For our first Winter concert of BCMS Season 42 we offer three works whose creators shared coincidences beyond nationality, precocity, and studies with Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov; had teaching careers at and leadership positions of important institutions as well as deep concerns over the direction of Russian Music; and lived with hardship during periods of war, personal and national upheaval.
Sergei Prokofiev’s Quintet Op.39 (1924) scored for an unusual instrumentation is one of his lesser-known works from a catalog that includes operas, concertos for violin and for piano, ballets, film scores, string quartets, and sonatas. The Quintet began life as music for a touring ballet called Trapeze, consisting of five circus characters represented by each of the instruments. It was commissioned as an economical travel companion for Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat (also scored for small ensemble of single one-of-a-kind instruments, plus actor, dancer, and narrator). When the original plan failed, Prokofiev re-purposed the music, rearranged movements, and published the work as a stand-alone chamber piece in six movements. Created in the wake of Stravinsky’s Parisian triumphs in ballet, the Quintet allowed Prokofiev to embrace the ‘Modern’ and break with the lingering lyrical and harmonic past in the music of Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Glière. The new possibilities for experiment included characterization with irregular meters, the use of odd or unresolved notes, tone clusters, percussive and jagged gestures with seeming wrong notes, and unresolved harmonic dissonances. As with Stravinsky, the individual part-writing and ensemble requirements set a higher bar for the players that continues to surprise and delight audiences and musicians after more than a century!
In recent years we have programmed Anton Arensky’s string quartet from violin, viola, and two cellos that shows the early influence of Tchaikovsky–Variations, Ballet, and Russian Chant. His Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor (1894) is probably his best-known work. It has been compared to Felix Mendelssohn’s popular first piano trio that will conclude our April concert. It is tuneful and elegiac, written in tribute to one of the great cellists of his day, and, in its third movement Scherzo, evokes the lightness we associate with Mendelssohn’s Scherzos. The frequently florid, inventive piano writing reveals Arensky’s early acquaintance with the music of Frederic Chopin. The finale concludes in a manner long established among the Russian Romantics: with a brief quote from the opening bars of the first movement.
Our program closes with a return to the influence, and spirituality of Tchaikovsky with the sublimely earnest String Quintet in A minor, Opus 39 (1891) of Alexander Glazunov. The string quintet in this instance is defined by an extra cello (rather than viola—or double bass as with Dvořák) added to the standard string quartet, a practice followed since Boccherini to great effect by Franz Schubert, Georges Onslow, and Sergei Taneyev (pupil of Tchaikovsky). It is in four movements: the first opening with a noble viola solo; the second dominated by pizzicato; a transcendent slow movement; and a Finale in Rondo with the theme interspersed by fugato and lyrical treatments of its motifs, leading to an exciting coda where all treatments of the theme are brought together with the original in a virtuosic contrapuntal display worthy of the Russian Romantic tradition.
Enjoy!
