|
Piano Quintet in A Minor, Op. 38
Sextet for B-Flat Clarinet, String Quartet & Piano, Op. 38
Quintet in B Minor for Flute, String Trio & Piano
Arthur Foote was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on March 5, 1853; at the age of seventeen he entered Harvard University, where he studied composition with John Knowles Paine and in 1875 received the first master's degree in music ever given in this country. The following year he attended the Bayreuth Festival, but his training was obtained entirely in the United States: he was one of the first composers of stature of whom this could be said.
Foote was a professional organist, holding a church position in Boston as late as 1910 and serving as president of the American Guild of Organists from 1909 to 1912. He also organized a chamber music series which was active in Boston during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, and he performed regularly as pianist with the famous Kneisel Quartet form 1890 to 1910. His effectiveness and influence as a teacher in Boston were felt over a fifty-year period which ended only four years before his death at the age of eighty-four (Boston, April 8, 1937).
In Boston Foote had the double advantage of having many of his orchestral works introduced by the Boston Symphony and of being able to write specifically for that outstanding orchestra. His best-known work is the suite in E major for string orchestra, Op. 63, premiered by the Boston Symphony in 1909 and eventually recorded under Koussevitzky.
The Quintet, Op. 38, was completed and published in 1898 and bears a dedication, in German ("in Freundschaft gewidmet") to the Kneisel Quartet and to its four members individually, who of course took part with Foote himself in the first performance. The four movements are: Allegro giusto, appassionato; Intermezzo: Allegretto (the longest movement of the four, despite the title); Scherzo: Vivace, and a final Allegro giusto.
Juan A. Orrego-Salas was born on January 18, 1919 in Santiago, Chile, where he initiated his basic training as a musician. By 1943 he had completed his undergraduate work in composition as a student of Pedro Humberto Allende and Domingo Santa Cruz and was teaching history of music at the National Conservatory in Santiago, as well as conducting the Catholic University Choir, which he founded in 1938. In 1944, taking advantage of two successive fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, he studied composition with Randall Thompson and Aaron Copland and musicology with Paul Henry Lang and George Herzog in the United States. Upon his return to Chile, he was Professor of Composition at the University of Chile.
In 1949 his Canciones Castellanas were chosen by the International Jury to be played in the Twenty-Third International Festival of the ISCM, held in Palermo and Taormina, Italy. He then traveled to Europe as a guest of the British Arts Council and the French and Italian governments. He returned to Chile where, in addition to his professorial tasks, he became the music critic for El Mercurio, the country's leading morning paper and, shortly thereafter, editor of the Revista Musical Chilena. In 1954 he returned to the United States on a second Guggenheim Fellowship. During this period his Sextet for clarinet, piano and string quartet, commissioned by the Wechsler Foundation of New York was premiered at Tanglewood. His Serenata Concertante, commissioned by The Louisville Orchestra, was also premiered and recorded.
He returned to Chile after a year's leave and became the Director of the Instituto de Extensión Musical. He resigned this position after two years to become the head of the Music Department of the Catholic University, where he remained until 1961, when he came to the United States to assume the duties of Director of the Latin American Music Center at Indiana University in Bloomington and Professor of Composition at its School of Music. In 1963 he returned to Chile to receive his diploma as "Profesor Extraordinario de Música," from the University of Chile. In 1971 he was given the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa in Music by the Catholic University of Santiago.
His works include a wide variety of chamber music works, compositions for solo instruments and for voice, four symphonies, concerti, two ballets, an opera, a missa for chorus, solo tenor and orchestra, two cantatas, and music for films.
The Sextet, Op. 38 for clarinet, piano and string quartet was commissioned by the Samuel Wechsler Foundation of New York and was premiered at Tanglewood in the summer of 1954. A year later in Chile, his native country, the composer received the Olga Cohen Award for this composition. The Sextet is divided into four contrasting movements, the first being a Sonata-Allegro based on two themes: one rhythmic in character and the other of a broad cantabile nature. The second movement is a theme and eight variations. The theme is of an archaic and lyrical character which immediately sets the mood of the 16th century Spanish Diferencias, the word deliberately used by the composer in its title. Each of the variations presents the main theme in different facets, alternating slow and fast tempi and always using one of the instruments of the ensemble in a predominant level of solistic importance. The final variation echoes the opening section with slight modifications. The
Scherzo is gay and brilliant, full of cross rhythmic accentuations, structural contrasts and virtuoso displays, only abandoned in the middle episode in which the air of utter tranquillity prevails before a return to the initial section. The last movement, Recitativo, Contrapunto e Coda, opens with a grand soliloquy of the clarinet which sets the meditative mood as well as the improvisatory free style that prevails throughout its development. After a succession of motet-like episodes and solo cadenzas, the movement ends with a coda based on a slow and gradual disintegration of the previous thematic content along an increasing pianissimo leading to the return of the opening key of E-flat in which the whole composition starts.
David Diamond was born July 9, 1915, in Rochester, New York, and began violin lessons at the age of seven. At twelve he went to the Cleveland Institute of Music for work in theory and violin, then returned to Rochester for further study at the Eastman School of Music which included work in composition with the late Bernard Rogers. A scholarship from the New Music School and Dalcroze Institute brought him to New York in 1934, and there he also studied privately with Roger Sessions. His first works, introduced in New York and Philadelphia concerts of the Greenwich Sinfonietta, the League of Composers and the Composers' Forum, attracted interest and encouragement from Aaron Copland, Olin Downs and Paul Rosenfeld. By 1936, still studying with Sessions, but with a commissioned work for Martha Graham already produced, he began work on a choral ballet to a scenario presented to him by E.E. Cummings. Diamond's patron Cary Rose sent him to Paris to complete the Cummings ballet (Tom), and there he met such figures as Gide, Roussel, Ravel, Despiau, Munch and Tansman. On his return to New York in 1937, he conducted the Psalm for orchestra which he had composed in Paris the previous summer and also his First Violin Concerto. He then received the H.H. Flagler Scholarship to study with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau; commissions and awards came to him in a steady stream from that time on among them a Prix de Rome and three Guggenheim fellowships and his music was introduced in both Europe and America by such conductors as Koussevitzky, Scherchen and Mitropoulos.
Following a fourteen-year period in Italy (with brief visits home for performances of his works), Diamond returned to the United States in 1965, to be greeted by observances of his fiftieth birthday by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and other organizations. The following year he was appointed chairman of the composition department of the Manhattan School of Music and elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He now lives in Rochester.
The Quintet for flute, strings and piano was composed at Fontainebleau in the summer of 1937, on commission from the League of Composers for the Barrère-Britt "Concertino" (Georges Barrère, flute; Mischa Elzon, violin; Gerald Kunz, viola; Horace Britt, cello; Jerome Rappaport, piano), which group gave the first performance on March 8, 1938, in New York under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of America. Diamond had just turned twenty-two when he completed the Quintet; it was this work, together with the orchestral Psalm, that moved the Guggenheim Foundation to grant him the first of his three fellowships in 1938 (he was the youngest recipient of such an award), and it also earned him the award of the Society for the Publication of American Music in 1941.
The Quintet has been well received by both the public and the critics since its first performance, and the reasons are not far to seek. Alan M. Kriegsman summed them up in a review in the Washington Post of January 23, 1967: "Diamond is a composer of unmistakable gifts, and his powerful musicality is right up at the surface of this full-blooded workit abounds in headstrong dance rhythms, made all the more compelling by jogging, muscular syncopations and an exotic harmonic flavorIn between two movements of throbbing energy, however, comes a sustained Romanza that is like one long, beautifully spun melodic strandgood solid inspiration.
This recording is issued on the occasion of Mr. Diamond's 80th birthday.
The Quintet in B Minor for Flute, String Trio and Piano is published by Southern Music Publishing Company.
Digitally remastered by Malcolm Addey. Cover photo by Anne Church. Photo of Arthur Foote courtesy of Spaulding Library, New England Conservatory of Music.
Piano Quintet in A Minor, Op. 38
Allegro giusto, appassionato (7:58)
Intermezzo: allegretto (8:47)
Mary Louise Boehm, piano · Kees Kooper, violin · Alvin Rogers, violin
Richard Maximoff, violn · Fred Sherry, cello
Sextet for B-Flat Clarinet, String Quartet & Piano, Op. 38
Sonata (Allegro non troppo) (4:15)
Recitative, Contrapunto e Coda (7:11)
Arthur Bloom, clarinet · Kees Kooper, violin · Judith Yanchus, violin · Paul Doktor, viola
Janos Scholz, cello · Mary Louise Boehm, piano
Quintet in B Minor for Flute, String Trio & Piano
I. (Allegro deciso e molto ritmico) (4:05)
David Gilbert, flute · Kees Kooper, violin · Paul Doktor, viola · Fred Sherry, cello
|
