Quartetto

for flute, oboe, clarinet in E flat, clarinet in B flat

with piano accompaniment

If Ponchielli’s Quartetto - with its four woodwind players and a pianist - looks to you more like quintetto, you are not mistaken. The anomaly arises from the fact that the work was written in the first place as a Quartetto with orchestra and that the original title was retained when it was published in a reduced version with the same solo woodwind parts but with the orchestral part arranged for piano. And that is not all that is strange about it. There is, for example, the unconventional make-up of Ponchielli’s woodwind quartet, which excludes the bassoon and includes not only the standard B flat clarinet but also - reflecting the composer’s experience as a bandmaster perhaps - the little E flat clarinet.

Strangest of all is the construction of the piece, which is in one continuous movement but divided into as many as nine different sections, each marked by a distinct change of tempo and each based on its own melodic material. What holds the Quartetto together, more or less, is its safety-first adherence to B flat major and keys closely related to it. There is also a (fairly minimal) cyclic element in that the theme anticipated by the piano and definitively introduced by the E flat clarinet shortly after the first entry of the wind instruments reappears not only at the climax of this opening Moderato section but also, on the piano, just before the Allegro brillante coda. But the basic motivation of the work is the composer’s delight in the colour and the virtuosity of the solo instruments in a variety of situations - lyrical little slow movements, a central scherzo, elegant solos, exuberantly decorative counterpoint and an abundance of tiny cadenzas.

The Quartetto was first performed in 1857, a year after Ponchielli’s first opera, I promessi sposi, and nearly twenty years before La Gioconda, the one work by which (thanks largely to Walt Disney) he is remembered today.