Program Notes - March 11, 2008
Cavatina (1904)
Bagatelle (1911)
John Ireland
John Ireland (1879-1962) was a prominent British composer best known perhaps for his high-spirited “A London Overture.” He also wrote a large quantity of chamber music and many songs. He was a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music and later taught there himself, one of his pupils being Benjamin Britten.
The two brief pieces heard tonight are relatively early works. The Cavatina, written shortly after his graduation from the Royal Academy, is a tasteful example of British salon music, sweet and a bit sentimental, but stopping just short of sentimentality. The Bagatelle, light, lilting and almost dancelike, is dedicated to the violinist Marjorie Haywood, also a teacher at the Royal Academy.
Piano Quartet
Walton
William Walton wrote this large-scale piece in the early 1920s but revised it several times over the years, most recently in 1976, about six years before his death. Most of the late revisions concerned the piano part.
The piece displays a high degree of thematic unity. The opening violin melody of the first movement is recalled, or at least alluded to, in each of the succeeding three movements.
The first movement is full of passionate rhapsodic feeling and the second is a spirited, rhythmically quirky scherzo. The slow movement is a kind of extended lyrical reverie, like a subdued love song, and the finale is full of nervous, driving rhythmic energy, relieved only by two brief lyrical episodes.
Another characteristic of Walton’s style, most noticeable in the second and fourth movements, is his fondness for intricate fugal textures.
Romance, from Suite for Viola and Piano
B. J. Dale (1885-1943)
Benjamin James Dale was a British composer, teacher and organist of high but perhaps unfulfilled promise. Like John Ireland, he studied at the Royal Academy of Music and later taught composition there. He had the misfortune to be in Germany when World War 1 broke out in 1914, and spent nearly four years in an internment camp there.
His suite for viola and piano dates from 1906. The Romance movement from it was often performed (as it will be tonight) as a separate piece without reference to its original position as the slow middle movement of a three-movement suite. British chamber music authority W. W. Cobbett has described it as “constructed on strictly classical lines” and breathing “the very spirit of romantic poetry.” Its main theme is in two parts, first heard separately and then combined.
Piano Quartet in A minor, op. 84
Elgar
This is one of the last major pieces that Sir Edward Elgar produced. It shows the composer’s thoughtful, introspective side. It is about as far as you can get from the confident, flag-waving Elgar of the Pomp and Circumstance marches or the religious mystic who wrote The Dream of Gerontius. One of this work’s major features is the skill by which the piano part is integrated with the four string players. The piano is always an important part of the texture, but it never dominates the discourse in a soloistic way.
This quintet was premiered in 1919. It is dedicated to famed music critic Ernest Newman. Elgar considered it one of his finest works.
The first movement begins tentatively, with the piano groping for a theme and the strings offering cryptic comments. Their series of nervous three-note interjections becomes an important factor as the movement proceeds. There are brief bursts of energy from time to time, but the gaiety seems forced. Another important element is a wry little dance tune in the strings over simple piano chords, a sort of Elgarian Valse Triste. The movement eventually seems to lose energy and ends as if exhausted, with the three-note questioning figure still persisting.
The slow movement is a lovely reflective elegy built around the gentle hymn-like theme heard at the start. Midway along there is an outcry of genuine grief, a kind of wailing motive. This is beautiful music, but meditative, inward-looking, peaceful.
The finale, after a short slow introduction, launches into a stormy allegro, with references to themes heard in the first movement. There is an episode of ghostly swaying dance supposedly suggested to Elgar by the trees on the estate where he was working on the piece, This totally serious and somewhat pessimistic work rises to a confident expression of power only at its very end – the first ray of sunshine in a basically dark musical landscape.
Program Notes by Robert Finn