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BOSTON SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS Sunday, October 17, 1999, at 3 p.m. at Jordan Hall

BOSTON SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS Malcolm Lowe, violin Richard Svoboda, bassoon Steven Ansell, viola James Sommerville, horn Jules Eskin, cello Charles Schlueter, trumpet Edwin Barker, double bass Ronald Barron, trombone Jacques Zoon, flute Everett Firth, percussion William R. Hudgins, clarinet

;.)"?'- ;'>„• withMARYLOU SPEAKER CHURCHILL, violin I IHuHDi-VV- A'c.v KEISUKE WAKAO, oboe V JON KIMURA PARKER, piano

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POULENC Sonata for trumpet, horn, and trombone

Allegro moderato Andante Rondeau

Messrs. SCHLUETER, SOMMERVILLE, and BARRON

BRITTEN Sinfonietta, Opus 1

Poco presto e agitato Variations. Andante lento Tarantella. Presto vivace SnnjIBUPnslBHmQwlBI Messrs. ZOON, WAKAO, HUDGINS, SVOBODA, HH SOMMERVILLE; Mr. LOWE, Ms. CHURCHILL, i Messrs. ANSELL, ESKIN, and BARKER

BARTOK Contrasts, for violin, clarinet, and piano

Verbunkos (Recruiting Dance): Moderato, ben ritmato Pineho (Relaxation): Lento HH Sebes (Fast Dance): Allegro vivace

Messrs. LOWE, HUDGINS, and PARKER m&v. mSBBM INTERMISSION m&fcai&m

SCHUMANN Quintet in E-flat for piano and strings, Opus 44 MT* Allegro brillante In modo d'una Marcia. Un poco largamente—Agitato 3S». Scherzo molto vivace "B*v IHQnS Allegro, ma non troppo

Mr. PARKER, Mr. LOWE, Ms. CHURCHILL, Messrs. ANSELL and ESKIN

Baldwin piano Nonesuch, DG, Philips, RCA, and New World records Jon Kimura Parker plays the Steinway piano. Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) Sonata for horn, trumpet, and trombone

Francis Poulenc, in Paris, just before 1920, made a splash writing and playing short, aggres- sive, difficult, and odd works for piano that sprang primarily from a combination of two influences: Stravinsky (especially Rite of Spring) and the short, aggressive, difficult, and odd piano pieces of Eric Satie. In these younger years, Poulenc was loosely associated with five other composers (not all of them French) living in Paris and "mentored" by Satie and Jean

Cocteau. This group was known as "Les Six," but in spite of the fame of that little collec- tive, it was short-lived, the artistic relationships mostly superficial, though the group did produce some collaborative scores. Poulenc's early compositional output otherwise consisted of quite a number of songs and small instrumental pieces, with some larger works, such as the ballet Les Biches (1923). In the middle of his career he extended his own formidable piano writing to pieces for key- board and orchestra; the Double Piano Concerto (1932) and the Organ Concerto (1939) were two of these. From the mid- 1930s he began to re-embrace the Catholicism of his upbringing, which resulted in several important sacred works including the Mass in G major (1937), Stabat Mater (1950), and Gloria (1959). Also from this period are the Piano Concerto (1949), the important sonatas (with piano) for violin (1943/49), cello (1948), flute (1956), clarinet (1962), and oboe (1962), and the operas Les Mamelles de Tiresias (after Apollinaire; 1944), Dialogues des Carmelites (after a play by George Bernanos; 1957), and the one-act La Voix humaine (on Cocteau's libretto; 1958). He also wrote many groups of melodies (songs) and piano pieces throughout his life; he is considered one of the most important song composers of this century.

Poulenc's Sonata for horn, trumpet, and trombone (1922) is one of three early short sonatas for winds, the others being the Sonata for two clarinets (1918) and the Sonata for clarinet and bassoon (1922). Like the composer's little piano pieces, the Sonata for horn, trumpet, and trombone is playful and extrovert at its core, with lively rhythms and a celebra- tory mood in the outer movements and quaint charm in the Andante. The piece is assem- bled primarily from simple, direct melodies with ostinato and arpeggio accompaniments.

Benjamin Britten (1913-1975)

Sinfonietta for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, and string quintet, Opus 1

Benjamin Britten, whose operas are among this century's most popular in that medium, was a phenomenally precocious composer. While in his twenties he wrote many of the works for which he became known, including his Simple Symphony, Sinfonia da Requiem, and Les Illuminations. He composed the Sinfonietta, his first published work, in 1932, while at the Royal College of Music; he dedicated the score to his teacher Frank Bridge. Already the young composer had demonstrated a natural gift of melodic invention. The Sinfonietta was in part an attempt to harness this gift into a more intricately constructed treatment.

Specifically influenced by Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1, particularly in its elab- orate development of motivic cells, Britten clearly wished to create an English music with a greater thematic intricacy than the sometimes meandering tunefulness of the tradition he had inherited. A pentatonic horn call (reminding the listener of Schoenberg's opening, though the lat- ter's perfect fourths are more dangerous in their destruction of a tonal sense) provides the material from which the young composer mines the tiny germinal elements that make up the Sinfonietta's thematic language. Britten is willing to expand the tonal procedures of his free sonata-form first movement, to play with harmonic ambiguities, but never to dis- pense with tonality altogether. The slow movement's variations bring an air of nostalgia Hirll HEKf StoP SM :-.-'"IP

and gentler, triadic harmonies. The finale is a Tarantella cast as a moto perpetuo in which the fast surface activity unwinds the musical material slowly and gradually. While the Sinfonietta may not yet reveal all of the expressive possibilities of Britten's melod- ic poignancy—especially as it came to be revealed in his operas—it certainly demonstrates a command of structure and form that can only be envied in a composer not yet turned twenty.

Bela Bartok (18814945) Contrasts, for violin, clarinet, and piano

With two exceptions, all of Bartok's chamber music is for string instruments, with or with- out the addition of a piano. The late Sonata for two pianos and percussion, written in 1937, was followed a year later by Contrasts, occasioned by a commission from Benny Goodman and Joseph Szigeti, to whom the piece is dedicated. Bartok completed the work in Budapest on September 24, 1938, after having heard some records of the Benny Goodman band that Szigeti sent him. Far from trying to blend the three very different types of instruments into a single complex sonority, Bartok exploits the difference in sound production as much as possible (as the title of the work suggests). He had long since become a past master of vio- lin effects—multi-stops, bowed and pizzicato notes played simultaneously, glissandi, and so on; now he investigates the possibilities of the clarinet as well, while keeping the piano part, which was conceived for himself, modestly in the background. The original plan, according to Goodman's wish, was to have a two-movement work that would fit on a single twelve-inch 78rpm record, but Bartok found that he needed greater scope, so to the planned two movements he added a slow middle movement. The music is strongly nationalistic, possibly Bartok's musical response to the advance of Nazism. The Verbunkos, or recruiting dance, was used to encourage enlistments in the Hungarian army in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; thereafter it remained as a characteristi- cally Hungarian musical genre featuring sharply dotted rhythms in a slow march tempo with ornamental turns, runs, and arpeggios decorating the melodic lines. Historically, the Ver- bunkos began with a slow section (lassu) followed by or alternating with a wild fast one

(friss); the original two-movement plan of Contrasts was designed to reflect this format. The Verbunkos ends with a clarinet cadenza that leads to the languid slow movement, in which violin and clarinet begin by mirroring one another, while the piano contributes soft percussive tremolos inspired by Balinese gamelan music. The fast dance, Sebes, begins with a short passage on a scordatura violin (with the E string re-tuned to E-flat and the G string

Internationally acclaimed pianist Jon Kimura Parker was born, raised, and educated in Vancouver. A true Canadian ambassador of music, Mr. Parker has given two com-

mand performances for Queen Elizabeth II and has performed for the Prime Ministers of Canada and Japan and for the United States Supreme Court. Mr. Parker has, in the past two seasons, performed at venues from Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House; toured the Canadian Arctic as part of "Piano Six," performing music of Beethoven, Chopin, Nirvana, and Alanis Morisette for Inuit school students; jammed with Doc Severinsen and the original Tonight Show Orchestra; and given an impromptu con- cert at the Victoria Falls Hotel while on safari in Zimbabwe. He also played himself in a guest appearance on the Disney Channel's "Under the Umbrella Tree." Mr. Parker has made several compact discs for Telarc with repertoire ranging from solo works of Chopin to the "Concerto for Piano vs. Orchestra" by the tabled P.D.Q. Bach. Most recently, Telarc has released his recording of Barber's Piano Concerto with Yoel Levi and the Atlanta Symphony. On New Year's Eve 1995, Mr. Parker gave a benefit per- formance of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto in war-torn Sarajevo. .

to G-sharp), following which the violin is directed to return to a second, normally tuned instrument. The outer sections of the dance are in a lively 2/4 meter, but the extended middle section uses what is often called "Bulgarian rhythm," which Bartok learned in his folk music studies: (8+5)/8, or more properly (3+2+3+2+3)/8. When the original 2/4 returns, the dance gets wilder and wilder, with just a few momentarily tranquil passages and a cadenza for the violin, before reaching its brilliant conclusion.

Robert Schumann (18104856) Quintet in E-flat for piano, two violins, viola, and cello, Opus 44

Schumann wrote this quintet early in the fall of 1842, his "chamber music year." He had just finished the three Opus 41 string quartets and would soon turn to the Opus 47 piano quartet. Both the string quartet and the piano quartet genres had notable histories going back to the classical works of Haydn and Mozart, but the piano quintet was entirely new as a medium, cre- ated singlehandedly by Schumann with this, his sole contribution to it—and his most popular piece of chamber music. Clearly the combination of piano and string quartet had its attractions: Schumann was followed in this genre by composers ranging from Brahms to John Harbison.

The quintet's first movement grows from an upward-leaping theme that is related by dis- tinct family resemblance to most of the remaining ideas of the movement. The C minor funeral march of the slow movement was almost certainly inspired by Beethoven. A lyrical Trio in C major provides contrast of mood but fails to prepare us for the dramatic surprise of the second Trio, a stormy F minor passage against which the viola attempts to recall the funeral march. The minor mode yields to F major for a new statement of the lyrical first Trio, now sounding especially sweet after the preceding outburst. The funeral march itself returns with a dying fall and longer periods of silence, recalling the Beethoven of the Eroica Sympho- ny and the Coriolan Overture. The dramatic return of the second Trio was an afterthought, suggested to Schumann by Mendelssohn, who—deputizing for Clara Schumann, who was ill—sight-read the piano part in a private performance in December 1842.

The scherzo is built on rushing scales, punctuated by heavy chords and syncopated cadences. This movement, too, has two contrasting Trio sections. The final coda of the scherzo firmly reestablishes the tonic key of E-flat, which is necessary in part because the finale opens in a dis- tant key and only works around to the tonic after two full statements of the theme. The entire last movement carries on a wide-ranging modulation, and even the recapitulation (like the opening of the movement) begins outside the home key. To make up for all this distant traveling, Schumann creates afugato, working in all the themes of the last movement. Then, in a massive fugal coda, he combines the opening themes of the first and last movements in a memorable moment that sets off a splendidly vigorous closing fugue.

—Notes by Steven Ledbetter and Robert Kirzinger (Poulenc)

Coming Concerts. .

January 16, 2000 LERDAHL Waltzes, for violin, viola, cello, and double bass • MAHLER (arr. SCHOENBERG) Songs of a Wayfarer • MOZART String Quintet in G minor, K.516

March 12, 2000 MOZART Bute Quartet in D, K.285 • JANACEK MW (Youth), for wind sextet • BRAHMS Serenade No. 1 in D, Opus 1 1 (chamber version)

Single tickets at $28, $21, and $16 may be purchased at the Symphony Hall box office, or by calling SymphonyCharge at (617) 266-1200.