Notes by Philip Carlsen

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This concert begins and ends with wind quintet transcriptions of organ pieces from the eighteenth century. The six other pieces on the program, from roughly the last hundred years, were all written specifically for winds. In a sense, all these works (with the exception of Debussy’s “Syrinx”) grow out of a long tradition of wind ensemble music, going back to a time when royal courts would maintain small bands of musicians to provide entertainment for dinners, informal concerts, hunting parties, and other sorts of social gatherings. These bands, called “Harmonie,” typically included two each of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons. By the early nineteenth century, a smaller version of the Harmonie ensemble with flute added, the wind quintet, had established itself as a significant new chamber music genre, spearheaded especially through the 25 quintets of Beethoven’s contemporary Anton Reicha. Two hundred years later, the wind quintet is still going strong, and its repertoire continues to expand.

The first piece on the concert is by Antonio Vivaldi by way of Johann Sebastian Bach. Vivaldi’s collection of twelve violin concertos, L’estro Armonico, was published originally in Amsterdam in 1711, and a copy of that collection eventually found its way to Johann Sebastian Bach in Weimar. In his desire to play these works, and eventually to emulate some of their lessons in his own instrumental writing, Bach transcribed several of them for keyboard with strings. Thus, Vivaldi’s Concerto in A minor for two violins and orchestra became Bach’s Concerto No. 2 in A minor for organ. There have been countless further transcriptions of the Bach over the years, including around 1993 when the great Israeli bassoonist Mordechai Rechtmann made his version for wind quintet—the one we hear on today’s concert. The piece is in three movements, fast-slow-fast. It displays many of the hallmarks of Vivaldi’s style: quick alternations of material between instruments, driving rhythms in the fast movements, yearning melodies in the slow one.

The presence of brand new music on this program, Freya Waley-Cohen’s Small Plinths, speaks to the ongoing vitality of the wind quintet, a genre with multiple professional ensembles at work today, many of them commissioning new work from young composers. Waley-Cohen, although not yet forty, is already making her mark on the British music scene as co-director of the innovative performance series Listenpony, and with a growing catalog of striking vocal, chamber, and orchestral compositions, including her recent opera Witch. Regarding Small Plinths, she describes a dinner she attended once where she heard about “a famous sculptor who had a collection of pebbles, fir cones and other small natural objects placed on tiny plinths around his studio,” a “tiny personal exhibition” that recalled her mother’s own collections of feathers and shells. She continues: “Writing the wind quintet, the image of the different textures of these small natural objects being elevated on plinths seemed to connect to the way I was writing the piece. The wind quintet is a naturally colourful ensemble, with five very different instruments, each completely individual in sound, and yet each with an incredible ability to blend together. Various textures and combinations of colours from within the ensemble, each shaped in its own natural curve, emerged as I was writing, and started to jostle up against each other. This jostling is what propels the momentum of the piece, which is filled and shaped by these small musical objects, until larger forms begin to emerge.”

Sir James MacMillan grew up the son of a carpenter in the small town of Cumnock, Scotland, about forty miles south of Glasgow. He has since become, at age 67, one of Britain’s leading composers, but is still closely connected to his working class roots and Catholic upbringing, regularly contributing new tunes for his church congregation to sing at services, and steeping his concert work in spirituality and social concerns. His Untold is based on an Irish folk tune, “For Ireland, I’d not tell her name.” It tells the story of a young man in love with the wife of his brother, who has written a beautiful song about her but refuses all entreaties to identify her. MacMillan suggests this story with purely musical means, beginning with just the first two notes of the original tune, repeating them over and over as trills, almost as if they’ve gotten stuck in the poet’s throat. Then the third note gets added, but not much more than that. There are many brief pauses—thoughts left unspoken—in this tender ballad of a piece.

Jim Parker’s Mississippi Five is an affectionate tribute to early New Orleans jazz. Parker calls attention to three great figures in his movement titles: King Oliver, the great early cornet player and bandleader who gave Louis Armstrong his start in his Creole Jazz Band; Johnny Dodds, a pioneer of New Orleans clarinet playing; and Bessie Smith, the “Empress of the Blues,” whose songs brought solace to so many in the days of Jim Crow. “River Queen” refers to the paddlewheel steamboats that plied the river, and you can hear their horns and the bustle of commerce in Parker’s musical depiction. He draws on blues chord changes throughout these pieces. He dresses the wind quintet players in the garb of street bands, whether trudging along in a traditional New Orleans funeral or cutting up with imitations of animal sounds, as we hear in the Jelly Roll Morton-inspired last movement, “Les Animaux.”

Claude Debussy’s incalculable contributions to music include two landmarks for flute—the Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun” from 1894, a sultry orchestral work featuring that instrument as the principal soloist, and the short piece for flute alone called Syrinx, written about twenty years later. Both pieces derive from the myth of Pan and Syrinx, as retold by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, and, more pertinent for Debussy, in the poem by his friend Stéphane Mallarmé called “L’Après-midi d’un faune.” Pan lusts after the wood nymph Syrinx, she escapes by turning herself into a reed, whereupon Pan bundles her into a set of pan pipes on which he can play while whiling away the lazy afternoons. Mallarmé imagines the lyrics for Pan’s song: “Syrinx, sly elusive instrument, go try / To bloom again beside the pools where you await me!”

As a suite of several short, lighthearted movements, Erwin Schulhoff’s Divertissement from 1927 perfectly evokes the spirit of the original eighteenth-century Harmonie ensembles and the music written for them, such as Mozart’s divertimentos. Not surprisingly, Schulhoff is more dissonant than Mozart. But his love of counterpoint and his playfulness come through strongly. He loved jazz, played it well, and often incorporated it into his own compositions, most obviously here in the “Charleston” movement.

Amy Beach displayed prodigious musical skills at a very early age and developed quickly as a pianist and composer. At age 17 in 1885, she made her debut with the Boston Symphony, performing Chopin’s F minor piano concerto. With the premiere of her “Gaelic” Symphony by the BSO in 1896, she became the first American woman to have a symphonic work performed by a major orchestra. Her style was strongly influenced by the music of Brahms and Dvorak, as well as her deep study of Bach. In her later years, she spent time each summer at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. It was there that she composed her Pastorale, a piece that reflects the tranquility of the woods and fields of that famed artists’ retreat.

One of the technological marvels of the eighteenth century was the mechanical clockwork organ (Orgelwalze), whose elaborate geared mechanism turned a barrel studded with pins that controlled which pipes would be played at any moment. Mozart was commissioned to write several pieces for such a device, among which was his Fantasia in F minor. Organists play this piece often—with their own hands and feet! It has also been transcribed for many other instruments and ensembles, including, of course, the wind quintet, as in the version on this concert by the British composer Julian Philips. The Fantasia’s first part begins with a dramatic fanfare, then embarks on a fugue before the music of the fanfare returns. The second part is lyrical and meditative, with increasing elaborations of its initial tune, ending with a cadenza and trill that leads without break into a return of the opening material, featuring a richly ornamented version of the fugue.

Academy of St Martin in the Fields Wind Ensemble performs Tuesday, April 21 7 PM at Merrill Auditorium in Portland.