Chamber music matinée 8

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1887, Heitor Villa-Lobos is considered the father of Brazilian music. Depending on how you count them, he wrote between 800 and 2000 works, of which the large cycles became the best known: his “Brazilian Bachiana” (Bachianas Brasileiras Nos. 1 to 9) on the one hand, and Choros Nos. 1 to 14, his homage to the street music of his home city of Rio, on the other. He also wrote several operas and ballets, a dozen symphonies, string quartets and other chamber music. Works for wind instruments play a particularly important role. The Fantasie aconcertante, composed in 1953, is one of Villa-Lobos’ late works. The three movements exemplify the three basic characters of his music: neo-baroque motorism in the introductory Allegro non troppo, mystical calm in the Lento middle movement and South American temperament in the concluding Allegro impetuoso. The two wind players are required to display a high degree of flexibility.

Mikhail Glinka, often referred to as the “father of Russian music”, wrote very little chamber music. In Milan, he became friends with the great Vincenzo Bellini. In the Trio pathétique, the clarinet cantilenas in the slow movement in particular bear witness to the impression that Bellini’s divine melodies left on him. Otherwise, this trio in D minor goes beyond the pathos of Italian opera. The two wind players from the orchestra of La Scala in Milan, who played the premiere together with the composer at the piano in the fall of 1833, are said to have exclaimed: “Ma questa è disperazione! “ (What despair!). The reason for the musical gloom lay in a physical and mental breakdown that Glinka had suffered in Italy in 1832. The trio can be understood as a kind of self-therapy.

Only rarely did Beethoven pay homage to the popular music of his time, and when – as in the B flat major Trio op. 11 – he even chose a popular song as the theme for his variations, there was a particular reason for this. The final theme of the trio was written by Joseph Weigl, the most popular Viennese opera composer at the time. Franz Schubert still suffered from the success of his operas, and Beethoven is said to have later regretted having ennobled a Weigl theme with his variations, so to speak. The trio “Pria ch’io l’impegno” from Weigl’s opera “L’amor marinaro” was in everyone’s ears in Vienna around 1800. Nevertheless, Beethoven would certainly have resisted the appeal of the melody if the clarinettist for whom he wrote the trio (probably Joseph Beer) had not expressly asked him to write variations on it. The most important movement of the trio, however, is the first. The short Adagio, probably only a kind of transition to the finale, can be counted among the young Beethoven’s most beautiful ideas thanks to its expressive melody. And it is hard to resist the charm of the popular tune in the finale – a real earworm.