a lover longs for a beloved across a canyon and listens for the echo response, for clarinet, soprano, and piano. BCMS has also performed it at First Church, in December 2007.]
Eric Nathan’s work for two winds is followed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s longest finished work for three strings, the Divertimento in E-flat major for Violin, Viola, and Violoncello, K. 563 in six movements*. Mozart usually reserved this title and six-movement structure for ‘occasional’ purposes, either festivities or as background entertainment. However, the unique size, content and history of his K. 563 have allowed it a more important place among his string chamber music output of more than twenty string quartets, six great viola quintets, and two duos for violin and viola. The writing for each player is as demanding as that in any of his concertos for string soloists.
Serenade in C minor K. 388/384a (1788) for Wind Octet, written by Mozart for pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and French horns, is in four movements. As the name suggests, it could have been in six; instead, it only has one minuet and ends with a collection of variations. If it was intended to be occasional music, Mozart seems to have missed that mark enough to re-arrange it for strings as his fourth viola quintet in that same year. We have performed this work in that later string arrangement several times in our BCMS history. This performance will be the first time we present it as first conceived.
Enjoy.
* The heading from Mozart reads, Ein Divertimento a 1 violino, 1 viola e violoncello; di sei Pezzi
