Quintet, Primavera, Op.156

Allegro quasi allegretto

Adagio

Intermezzo

Finale

Koechlin’s music “needs a public that is not in a hurry,” said Gabriel Fauré, who was one of his teachers at the Paris Conservatoire and who knew him better than most of his contemporaries. Unfortunately, brilliant musician though Koechlin was, the public has been too busy to get to know more than a tiny proportion of his 225 works - including large-scale orchestral pieces like Les Bandar-Log and Le Livre de la jungle as well as an extraordinary diversity of chamber music - much of which still remains unpublished. Even a score as attractive and as undemanding as the Primavera Quintet had to wait eight years to get a hearing.

Primavera is clearly a product of 1936, when it was written, rather than of 1944, when it was first performed, in Paris, by its dedicatees, the Ensemble Pierre Jamet. It is a carefree work rejoicing in such tunes as that which is introduced by the harp at an early stage in the first movement. At the same time it is highly ingenious in its contrapuntal writing, not least where the main theme is associated with the two subsidiary themes proposed by the viola in the middle section. The two central movements - an Adagio which is basically a harp solo and a somewhat melancholy pastorale featuring mainly the flute in siciliano rhythm - are both very short. The Finale compensates not so much in duration as in its eventful treatment, often fugal in style, of its two main themes and its wittily timed pause just before the cheerful coda.

Gerald Larner©