Wind Orchestra
Joaquín Valdepeñas, conductor

Jean Françaix

9 pièces charactéristiques

Nadia Boulanger working on La ville morte, 1911 (photograph) by an unknown photographer. Wikimedia Commons. Boulanger was a famous teacher of harmony and musicianship; she taught both Stravinsky and Françaix, among many other famous figures of twentieth-century French and American music.

Jean Françaix was born in 1912 in Le Mans, a city just over 100 miles to the southwest of Paris. His father, Alfred, directed the conservatory in Le Mans. Jean’s musical talent brought him to Paris as a child, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger, becoming not only one of her first pupils but also one of the few French musicians the noted teacher took on; Boulanger would become much better known for her guidance of American composers like Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter. Françaix, also a pianist, went on to write numerous instrumental and vocal works; he died at age eighty-five in 1997 but remained an active composer into his final decade.

Françaix composed his Nine Characteristic Pieces for winds in 1973 at a time when many composers were exploring atonality and electronic sound worlds; in his music, however, Françaix hewed mainly to a neo-Classical aesthetic that dated back decades. This sound is as clear here as it is in the sonically quite similar quartet for winds he composed forty years earlier, in 1933. As his friend and colleague Emile Naumoff—who also studied with Boulanger as a child (though much later)—has written, Françaix “consistently composed music on his own terms, transcending the fickle humors of Paris and worldly trends”; Françaix also “defined his own challenges and found his own answers, remaining true to himself and his audience—past, present, and future.”

Françaix’s 1973 collection of nine short pieces for winds, all to be played without interruption, reflects Françaix’s playful style, which is tonal with frequent surprises and sometimes calls to mind the music of Kurt Weill or Dimitri Shostakovich in its amusing dissonances and distortions. The suite’s opening Presto is a relentless romp with swirling chromatic lines, and a flowing and tender Amoroso in quintuple time follows. A held bassoon note leads to the wistful Notturno, which highlights the clarinets. The syncopated, dancelike Subito vivo is an oboe showcase, with clarinets returning to prominence in the Allegro, which harkens back to the opening Presto in its resemblance to a twisted march. A more fluid Andantino leads to the breezy Leggierissimo with its rapid flute figures. The flutes and clarinets dominate the (relatively) forlorn Moderato, which gives way to the suite’s center of gravity: a feverish Finale that plays on the contrast between sweeping scalar runs and simple folk-like melodic fragments.

— © Matthew Mugmon

Igor Stravinsky

Octet

Stravinsky related once that the Octet was inspired by a dream he had of a group of instruments playing “some attractive music” that he was unable to recognize or remember the next day. He did, however, note how many instruments were playing and what they were.

I awoke from this little concert in a state of great delight and anticipation, and the next morning I began to compose the Octuor, which I had had no thought of the day before, though for some time I had wanted to write an ensemble piece—not incidental music like the Histoire du soldat, but an instrumental sonata.

In fact the Octet marks Stravinsky’s return to sonata form for the first time in his maturity as a composer; it is thus seen as one of the landmarks of his neo-Classical style. But he of course does not simply imitate eighteenth-century practice. His music had always involved such elements as repetition and contrast of passages for symmetry and balance, but they had not before made extensive use of modulation and key changes to signal the form, nor was he particularly interested in a dialectic of conversation between “first themes” and “second themes” that might (as in the standard view of sonata form) generate a climactic synthesis. The sonata that he wrote, however much it might have hinted at older music, remains pure Stravinsky.

The composer was apparently nervous about the reception of the piece, especially after the debacle of his 1920 Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which Koussevitzky had conducted at the end of a Romantic program for full orchestra, thereby intensifying the work’s austerity and making it seem ludicrous—or at least, incomprehensible—by comparison. Stravinsky chose to conduct the premiere of the Octet himself, though again the sight of eight instrumentalists against the huge auditorium of the Paris Opéra must have been a strange one to an audience hearing the new piece for the first time. It was also one of the first times that Stravinsky had conducted in public. To the sympathetic Jean Cocteau the composer’s gesticulations, which were a far cry from the silken gestures of an experienced conductor, suggested “an astronomer engaged in working out a magnificent instrumental calculation in figures of silver.”

For Stravinsky the choice of wind instruments perfectly captured his vision of a music that would be crisp, dry, of crystal clarity, avoiding all of the sentimental or “expressive” excess that he feared stringed instruments might indulge. The first movement suggests the traditional pattern of sonata form, but without the dramatization of the harmony that occurs for example in Beethoven. Stravinsky’s interest is almost always in the interplay of melodies and rhythms in a contrapuntal texture.

The second movement is a set of variations on a theme stated at first in the flute and clarinet against offbeat punctuations in the other instruments. Melody is the nearly constant element of the variations, with the theme appearing in recognizable guise (though transposed or decorated), while the accompaniment changes character from one variation to the next. The first variation, featuring running scale passages in the upper parts over the theme melody in the trombones, recurs twice, making a little rondo of the movement.

The variations lead straight on into the finale, which begins with a leaping theme in the first bassoon against eighth-note scales in the second. The overall contrapuntal character is maintained almost to the end, when the instruments begin a breathless chordal passage that divides the eighth notes of two measures into a pattern of 3+3+2, bringing the work to a close on one sharp, dry chord.

One of the very first pieces of prose that Stravinsky ever wrote about his music was an article for The Arts in January 1924 dealing specifically with the Octet. There he maintained:

This sort of music has no other aim than to be sufficient in itself. In general I consider that music is only able to solve musical problems; and nothing else, neither the literary nor the picturesque, can be in music of any real interest. The play of the musical elements is the thing.

— © Steven Ledbetter

Antonín Dvořák

Wind Serenade in D minor, B. 77, op. 44

Antonín Dvořák composed two serenades, one for string orchestra in 1875 and the other for winds in 1878. The earlier work reflects the thirty-four-year-old composer’s experience with the string quartet, a medium that he found congenial for artistic experimentation. The later work reflects, both warmly and amusingly, his experience as a young musician playing in the village band. At the time of its composition his fame was beginning to spread beyond local renown, and the Serenade itself contributed to that growing reputation, especially when the Budapest critic Max Schütz wrote in October 1880 that “only a master writes like this; only a poet by God’s grace has such inspiration.” Bohemia had enjoyed for well over a century, and perhaps much longer still, a great tradition of wind serenades, and Dvořák certainly knew at least some of the work of his great Bohemian predecessor Franz Krommer (a contemporary of Haydn and Mozart). In his continuation of the tradition Dvořák created an ensemble of winds with cello and double bass to reinforce the harmonic line, and wrote for this ensemble a suite of movements inspired largely by dance patterns of Czech origin.

The first movement (Moderato, quasi marcia) is in a minor key, but is in no way somber. Its mock-pompous air makes it rather comical, in fact, while the quieter trio, highlighting the oboes and clarinets in a lyric mode, is imbued with the idiom of Czech folk music. Eventually the horns recall the rest of the ensemble to its marching duty.

The second movement may be called a menuetto, but it is very much in the style of a Czech folk dance, the sousedská (neighbor’s dance), rather than the stately court dance of the previous century. The trio, in a faster tempo, races along with gurgling delight.

Serene and introspective melodies intertwine deliciously in the Andante con moto as clarinets and oboes sing their cool nocturne.

The finale then bursts forth with great energy and a high-spirited dialogue. The dancing accompaniment carries the discussion into a sudden return of the march from the opening movement; this yields to a final unbuttoned jubilation in the major-key close.

— © Steven Ledbetter

Joaquín Valdepeñas, a distinguished clarinetist, is a three-time Grammy nominee and a two-time Juno Award winner. After graduating from Yale University, he began his career as the principal clarinetist of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He has a prolific recording career and boasts over three dozen recordings. In two recent projects he recorded with the ARC Ensemble on the Chandos Music in Exile Series and recorded Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto with the English Chamber Orchestra. Valdepeñas has appeared at leading music festivals including Aspen, Marlboro, Casals, and the Great Mountains Festival in Korea. Valdepeñas is the founder of the Amici Chamber Ensemble, with which he has commissioned many works and received a Juno Award. A devoted chamber musician, he has collaborated with the American, Calder, Emerson, Muir, Orion, St. Lawrence, Takács, Ying, and Zemlinsky string quartets, as well as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Valdepeñas is an alumnus of the Aspen Music Festival and School and is resident conductor at the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Glenn Gould School. His former students hold positions in symphony orchestras around the world, including one recently placed student who now serves as the principal clarinetist of the Cleveland Orchestra.