Concert programme — Bax, Telemann & Debussy — Concert Programmes

Arnold Bax (1883-1953)

Elegiac Trio for flute, viola and harp(1916)

in one movement

Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767)

Trio Sonata in C minor (c 1725)

transcribed for flute, viola and harp

Adagio

Vivace

Affettuoso

Allegro

Harald Genzmer (1909-2007)

Trio for flute, viola and harp (1947)

Fantasia

Scherzo

Notturno

Theme and Variations on an old folk song

Toru Takemitsu (1930-98)

Then I knew ‘twas wind for flute, viola and harp (1992)

Astor Piazzolla (1921-92)

2 movements from Histoire du Tango (1986)

transcribed for flute and harp

Café 1930

Bordel 1900

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Sonata in F major for flute, viola and harp (1915)

Pastorale: Lento, dolce rubato – vif et joyeux – lento

Interlude: Tempo di minuetto – poco più animato – tempo primo

Finale: Allegro moderato ma risoluto

If Debussy’s Sonata in F was the earliest score for flute, viola and harp – and there is no evidence to contradict the idea – it is surely not just a coincidence that Bax wrote another for the same three instruments only a year later. The argument for Bax’s originality in this case is that he couldn’t have heard the Debussy Sonata, which was first performed six months after he completed the Elegiac Trio. But the Debussy Sonata was actually published some time before it was performed and, anyway, Bax would have needed only to know the instrumentation of Debussy’s latest work to start thinking about the potential of the flute-viola-harp ensemble. Whatever the truth of the situation, it seems that Bax, who had made himself as Irish as an Englishman could be, wrote the Elegiac Trio as a lament on the Easter Rising in 1916. Certainly, although it could just as well be a sad comment on the Great War, it is coloured by a deep tinge of Celtic poetry as well as a touch of French sensibility.

Given the short history of the harp trio, ensembles like tonight’s have to turn to arrangements or transcriptions to vary their repertoire with music from other periods. The many trio sonatas of Telemann – who occupied a position in Hamburg similar to that of Bach in Leipzig and who was one of the most prolific composers in a prolific age – must be a fruitful source. It depends, presumably, on whether the keyboard part is within the capabilites of the harp, as it is in the Sonata in C minor for oboe, gamba and harpsichord from the Essercizii musici (published in Hamburg in 1740 but apparently written in the 1720s). No adaptation is necessary in textures which are largely a matter of an interchange of ideas between (in this case) flute and viola with the harp in an accompanying role. While it is not lacking in contrapuntal interest, the major attraction of the work – not least in the bright little Vivace but particularly in the Affettuoso slow movement – is in its melodic invention. More than once the closing Allegro seems about to develop into a fugue but never does.

Harald Genzmer, who was born not long after the beginning of the most turbulent century in European history and lived well into the next, was one of music’s great survivors. His work list is corresondingly long – and all the longer for the fact that, although he was a disciple of Richard Strauss and a pupil of Paul Hindemith, he had no greater ambition than to produce music that was “lively, artistic and easy to understand.”

If you had had to back a late twentieth-century composer likely to write a worthy successor to Debussy’s Sonata for harp trio, Toru Takemitsu would have been a good bet. It was French music that had inspired him to become a composer and, though largely self-taught in early post-war Japan, he developed an exquisite sensitivity to harmony and colour. That much is clear from Then I knew ‘twas wind which was not only designed as a programme companion to the Debussy harp-trio Sonata but also takes an idea from it as the basis of the construction. While its title derives from a line by Emily Dickinson, it is not intended as an illustration of her poem. The music that grows out of the rising harp figure from Debussy’s opening bar, quoted by Takemitsu’s viola shortly after the harp introduction, clearly does not have the force of the wind as Dickinson heard it. The composer’s characteristically mystic thinking equates the wind with “the soul, or unconscious mind” and invests the work with a dream-like quality, which he secures by frequent silences and by never imposing a physical momentum on its speculations.

One of the best pieces of advice offered by one musician to another was Nadia Boulanger’s to her Argentinian composition pupil Astor Piazzolla. After an examination of the music he had brought with him – “Here you are like Stravinsky, like Bartók, like Ravel, but you know what happens? I can’t find Piazzolla in this” – she told him to be himself, go back to Buenos Aires and develop the tango into serious music. His “nuevo tango” didn’t make him popular everywhere in Argentina, least of all with fellow tango composers and other traditionalists. But it did make his music an international cult. It also demonstrated that the tango could be as fruitful an inspiration as the waltz had been to previous generations of composers. It is true that a musical history of the waltz would not have it originating in a brothel as the tango does in Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango and as, in fact, it did. In this selection of two of the four movements of that work (originally written for flute and guitar) the charmingly tuneful Café 1930 precedes the not much less decorous Bordel 1900.

Debussy was never to be as happy again, or as creative, as he was in the summer and autumn of 1915, when he was staying at Pourville near Dieppe on the Normandy coast. It was there that, as well as the twelve Etudes for piano, he wrote the Cello Sonata and – towards the end of his stay, when he was dreading the prospect of returning to war-time Paris – the Sonata for flute, viola and harp. Modelled on the pre-classical French sonata, they were the first in a projected series of six such works which, sadly, progressed no further than the Violin Sonata completed just a year before his death.

Debussy said of the Sonata for flute, viola and harp that he didn’t know whether it should make one “laugh or cry – perhaps both.” It is not an unhappy work and yet it is, as he remarked, “frightfully sad” at times, as though tinged with regret for the garden and sea view he was so reluctant to leave at Pourville. Even so – in spite of the ambiguity of the harmonies at the beginning, the elusive flexibility of the rhythms, and the lingering blends of autumnal instrumental colour – the ternary shape of the first movement is precisely defined. The quicker middle section is based on a clearly contrasting rhythmically impulsive theme introduced by viola and repeated by flute and harp in turn before a varied and still more nostalgic recall of the opening section.

Just as the self-sryles “Musicien Français” avoids sonata form in the Pastorale, he avoids classical precedent in the Interlude, alluding instead to the slow baroque minuet. Although he twice accelerates the tempo here, in anticipation of the cheerfully animated trio section, he cannot escape a particularly melancholy recall of the minuet material at the end. It is not until the Finale, with its ostinato rhythms and peculiarly exotic modal harmonies, that he is able to sustain the joy which has been such a sporadic feature of the work so far. A brief echo of the Pastorale just before the end does little to halt the momentum.