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An Afternoon of Intimate Brilliance
Our Sunday Matinees at Naz Series opens with a journey through wit, charm, and radiant beauty. In the warm acoustics of the intimate Beston Hall, the RPO invites you to step closer to the music.
We begin with the shimmering playfulness of Bohuslav Martinů’s Toccata, a vibrant burst of color and rhythm. Then, two of our own dazzling principals step into the spotlight for Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364—a masterwork of elegance and heartfelt dialogue between violin and viola. Finally, Francis Poulenc’s sparkling Sinfonietta closes the afternoon with Parisian charm, a graceful wink to tradition wrapped in irresistible melody.
Program Notes:
Bohuslav Martinů (December 8, 1890 – August 28, 1959)
Toccata
As a young Czech composer at the Prague Conservatory, Martinů struggled to fall in line with rigid conservatory teaching and expectations and was booted out for “incorrigible negligence.” Instead of going to class, he was out on the town, gaining a real-world education by hearing the latest musical developments all over Prague. He was especially drawn to works like Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, which premiered in Prague in 1908. Martinů followed his piqued ears all the way to Paris and its creative milieu in the 1920s, before leaving Europe for the United States during World War II because his music was banned by the Nazis. He developed a wholly unique compositional voice, a composite of impressionism, jazz, and modernist currents, but always with tonal foundations.
For such a rebellious composer prone to following his whims, he was curiously drawn to the highly structured forms of earlier music. A favorite form was the Baroque concerto grosso, a type of concerto in which a group of soloists and an orchestra trade spotlights. With the concerto grosso as an imaginative jumping off point, the Toccata was written to feature a chamber orchestra and pianist in creative dialogues and integrations. The first movement references the Baroque keyboard toccata, which means “to touch.” The piano provides the work’s driving rhythmic force, opening with low-register oscillations that retain a clear lineage to Bach’s toccatas. The rhythmic motoring and anxiety-driven atmosphere is contrasted a few times with a brighter, expansive theme that offers an antidote to the tension. But the work’s motoring oscillations plug along all the way to the movement’s conclusion.
THE NEW YORKER: Bohuslav Martinů Is One of Music’s Great Chameleons
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (January 27, 1756 – December 5, 1791)
Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat for violin and viola, K. 364
What do you get when you combine a concerto and a symphony? The answer is a sinfonia concertante, a genre of music that evolved from the Baroque concerto grosso and enjoyed brief popularity during the Classical era. Like the concerto grosso, sinfonia concertantes feature groups of soloists. Unlike the concerto grosso, where the soloists and orchestra are in a balanced back-and-forth dialogue, the soloists are given top billing with more time to explore supplementary themes. Yet the orchestra’s role remains significant. Is it different than a concerto for multiple instruments or the 19th century double concerto? Not much so, but composers employed the term with frequency for a short time.
Mozart wrote his Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola right before he was kicked out of the court in Salzburg, in part for not sticking to court-ordered compositions. So, if this work sounds especially playful, that’s because Mozart was having a grand time avoiding his duties while writing it. His travels beyond Salzburg whetted his appetite for writing for new instrumental combinations. In this sinfonia concertante, Mozart appears to be bursting with thematic material, which gives the solo violin and viola plenty to do, both solo and in tandem, and the orchestra an essential role to play. The first movement is a lively Allegro maestoso. The second movement, an extended Andante, is one of Mozart’s rare minor slow movements and may have been written as an expression of grief following the loss of his mother. The final movement is especially droll and operatic in its jesting themes.
Francis Poulenc (January 7, 1899 – January 30, 1963)
Sinfonietta
Poulenc is a French composer who made his mark during the first half of the 20th century and is often associated with his fellow French composer colleagues, who are collectively known as Les Six. Poulenc and his friend Darius Milhaud are among the best known, masterfully building upon the impressionistic techniques of Debussy and Ravel with French sarcasm and the jazzy sounds that swirled around Paris in the 1920s. They wrote highly stylistic music.
In his chamber music output – music for smaller arrangements of instruments – Poulenc was a master of the sonata genre, a duo group comprising a solo instrument with piano accompaniment. He wrote several sonatas for wind instruments that remain mainstays of the repertoire. He attempted a string quartet several times over the years, but one never materialized. Finally, in 1946, at the age of 47, he finished one and asked the Calvet Quartet, a French quartet with international renown, for a private read-through. After the reading, Poulenc wrote to Milhaud, “I’ve destroyed my Quartet and thrown it in the gutter in the place Pereire. I’d made a total mistake and it was bad, bad, bad despite a certain musicality.” He later reflected on its problems, writing, “Right from the opening bars I was saying to myself: ‘Whatever else, that’d be better on an oboe, that needs a horn, there it should be a clarinet.'” Fortunately, he saved several of its tunes for an orchestral sinfonietta, a small-scale symphony with doubled woodwinds and French horns. The sinfonietta was commissioned by the BBC and premiered in London on October 24, 1948. Having recently revised his ballet, Les biches (1924), the sinfonietta seems influenced by the ballet’s character and maintains a balletic feel. In a self-depreciating remark, Poulenc later criticized his works at the time for attempting to be too youthful, which he attributed to revisiting the ballet he had written in his 20s.
The first movement, Allegro con fuoco, opens stealthily with a quick boom followed by animated flutters and accented lifts. The movement features Poulenc’s characteristic writing for winds and horn, passing the motives around generously. A second theme, however, is more sustained and brings in jazzier harmonies and cinematic themes. Harp glissandos give the movement a golden shimmer. The second movement is a peppy rollick for the orchestra, with quick chromatic themes contrasted with lyric ones that soar over the action. It’s the movmement most associated with Les Biches. The third movement, Andante cantabile, led by the clarinet, is pastoral, with resonances of Brahms. The final movement, the Finale, is a playful romp dripping in Poulenc’s circus-like sarcasm.
Program notes by Anna Reguero, PhD, a Rochester-based scholar and arts writer