Mendelssohn, Thuille, Bridge, Moore
The last of this summer’s Festival Mozaic chamber concerts on Friday, July 25, was again performed in the Harold J. Miossi Performing Arts Center at Cuesta College.
In contrast to the Festival’s third chamber concert on Wednesday, the timeframe for this program was more constrained, with compositions spanning 122 years of musical creativity vs. the 384 years of Wednesday’s performance. Three of the four pieces were written just less than 80 years apart. Another common link among the works in this concert, as pointed out by Alysson McLamore in her pre-concert lecture, was each composer’s positive parental influence—not a common theme in many composers’ lives. Revisions also played a part.
The earliest piece was Felix Mendelssohn’s “Viola Quintet No. 2 in B-flat Major” completed in 1845. Being a musical child prodigy born into a loving, wealthy family meant his career path was less troubled than most of his contemporaries. His mother began teaching him piano at age six. His parents—known for their in-home salons—hired an orchestra for such occasions that often performed his works and helped the young Felix to develop his compositional ideas. This quintet displays Mendelssohn’s mastery of the burgeoning emotionalism of the early Romantic era in music (roughly 1800-1910).
This Festival string quintet, violinists Celeste Golden Andrews and Eunice Kim, violists Jenni Seo and Jessica Chang, and cellist Alexander Hersh, gave a masterful performance of the work. The third movement—Adagio e lento—was especially delicately executed, fading into almost nothing at the end.
Not quite 40 years after Mendelssohn’s second viola quintet was posthumously premiered, Austrian-born composer Ludwig Thuille completed his “Sextet for Piano and Wind Quintet in B-flat Major.”
McLamore explained that Thuille, as if the hero of a novel by Charles Dickens, was orphaned at age 11 but was soon fostered by a wealthy widow who was a friend of the parents of composer Richard Strauss. Thuille and Strauss became good friends, and Strauss became a major influence on Thuille’s musical development. One of the results of this camaraderie was the Sextet. It is an exceptionally poignant example of post-Wagnerian romanticism with soaring melodies over lush accompaniment.
Since both Strauss and his father, Franz, were horn players, it’s no mystery that the horn is the most prominent instrument in this composition. It was beautifully rendered by Festival Mozaic hornist Jaclyn Rainey. She and the rest of the ensemble—Marcia McHugh on flute, Xiaodi Liu on oboe, Gregory Raden on clarinet, Fei Xie on bassoon, and Marta Aznavoorian on piano—were masterful in their sensitive and well-honed treatment of this sublime composition.
To say that Frank Bridge’s parental support as a musician was positive would be rather ironic. His father—a violinist and conductor—was apparently an extreme pedant as a teacher. This did help Bridge to succeed as an all-around performer, conductor and composer. His “Piano Quintet in D-minor” was written at a time of great geopolitical and artistic upheaval. World War I was on the horizon, and composers in the West—like Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinsky—were pushing forward in the struggle to throw off the shackles of Romanticism by exploring exotic, non-diatonic scales, extended instrument performance techniques and the music of indigenous cultures.
Bridge’s quintet seems to skirt around these influences, as if circling a forest pool of water, trying to decide if it’s warm enough to swim in. It is, nonetheless, a well-formed chamber work that was finely executed by Festival violinists Scott Yoo and Claire Bourg, violist Hannah Nicholas, cellist Robert deMaine and pianist John Novacek.
The newest work in the evening’s concert was written by Dorothy Rudd Moore in 1967. She and both of her parents were music lovers and her mother gave her voice lessons while Dorothy was still young. She went on to learn to play the piano and clarinet. She received a bachelor’s degree in composition from Howard University.
Her atonal “Three Works for Violin and Piano” are quite short and intense and remind me of the works of Anton Webern. Violinist Stephen Copes and pianist Susan Grace gave the work an outstanding performance.
One thing about this concert I found rather surprising. The two most recent works, by Bridge and Moore, did not display any contemporary, so-called extended, techniques that were coming into more common use, especially in the 1960s and later. Even Thuille’s comrade, Richard Strauss, used effects such as flutter-tonguing wind instruments, scratch-bowing and col legno (with the wood of the bow) on strings. Otherwise, another night of wonderful music.