Programme — debussy: string quartet, Jeux d’enfants, Rêverie: L’Escarpolette (The Swing) …

Jeux d’enfants

Rêverie: L’Escarpolette (The Swing)

Impromptu: La Toupie (The Top)

Berceuse: La Poupée (The Doll)

Scherzo: Les Cheveaux de bois (The Merry-go-round)

Fantaise: Le Volant (The Windmill)

Marche: Trompette et tambour (Trumpet and Drum)

Rondino: Les Bulles de savon (Soap Bubbles)

Esquisse: Les Quatre coins (Puss in the Corner)

Nocturne: Colin-Maillard (Blind Man’s Buff)

Caprice: Saute-mouton (Leap-Frog)

Duo: Petit mari, petite femme (Little Husband, Little Wife)

Galop: Le Bal (The Dance)

Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants is dedicated to Mesdemoiselles Marguerite de Beaulieu and Fanny Gouin, which no doubt explains its origin. Performing it, on the other hand, is not child’s play. Bizet was himself a highly accomplished pianist, and his ear for sonorities - a very much better ear than he is given credit for in the piano world - means that some unusual demands are made both on keyboard and pedal technique. It is not, however, a showy work. The composer’s wit is certainly put on display but the pianists’ technique is directed towards characterisation and the creation of atmosphere.

Bizet’s genius as a miniaturist is familiar to more people perhaps through his Petite Suite which is five of the twelve movements of Jeux d’enfants in an orchestral arrangement written at about the same time as the piano duet version - in 1871, three years before Carmen. But, of course, the best piano music does not necessarily make good orchestral music. L’Escarpolette, with its arpeggios swinging up the bass and down the treble, a dreamy melody for the secondo right hand in the middle, is an essentially piano inspiration which could not be included in the orchestral suite. The spinning figurations of La Toupie did, on the other hand, prove to be transferable, as did the cradle-song melodiousness of La Poupée. The roundabout movement of the next two - the giddy haste of Les Cheveaux de bois and the gentle sailing of Le Volant - are a perfect contrast which would gain nothing from orchestration.

Trompette et tambour, which opens the orchestral suite, is perhaps the best known of them all; Les Bulles de savon, with its elusively slippery figuration in the primo part, is probably the least familiar. Les quatre Coins is not a popular game in this country but it obviously involves running on tip-toe from corner to corner, and Colin-Maillard is a stealthy piece of a different kind, to make another well contrasted pair. Some of the most entertaining duet writing of the work is in the energetic and unpredictable exchanges of Saute-mouton, which is sweetly offset by the Petit Mari, petite femme (the little wife having rather more to say than the little husband). As in the orchestral suite, that moment of sentiment is immediately forgotten in the exhilarating final Galop.

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

Phantasy Quartet, Op.2

for oboe and strings

As a student at the Royal College of Music in 1932 Britten submitted an entry, a Phantasy String Quintet, for the Cobbett Chamber Music Prize and won it. W.W. Cobbett had endowed the prize in 1905 to encourage British composers to develop his idea of the “phantasy,” a single-movement form which would combine the freedom of the Elizabethan consort “fancy” with the cyclic structure of the nineteenth-century “fantasia.” Britten seems to have felt that Cobbett had a point. Certainly, within a few months of being awarded the prize he had written a Phantasy Quartet for oboe and strings in the hope not of winning 13 guineas with it but of persuading Leon Goossens, its dedicatee, to perform it - which he duly did in a BBC broadcast in August 1933.

The Phantasy Quartet is very much in line with Cobbett’s “phantasy” prescription. It is designed as a kind of palindrome beginning with a march progressing from silence to fortissimo and ending with the same march receding from fortissimo back into silence. Within that framework there are the exposition and development of a vigorous Allegro giusto, an Andante with episodes for a lyrical string trio and a rhapsodic oboe, and an abbreviated recapitulation of the Allegro giusto. The structure is further secured by the fact that all the thematic material is derived from the tune introduced by the oboe over the marching tread of the strings in the opening section. If this seems excessively schematic, the dramatic articulation, the melodic inspiration and the expressive spontaneity of the work confirm that the young composer was not in the least inhibited by it.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

String Quartet in G minor

Animé et très décidé

Assez vif et bien rytmé

Andantino, doucement expressif

Très modéré - très mouvementé

The work which established Debussy’s reputation as a composer quite out of the ordinary - in that it opened a window on a whole new sound world - was his Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune. While he was working on that revolutionary score he applied himself also to his one and only string quartet and, at the age of 31, proved himself as masterful in that essentially traditional medium as any of his contemporaries. Indeed, if César Franck’s String Quartet in D major was the ultimate achievement of its kind in French music up to that point, Debussy’s in G minor excelled it nearly every way.

One of the characteristic qualities of Franck’s music is its cyclic structure, in which a particularly significant theme recurs from movement to movement. Debussy goes further than that in deriving nearly all the melodic material from the opening bars- and in doing it with every appearance of spontaneity in harmony and colouring and emotional inspiration. The most important element in the first theme is not the syncopations, which give its rhythmic thrust, but the little triplet turn which seems so insignificant at first but which proves to be an inexhaustible source of melodic inspiration. The sweetly lyrical second subject, eventually introduced after a dramatic crescendo, might sound distant from the main theme, but the reason for its late entry - which is made on violin in counterpoint with the first theme on cello - is that it needed time to develop its distinctive shape.

The relationship between the main theme and the dancing line pursued by viola at the beginning of the second movement, against an intricate pizzicato accompaniment on the other three instruments, is clear enough. So too is the relationship between that theme and a much slowed down version expressively stretched out by first violin in the middle of the movement. The Andantino is not so rigorously motivated. The point of the brief introduction, featuring anticipations of the melody about to emerge on first violin, must be to alert the listener to the renewed influence of the triplet motif. But both here and in the somewhat quicker middle section, where the violin introduces two new (though related) ideas, the impulse is sentimental rather than structural.

The last movement, on the other hand, though it is far from unemotional, is concerned with tying the various thematic strands firmly together. Unexpectedly, its busy first subject - which enters on viola once the eloquent introduction has accelerated to the main tempo of the movement - is not based on the triplet element of the main theme. That distinctive feature is reserved for the second subject, an expansive melody which eventually provokes the central climax. Two further accelerations introduce close variants of the opening theme of the work and drive it irresistibly to its conclusion.

John Ireland (1879-1962)

Hope the Hornblower (before 1911)

Sea Fever (1913)

Tutto è sciolto (1932)

When Lights go rolling round the Sky (c 1911)

Great Things (1925)

Although there was a revival of interest in Ireland round the centenary of his birth in 1979, it didn’t last long. Indeed, less of his music is heard now than at any time since his death. Even Sea Fever, which was at one time of one of the most popular not only of his own but of all British songs - though the author of the words didn’t much like it - seems to have fallen out of favour. So the present selection - including two cheerful early songs, a later one in not quite the same vein, a sensitive product of his maturity and Sea Fever itsself - is a timely if necessarily limited reminder of Ireland’s genius in an area in which, between the wars above all, he excelled.

His setting of Sir Henry Newbolt’s Hope the Hornblower, which was written some time before 1911, is rather more than the rollicking hunting song it at first seems to be. Apart from such immediate attractions as the exhilarating rhythm of the piano accompaniment and a vocal line so aptly shaped to the natural inflection of the words, there are the subtle changes in harmony and rhythm which have an oddly, if briefly chilling effect at “Ask not yet till the day be dead” at the beginning of the third stanza.

Sir John Masefield’s problem with Ireland’s setting of Sea Fever was not the royalties it brought him but the “dirge-like” impression given when it was performed at the tempo prescribed by the composer. He was happy only when it was sung with eager urgency. Ireland, on the other hand, firmly believed that his Lento tempo was right and didn’t like the song taken too quickly. So what is a singer to do?

Tutto è sciolto, Ireland’s contribution to “The Joyce Book” - a collection of settings by thirteen different composers of texts from “Pomes Penyeach” - seems to come from a different age. Written in 1932, it is remarkable for its linear economy and the modest but exquisitely chosen harmonies reflecting the twilit colouring of Joyce’s words. The operatic derivation of the Italian title of the poem, which comes from Elvino’s lament in the second act of La Sonnambula, clearly did not tempt Ireland into emulating Bellini.

When Lights go rolling round the sky - one of three Ireland settings from about 1911 of words by the now forgotten James Vila Blake - is in much the same vein as Hope the Hornblower, with a romping rhythmic accompaniment and a hearty vocal line. Again, the genius is in the detail, in the precisely registered changes of atmosphere in the more lyrical lines that come between the irrepressible first stanza and its two repeats.

One of Ireland’s favourite poets, alongside Housman and the two Rossettis among others, was Thomas Hardy. Great Things was written in 1925 and it was presumably the affinity he felt with the poet in this case that encouraged him to undertake his Hardy cycle early in the following year. To begin with not very different from Hope the Hornblower and When lights go rolling round the sky, except that the piano accompaniment is even more exuberant in its tipsy kind of way, Great Things is quite masterful in its effortless accommodation of the changing moods of Hardy’s not entirely reckless poem.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Two Songs, Op.91

Gestillte Sehnsucht

Geistliches Wiegenlied

Geistliches Wiegenlied,the earlier of Brahms’s two songs, Op.91 - written originally for voice, viola and piano but performed on this occasion with cello instead of viola - was presented to Joseph and Amalie Joachim on the birth of their first child in 1864. Gestillte Sehnsucht was written in 1884 as a companion piece to it in the hope that the Joachims, who had separated by this time, might get together to perform the two songs in public and possibly even effect some kind of reconciliation. In fact, although Amalie did sing them, it was never with Joseph as violist.

The scoring for the string instrument is probably even more effective in Gestillte Sehnsucht than it is in Geistliches Wiegenlied. As well as introducing the most significant melodic image, which is always associated in the vocal part with the calming influence of the whispering of the wind and the birds, the it sustains an eloquently lyrical commentary, its supple phrasing crossing the bar line at times, its colouring intensified in the minor-key middle section by double-stopped harmonies. In Geistliches Wiegenlied the function of the string instrument is to play the part of Joseph by presenting an old German carol, “Joseph, lieber Joseph mein” as a kind of ritornello. In alternation with the carol on viola or cello, and in counterpoint with an obbligato partly based on it, the voice has a quite different song to sing - a setting of Emanuel Geibel’s German translation of a cradlesong by Lope de Vega. Viola or cello, the combination is irresistible.

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)

Oboe Sonata

Elégie: paisiblement

Scherzo: très animé

Déploration: très calme

The Oboe Sonata which, according to the composer, was “cooked in the same pot” as the Clarinet Sonata in 1962, is dedicated to the memory of Sergei Prokofiev. It was Poulenc’s very last work. He cannot have known that he had only a few months to live and yet its sorrowful aspect, which informs both the opening Elégie and the final Déploration, is surely more widespread and more prominent than it would be in a work inspired only by the loss of a distant colleague who had died nearly ten years earlier and who didn’t much like Poulenc’s music anyway.

Whatever was in the composer’s mind when he wrote it, the Elégie seems to have more to do with Poulenc - the two main themes are no less characteristic of him for sounding like Stravinsky in one case and Debussy in the other - than with Prokofiev. If Prokofiev is here at all it is in the Scherzo, which echoes several of the Russian composer’s stylistic features, not least in its expressive middle section, and which by the end is almost as sad as the other two movements. And if ever a composer was saying farewell to life, modestly but poignantly, it is Poulenc in the final Déploration, a lament that lingers over material from the Elégie before just slipping discreetly away at the end.

Two Novelettes

No.1 in C major

No.2 in B flat minor

Novelette sur un thème de Manuel de Falla

Being himself a pianist and having become a composer largely through the encouragement of his influential piano teacher Ricardo Viñes, Poulenc wrote much for the piano in his early years. Indeed, it was through the success of his Mouvements perpétuels that, at the age of nineteen, he first became known to a wider public. It is still, in its naive charm, his most popular piano work. The two Novelettes, written in 1927 and 1928 respectively, are clearly by the same composer as the Mouvements perpétuels, even though they are technically very much more sophisticated. Vividly contrasted as a pair, the first Novelette is as poetic in its expressiveness as the second is brilliant in its malicious wit.

Although Poulenc wrote less and less for piano in the later stages of his career, except as an accompaniment to the voice in his numerous French song-settings, he did return to it from time to time as a solo instrument. His very last piano piece, Novelette sur un thème de Manuel de Falla, written in 1959 and based on a characteristic theme from Falla’s ballet El Amor Brujo, is a posthumous tribute to a much admired Spanish colleague.

Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967)

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Serenade for strings in C major, Op.48

Pezzo in forma di Sonatina: andante non troppo -

allegro moderato - andante non troppo

Walzer: moderato, tempo di valse

Elégie: larghetto elegiaco

Finale (Tema Russo): andante - allegro con spirito

Writing to Nadezhda von Meck shortly after he had completed his Serenade for strings, Tchaikovsky expressed his satisfaction with the scoring of the new work and at the same time declared that the first movement was his “homage to Mozart.” One need listen no further than the double-stopped fortissimo sonorities in the slow introduction - a new sound in 1880 and one which has reverberated through string-orchestra music ever since - to understand his pride in the scoring, although it was the two middle movements which pleased the composer most in this respect.

The declaration of a homage to Mozart, on the other hand, tells us more about Tchaikovsky’s perception of his favourite classical composer than about the first movement of the Serenade in C. If he had been thinking of the sonata-form structure of the Allegro moderato the comment would have been unremarkable - even though, because he prefers to develop his themes as they occur, Tchaikovsky’s middle section is short by classical standards. What he actually had in mind was Mozart’s style and, to present-day ears at least, there is little of that in either the melodic line or the rhythmic syncopations of the first subject, and there is no more than a hint of rococo prettiness in the repeated notes of the second subject. The textural elaboration isn’t Mozartian either, least of all the hyper-active cello line associated at an early stage with the first subject.

The repeat of the Andante non troppo at the end of the first movement is a timely reminder of its salient melodic features, just before they are inverted to provide the delightful main theme of the Waltz in G major. The same scalic shape is presented - simultaneously in its ascending form (on violins and violas) and its descending form (on cellos and basses) - at the beginning of the third movement. The main theme of the Elegy is the lovely cantabile melody played by first violins over an intricate pizzicato accompaniment. Passing to cellos, it inspires a passionate violin counterpoint and is then developed in dialogue between the two. It is recapitulated in its original D major form on violas and a violin recitative-cadenza acts as a transition to a muted recall of the scalic opening section and extended, intermittently passionate coda.

Headed Tema Russo, the Finale actually includes two Russian tunes - the song featured in the G major Andante introduction and the vigorous dance presented as the main theme of the C major Allegro con spirito. The second subject, introduced in E flat major by violas, is a daring contrast which is skilfully reconciled in a brilliant contrapuntal treatment of the two themes in the development. The dramatic recall of the introduction to the first movement shortly before the end of the work, followed by a last appearance of the main theme of the Finale, reveals yet another thematic relationship and firmly sews up the construction as a whole.