A disciple of Wagner and Liszt, Strauss kept the embers of late Romanticism burning long into the 20th century. He died in 1949, leaving as his musical epitaph the voluptuously nostalgic Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra. In addition to the many operas and symphonic tone poems for which he is best known, Strauss produced a handful of appealing instrumental chamber works. All, with the exception of this string sextet from his final opera, Capriccio, date from before his 24th year.
Capriccio was first produced in Munich in 1942. With its lighthearted libretto, inspired by an 18th-century Italian comedy titled Prima la musica e poi le parole (First the Music and Then the Words), it is at heart an opera about opera. (Strauss called it a “conversation piece.”) In it, a composer and a poet vie for the favor of a countess, but ultimately the words-versus-music debate remains unresolved. The sextet is played by the first-desk strings before the curtain rises, as if to remind us that music came first in Strauss’s mind. Like many operatic overtures, it has also enjoyed an independent life in the concert hall.
From the opening bars, with their suave, swirling violin melody, we are immersed in the unmistakable sound world of late Strauss. The music is exuberantly tonal, richly upholstered, and colored by the warm, baritonal timbre of the violas and cellos. Strauss’s long-breathed phrases exude the ripe, reflective mellowness of old age. The sextet is divided into three sections, the outer ones sweetly lyrical, the middle one agitated, with dramatic tremolos and energetic solos for the first-chair players. The contrast between serenity and emotion sets the stage for the argument of the opera.
Janáček was in a nostalgic frame of mind in the summer of 1924. Max Brod’s newly published biography of the composer, for which Janáček had painstakingly supplied a great deal of material, had released a flood of bittersweet memories. Moreover, the celebration of his 70th birthday, on July 3, had inevitably focused international attention on Brno’s most celebrated citizen. That very day, Janáček quietly slipped away to Hukvaldy, his native village in the Moravian mountains. There, over the next three weeks, he composed a four-movement wind sextet that he described as “a sort of memoir of youth.”
Mládí (Youth) is scored for a standard wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and French horn), fortified by a bass clarinet. The music exhibits many of the traits of Janáček’s mature style, in particular the insistent repetition of short melodic motives and irregular, speech-like rhythmic patterns. According to the composer’s wife, the premiere was marred by a memorable mishap: One of the clarinet keys “got damaged somehow so that it didn’t give out a sound. And it was unfortunately just that note that was the most prominent in my husband’s piece.” The clarinetist tried to make the best of the situation, performing his part as if nothing was amiss while omitting the unplayable note. Janáček, however, flew into a rage. Rushing backstage after the concert, he chewed the hapless clarinetist out, then announced to the startled audience that the piece they had just enthusiastically applauded wasn’t his composition after all.
The autobiographical content in Mládí is largely implicit. According to an anonymous program note published in a local Brno newspaper, which may or may not have been sanctioned by the composer, the jaunty opening Allegro expresses Janáček’s reminiscences of “childhood in his native school in Hukvaldy,” while the wistful lyricism of the Andante sostenuto recalls “the sad scenes of parting from his mother at the station in Brno,” where he studied as a chorister in the Augustinian monastery. The third-movement march is based on a duet for piccolo and piano that Janáček had written several weeks earlier. That piece, in turn, evoked images of a military band he heard in Brno as a boy; its “wild music,” he wrote in 1923, “continues ringing in my ears to this day.” The Vivace’s strutting piccolo confidently prepares the way for the composer’s “courageous leap into life” as represented in the concluding Allegro animato.
Born in Polanka, Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Nelhybel immigrated to the United States by way of Switzerland after World War II and became an American citizen in 1962. Enormously prolific—his catalogue of published and unpublished works runs to some 600 titles—he made an especially noteworthy contribution to the concert-band repertoire. Although his dissonant, rhythmically assertive style has much in common with eastern European folk music, Nelhybel pointedly distanced himself from the music of his homeland. “My only closeness to any Czech composer would have to be Janáček, but not necessarily that my music sounds like his,” he once said. “I am a more Slavic composer, more of an Eastern composer, more of a Russian composer.”
In contrast to Nelhybel’s large-scale works for symphonic band, the 1965 Trio for Brass (trumpet, horn, and trombone) is intimate and conversational in tone. The music’s spare, linear texture highlights his characteristic emphasis on independent melodic lines, as well as his varied harmonic palette. In the words of composer Hubert Bird, Nelhybel’s “music has character and spirit, both on the surface, where communicative melodies abound, and inwardly, where many of the meaty, structural components provide substance. There are contrapuntal features of which Bach would have approved, colorful harmonies, rhythms and meters that dazzle us ... organized in formal structures that are the hallmark of masters.”
The formal structure of the Trio is decidedly idiosyncratic. The work opens with a light, pattering fast movement, with lively cross-accents and pungent harmonic clashes as the three instruments move in and out of synchrony. The Andante moderato is characterized by the brittle, metallic timbre of the muted brass; whimsical swooning figures alternate with mincing staccato notes. So far, so conventional. Instead of wrapping things up with a conventional finale, however, Nelhybel appends a miniature suite consisting of seven contrasting sections, ranging from a jaunty, happy-go-lucky march to a fractured waltz and a tender lament.
Best known as a keyboard virtuoso, Bach was also a highly proficient string player. He learned to play the violin as a child—probably under the tutelage of his father, a town piper in Eisenach—and, according to his composer-son Carl Philipp Emanuel, developed a “clear and penetrating” technique. This dual ability was surely a factor in Bach’s first major appointment as Kapellmeister, or director of music, to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen in 1717. The young composer felt lucky to be in the employ of “a gracious prince who both loved and knew music.” Thanks to Leopold’s interest and generosity, he had at his disposal a group of some 16 expert instrumentalists who inspired not only the “Brandenburg” Concertos but also Bach’s great unaccompanied works for violin and cello.
The six concerti grossi that Bach dedicated to Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg in 1721 (some of the music was written as early as 1713) range widely in both style and instrumentation. On the title page of the presentation copy, the composer identified them in French as “six concerts avec plusieurs instruments,” or “six concertos for several instruments.” Musicologists have long debated whether he was referring to the varied scoring of the collection as a whole—each work calls for a differently constituted ensemble—or indicating that the concertos were to be performed with one player to a part. Even today, when reduced forces are the norm, it’s not uncommon to hear the “Brandenburgs” played by larger orchestras. The basic requirement is that the contrast between soloists and full ensemble, the defining feature of the Baroque concerto grosso, be clearly maintained.
Scored for two horns, three oboes, bassoon, violino piccolo (a small, high-pitched member of the violin family), strings, and continuo, the First “Brandenburg” is couched in the warm, “pastoral” key of F major. Much of the concerto has an invigoratingly outdoorsy feel; indeed, it opens with a punchy horn fanfare that serves as the germ of the first movement’s bouncy triadic theme. (Scholars have linked this fanfare to one of the “greeting calls” documented in contemporary hunting-horn treatises.) Bach abruptly switches gears in the plangent Adagio, a richly expressive arioso in D minor for solo oboe and violino piccolo. After another motoric Allegro, built on a pattern of repeated notes, Bach emends the conventional tripartite concerto format by adding a dance-based fourth movement that combines a graceful minuet with a lumpy polonaise, each built around a contrasting Trio midsection.
—Harry Haskell