Sextet in C major Op.37 (1935)

According to Bartók - a composer of a similar age and from much the same Hungarian background - Dohnányi wrote music “of unquestionable value” although, as he added, “there is nothing really new in it.” There’s not much that’s really Hungarian either. The Sextet in C is no less attractive for that. Scored for an ensemble of not far short of orchestral potential, it begins with a generously abundant Allegro apparssionato that indulges itself in the available sonorities with an opulence worthy of Richard Strauss, who is inevitably called to mind in places. Dohnányi does, however, have long-term economy in mind. The three notes proclaimed by the horn in the opening bars and then incorporated in the main theme are dramatically recalled in the closing bars of the movement. A close variant of those three notes introduces the dreamy musings of the strings at the beginning of the Intermezzo and is even more poetically echoed after the central slow-march episode. They are prominent in neither the Brahms-like outer sections of the scherzo nor its Mendelssohnian middle section but they do reapper in time to effect an unbroken transition to the last movement. The one part of the work that sounds, with its lively dance rhythms and its café-concert waltz, as if it was written in the 1930s rather than twenty years earlier, the Finale ends with a last recall of the three-note motif.