PROGRAM NOTES
Looking ahead to A Far Cry’s season finale Sunset, Sunrise beckons an early spring with Boccherini’s birdsong-filled “Aviary” Quintet and Caroline Shaw’s garden-inspired Plan & Elevation for string quartet. With movement titles such as “The Herbaceous Border” and “The Orangery,” Shaw’s work invites listeners on an energizing early morning stroll. Sunrise also seeks to shed new light on a little-known masterpiece, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Clarinet Quintet, a quintessential example of the form.
Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805)
STRING QUINTET IN D MAJOR, OP. 11, NO. 6, G. 276, “L’UCCELLIERA
Occasionally, a composer becomes inextricably linked with one particular piece of music. For Boccherini it is the Minuet from his String Quintet in E. This is just one movement amongst thousands written by arguably one of the most talented virtuoso cellists of the 18th century. Boccherini’s chamber music alone totals upward of 200 works, and if Haydn is the “Father” of the string quartet, Boccherini fills that role for the string quintet.
He was born into an immensely talented family in Lucca, Italy, where his father was a double bassist. All the Boccherini siblings excelled in the arts and found professional work in various disciplines—music, dance, opera— working alongside some of the most prominent figures of their time, including Gluck and Salieri. Boccherini initially made his career as a performer, giving his first public concert at the age of thirteen. His obituary recalled his “incomparable sonority” and the “expressive singing tone of his instrument,” and Thomas Twinings, grandson of the tea merchant, once declared: “Haydn and Boccherini spoil for me all other fiddle music.”
By Boccherini’s late teenage years, he had already written a substantial amount of trios, quartets, and duos. He studied briefly in Rome, and worked in Vienna, Genoa, and Paris—often alongside his father. In November 1770, he was appointed as “compositore e viruoso di camera” for Don Luis, brother of King Charles III of Spain, and would remain in Madrid for the rest of his life. His career focus soon shifted from cellist to composer, and the overlap of those two roles is particularly evident in the first two sets of his string quintets, Opp. 10 and 11, written in 1771. Both of these collections feature two cellos—a rare configuration at the time—so that Boccherini himself could sit in and perform with the group. He also took this opportunity to elevate the cello from little more than a steady bassline and integrate it into the overall counterpoint of voices, making it a more equal contributor.
There is a long history of mimesis in music where the sounds of the manmade or natural world are recreated on instruments. The String Quintet in D is nicknamed “L’Uccelliera,” or aviary, for the array of birdsong heard in the second and fifth movements.
Caroline Shaw (b. 1982)
PLAN & ELEVATION
In 2013, North Carolina native Caroline Shaw became the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in recognition of her work, Partita for 8 Voices. She studied violin at Rice University and Yale, and composition at Princeton. As a vocalist, she is a member of the Grammy Award winning ensemble, Room Full of Teeth. Between 2014-2015, Shaw was the inaugural Early-Career Musician in Residence at Dumbarton Oaks, the historic estate in Washington, D.C. once owned by the diplomat Robert Woods Bliss, and his wife, arts patron Mildred Bliss. The house, which once played host to meetings between international delegates that blossomed into the United Nations, was given to Harvard University and functions as a research and cultural hub.
Shaw’s program note for Plan & Elevation follows.
I have always loved drawing the architecture around me when traveling, and some of my favorite lessons in musical composition have occurred by chance in my drawing practice over the years. While writing a string quartet to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, I returned to these essential ideas of space and proportion — to the challenges of trying to represent them on paper. The title, Plan & Elevation, refers to two standard ways of representing architecture — essentially an orthographic, or “bird’s eye,” perspective (“plan”), and a side view which features more ornamental detail (“elevation”). This binary is also a gentle metaphor for one’s path in any endeavor — often the actual journey and results are quite different (and perhaps more elevated) than the original plan.
I was fortunate to have been the inaugural music fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 2014-15. Plan & Elevation examines different parts of the estate’s beautiful grounds and my personal experience in those particular spaces. Each movement is based on a simple ground bass line which supports a different musical concept or character. “The Ellipse” considers the notion of infinite repetition (I won’t deny a tiny Kierkegaard influence here). One can walk around and around the stone path, beneath the trimmed hornbeams, as I often did as a way to clear my mind while writing. The second movement, “The Cutting Garden,” is a fun fragmentation of various string quartets (primarily Ravel, Mozart K. 387, and my own Entr’acte, Valencia, and Punctum), referencing the variety of flowers grown there before they meet their inevitable end as cuttings for display. “The Herbaceous Border” is spare and strict at first, like the cold geometry of French formal gardens with their clear orthogonals (when viewed from the highest point), before building to the opposite of order: chaos. The fourth movement, “The Orangery,” evokes the slim, fractured shadows in that room as the light tries to peek through the leaves of the aging fig vine. We end with my favorite spot in the garden, “The Beech Tree.” It is strong, simple, ancient, elegant, and quiet; it needs no introduction.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)
CLARINET QUINTET IN F-SHARP MINOR, OP. 10
On September 2, 1912, The Times in London ran the obituary for Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. It read, in part: “We regret to announce that Mr. Coleridge-Taylor, the composer, died yesterday…he left his home Wednesday afternoon, intending to visit the Crystal Palace, but was taken ill near West Croydon Railway Station and fell. Recovering sufficiently to return home by tram, he at once went to bed and a doctor who was called stated that he was suffering from influenza. Pneumonia supervened and Mr. Coleridge-Taylor died at 6 o’clock last evening. The sudden death of Mr. Coleridge-Taylor at the age of 37 will be felt as a serious loss by all who are interested in musical matters.”
The son of an African doctor and an Englishwoman, Coleridge-Taylor showed an early talent for music as both a violinist and composer. His first work was published when he was only 16 years old, and his first symphony was written four years later at age 20. He went on to study at the Royal College of Music with renowned professor Charles Villiers Stanford, alongside his contemporaries and classmates Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst (whom Coleridge-Taylor had beat out for a scholarship).
Success came swiftly for Coleridge-Taylor in the days immediately following his graduation. In 1898 he was commissioned by the Three Choirs Festival upon the recommendation of Edward Elgar, the result of which was the secular cantata, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, based on the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It became a hit on the scale of Handel’s Messiah. Multiple trips to the United States soon followed in 1904, 1906, and 1910, during which he was invited to visit President Roosevelt at the White House and embarked on multi-city tours across the United States conducting his own works and performing alongside African American musicians and composers, including Harry Thacker Burleigh. Upon returning to England, Coleridge-Taylor enjoyed a thriving career as a conductor, and teacher, and wrote hundreds of works before his untimely death.
A handful of chamber works come from Coleridge-Taylor’s teenage years and early 20s, including the Clarinet Quintet of 1895. Stanford, his teacher, was so impressed that he took the opportunity to show the piece to violinist Joseph Joachim, who reportedly praised the work and may have performed it with Richard Mühlfeld, the clarinetist who had inspired Brahms to write his famed clarinet quintet just four years prior.
Kathryn J Allwine Bacasmot is a pianist/harpsichordist, musicologist, music and cultural critic, and freelance writer. A graduate of New England Conservatory, she writes program annotations for ensembles nationwide.
