Tuesday, August 12
Wind Orchestra Recital
Joaquín Valdepeñas, conductor

Charles Gounod

Petite symphonie

During much of the nineteenth century, French music was dominated by opera. Few composers (and fewer audiences) were interested in symphonies or chamber music. Opera was both glamorous and popular, and success in that field could make a composer wealthy. Gounod, while he was to have his operatic successes, cultivated a far wider range of interest than most French composers of his day. While in Italy as the recipient of the 1839 Prix de Rome, he encountered the music of Palestrina and other Renaissance masters and spoke admiringly of its “absence of all perceptible processes, all secular artifice, all vanity or coquetry.” It was in Italy, too, that he encountered Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, the sister of Felix Mendelssohn. She introduced the young Frenchman to the works of Bach and Beethoven (as astonishing as it may seem to us, their music was virtually unknown in France then), not to mention those of her brother. After three years in Rome, Gounod visited Vienna, Berlin, and Leipzig before returning to Paris. In all of these places, he encountered music by the leading German masters past and present, music that was unknown or not highly regarded at home.

After returning to France, Gounod wrote music in many genres—sacred oratorio and opera in particular, though he also made two modest attempts at composing small symphonies in emulation of the model of Haydn. But the extraordinary success of Faust in 1859 turned his attention decisively to the theater, and he might never have written his “little symphony” but for a commission from his friend Paul Taffanel, the highly influential teacher of flute at the Paris Conservatoire. Taffanel had set up an organization specifically to perform chamber works for wind instruments, and in 1885 he asked Gounod to contribute a piece. Gounod chose an instrumentation that closely matched the scoring of some of Mozart’s wind serenades—two each of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons—and then added a single flute, in an homage to Taffanel.

The Petite Symphonie is a miniature evocation of a complete Classical symphony from the vantage point of the late-nineteenth century: delicate, evocative, and elegantly colored. The opening movement begins with a Haydnesque slow introduction before slipping into a formal sonata-allegro movement. (The slow movement particularly features Taffanel’s flute.) The Scherzo has more the air of the hunt than that of a Classical dance, but it contains a full trio and restatement. The Finale is filled with exuberant syncopations and staccatos that pass the musical goodies all around the ensemble, to general merriment and delight.

— © Luke Howard

Richard Strauss

Sonatina No. 1 in F major, “Aus der Werkstatt eines Invaliden”

Though Richard Strauss virtually defined German post-Romanticism with his richly scored and intensely passionate operas, programmatic tone poems, and sumptuous orchestral Lieder, he maintained a reverence (bordering on fixation) for Viennese Classicism. The plots of his operas Salome and Elektra engorge themselves on fin-de-siècle decadence, but the stories for Der Rosenkavalier, Capriccio, and Ariadne auf Naxos would not be at all out of place in the late eighteenth century. And while one of Strauss’s musical gods was Richard Wagner, the other was Wolfgang Amadè Mozart. In 1941, when he was asked to contribute to a book about Mozart in Munich, Strauss responded, “I cannot write about Mozart. I can only worship him.”

Despite his admiration for Mozartian Classicism, though, Strauss wrote comparatively little chamber music, and the handful of chamber works he did produce were all completed before he was twenty-four. He was not inspired easily by the traditional, absolute forms of small-scale Classical composition. So when Strauss writes a multi-movement work for a relatively small chamber group, such as his 1943 First Sonatina for wind ensemble, the influence of Mozart must be very close.

The inspiration in this case is Mozart’s Tenth Serenade for winds in B-flat major, Gran Partita, K. 361. Composed sometime in the early 1780s for the court at Munich, it was a divertimento on a grand scale, written for twelve wind instruments and double bass. The genre and size of Mozart’s Serenade made it an amplification of the Harmonie or wind octet that was becoming extraordinarily popular in Germany and Austria at the time.

At the start of his career, Strauss had already composed a work honoring Mozart’s Gran Partita. His Serenade, Opus 7, for thirteen wind instruments, modeled directly on the Gran Partita, was premiered in Dresden in 1881, exactly one hundred years after the premiere of Mozart’s work. Then, sixty years later, Strauss accepted a commission from the Dresden Musicians’ Union to celebrate its ninetieth anniversary, which also happened to coincide with the composer’s eightieth birthday.

Strauss completed the First Sonatina in F Major in the summer of 1943, and two years later wrote another wind Sonatina dedicated “to the shade of the divine Mozart, at the end of a life filled with gratitude.” The title “Sonatina” is, however, somewhat misleading both with regard to the size of the ensemble and the scope of the work. Each of the three movements of the First Sonatina can last ten minutes or more in performance, making the work at least as long as any of Mozart’s symphonies.

For the present Sonatina, Strauss appended the subtitle “Aus der Werkstatt eines Invaliden” (From the Workshop of an Invalid). He was recovering from an illness at the time, and perhaps used the convalescence (and the subtitle) as an explanation for what he seems to have regarded as a minor trifle. In December 1943, after the work was completed but before its premiere in June 1944, Strauss informed his publisher that these movements were nothing more than “chippings, inconsequential stuff which might at best be of some use to musicians in need of ensemble practice but which is of no interest whatsoever to publishers.” (The Second Sonatina was subtitled “Fröliche Werkstatt” (Happy Workshop), indicating not only that Strauss’s health had improved but also that the War had ended.) Indeed, neither of the two sonatinas for wind ensemble was published during Strauss’s lifetime.

Despite its wartime origins, the First Sonatina has an untroubled air of relaxation and serenity. Its tensions are purely internal and musical, not programmatic at all. The first movement opens with ambiguous harmonies before settling solidly into the tonic key of F major. Strauss’s harmonic language remained firmly triadic throughout his long career, but his ability to modulate rapidly to unexpected keys became something of a signature trait, manifest in the opening of this work as well. A tuneful, pastoral section, led by an oboe melody, dominates the middle of the movement and gives many of the players a turn in the melodic spotlight. These internal passages sound developmental, more in the style of Beethoven perhaps than Mozart, but decidedly Viennese, and definitely not Modernist. The movement closes with a contented reflection on previous motifs, recalling at times gestures from Der Rosenkavalier.

The middle movement actually combines a bucolic slow movement and a minuet, suggesting that Strauss was indeed thinking symphonically in this work. The arpeggiated phrases that open the Romanze imbue this section with Mahlerian breadth and serenity. Later, when a more dramatic moment of crisis appears, it is quickly dispelled. An unusually contrapuntal and brief minuet then follows, with echoes and motivic restatements sounding across the barlines. But before it has a chance to gain a foothold, the Romanze theme returns, complete with its temporarily threatening passage, and closes out the movement.

If the second-movement minuet seems to have been shortchanged, Strauss compensates with a return of dance rhythms in the good-natured Finale: Molto allegro. Repeated-note figurations in the accompaniment propel the long-breathed melodies forward. Then, after a cadence, a new idea emerges—almost like a second slow movement in its relaxed contentment. But the triple-meter dance tempo picks up again, and the movement bubbles along cheerfully to its grand conclusion. — © Luke Howard

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.