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RECITAL 1989--PROGRAM NOTES
Walter Piston: Sonata for Flute and Piano
Greg Tucker: Idle Conversation for two flutes
Franz Schubert: Introduction and Variations on Ihr Blümlein alle
- Intermission -
Jean-Marie Leclair: Sonata in G major for flute and continuo
George Frideric Handel: Music for the Royal Fireworks
in an 18th-century arrangement for flute and keyboard
This evening's program opens with works by two Boston composers. Walter Piston studied at Harvard University and, like so many Americans of his generation, he continued his education in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. He taught at Harvard University for over thirty years and enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which gave the first performances of eleven of his works. His Sonata for Flute and Piano, dedicated to the Boston Symphony's first flutist at the time, Georges Laurent, demonstrates the French virtues of clarity and balance of form and, particularly in the effervescent third movement, shows the influence of the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Roussel.
Greg Tucker studied composition with Robert Stern at the University of Massachusetts and with Charles Fussell at Boston University. He is currently Audio Engineer and Technical Director for the Experimental Media Facility at the M.I.T. Media Laboratory. Leone Buyse and I heard and relished a performance of Idle Conversation at the National Flute Association Convention in 1987, and are performing it this evening for the first time. It is in one movement of about seven minutes' duration. Greg has provided the following note: "While it is not always clear to me that the inflections and momentum of human conversation can be prevailed upon to provide a useful musical structure, I find myself powerfully drawn to it anyway. Idle Conversation is an attempt to rely on my experience of the ebb and flow of conversation as the basis for a piece of music. As such it is generalized to an extent, at times a reflection on conversation as much as a model of any particular one. The attractiveness of the idea comes, I think, from its great value as a human activity--it fills daily life with a kind of interpersonal contact that is enjoyable if not indispensable."
In Trock'ne Blumen, the eighteenth of the twenty songs in Schubert's cycle Die Schöne Müllerin (The Fair Miller-maid), the young miller has finally recognized the futility of his love for his boss' daughter. The song opens in E minor with his melancholy contemplation of the withered flowers (trockene Blumen ) she had once given him. His conviction that she will yet recognize his love--though he be dead in the meantime--carries the music to the brightness of the major mode. The Introduction and Variations, composed by Schubert for his flutist friend Ferdinand Bogner, follow this pattern, progressing from the somber mood of the introduction to the buoyancy and affirmation of the last variations and coda. Bogner must have been a formidable flutist--both flute and piano have ample opportunity for an ostentatious display of virtuosity untypical of Schubert.
Jean-Marie Leclair was a renowned violinist who did much to expand the expressive and technical resources of his instrument; he is remembered as the founder of the French school of violin playing. Forty-eight sonatas published in four collections form the bulk of his instrumental output; nine of these he specified as being playable also on the flute. The G-major sonata demonstrates Leclair's accomplishment at adapting to French Style the Italian sonata form inherited from Corelli. Particularly in the slow movements, irregular but balanced phrase lengths, noble expression, and rich ornamentation combine to exemplify le bon goût.
The idea of hearing "a Grand Overture of warlike instruments composed by Mr. Handel" in an arrangement for flute and continuo may strike the modern listener as peculiar. But the flute was enormously popular in eighteenth-century England--arranging popular instrumental and vocal works to satisfy the legion of dedicated amateurs of the instrument was a lucrative industry for composers and publishers. The house of Walsh, Handel's publisher in London, lost no time in cashing in on the success of his Music for the Royal Fireworks; Handel himself, an inveterate re-orchestrator and recycler of his own music, may have had a hand in the making of this arrangement. But it is testimony to the quality of this evergreen music that it does not depend on the grand sonority of massed trumpets, drums, reeds and strings, but can speak just as eloquently with a lighter voice.
--Fenwick Smith
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