De la musique avant toute chose,
Et pour cela préfère l’Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.
Paul Verlaine, 1882
Music first and foremost of all!
Choose your measure of odd not even,
Let it melt in the air of heaven,
Pose not, poise not, but rise and fall.
Translation: Arthur Symons
The second concert of our 40th Anniversary Season contains three works: two quintets and a sextet, played in very different combinations by all nine BCMS Member Musicians. We open with Beethoven’s early C major Viola Quintet, Op. 29 (1800–02), the only work he wrote originally for the combination of string quartet plus viola, using the same forces as the six quintets by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Although written around the same time as his earliest string quartets, Beethoven’s treatment of the combination employs orchestral effects and operatic content that seemingly expand the musical discourse and techniques beyond those reserved for the intimacy of the drawing room.
Second on the program we offer the world premiere of Sextet for Oboe, Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Bass, and Piano by Boston composer Scott Wheeler. It is a special 40th Anniversary gift to our Member Musicians from members of the BCMS Commissioning Club who have to date supported the commission of eight works that we have premiered in our series, and are recording for release over the next three seasons.
You might wonder about the unusual, yet familiar, combination of instruments. Scott Wheeler says:
My Sextet began with my fascination for the 1924 Quintet for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola and contrabass by Serge Prokofiev. Originally written for a Paris ballet called Trapèze by choreographer Boris Georgevich Romanov, Prokofiev’s Quintet is a gem combining aspects of Russian folk music and French modernism. I thought if I added piano to this combination I could create an unusual set of musical colors that would be both entertaining and substantial, suitable for this fortieth anniversary season of the Boston Chamber Music Society.
Our program closes with the great Piano Quintet in F minor by French composer Cesar Franck. This season marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the composer who managed to capture with so much heartfelt beauty the angst, ambivalence and conflict in musical taste and political discourse of his time. This work was written in 1879 and premiered 1880 within the decade following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War it had declared, and the founding of the Société Nationale de Musique in 1870 in a futile nationalistic attempt to stem the rising tide of influence of German music. If the quintet was intended to divert attention from the music of Wagner, Beethoven or Brahms, it has not succeeded. But, it has made for itself and us a place to experience the will to triumph over struggle.
Enjoy.
MT
I think last Sunday’s concert was not well publicized. I tend to go to programs every weekend and was not aware of it. I look everywhere but most often at https://www.thebostoncalendar.com/events?search=chamber and didn’t see it. Nor did I see the earlier program at Sandars Theater.