Posted on by tjphilbrick

American Composers #5 – Amy Beach

Hello all,

This week’s music, continuing in our series on the music of great American composers, is the second movement of Amy Beach’s piano quintet in F-sharp minor, performed by a group of music performance fellows at the Tanglewood Music Center in Tanglewood, Massachusetts.  

Amy Beach was born in Henniker, New Hampshire in 1867. Unlike most composers, she was almost entirely self-taught. She came to fame in a crop of American composers that included George Chadwick, Arthur Foote, and the legendary Edward MacDowell, whose name is associated with the MacDowell Artist Colony (also in my beautiful home state of New Hampshire :).

Like most American composers of this era, Beach’s writing is quintessentially Romantic, with early strains of late romantic and even pseudo-harmonic characteristics. Her piano quintet is a perfect example of this. In the second movement, which you will hear today, she blends soaring piano solos with delicate textures in the strings, punctuated by what can only be described as Charles Ives-esque harmonic undertones.

Listen for the absolutely stunning return of the cello solo at 6:40. In my opinion, this is one of the most beautiful melodies ever written by an American composer!

Enjoy,

T

Posted on by tjphilbrick

Beach Quintet

Hello all,

This week’s music is the second movement of Amy Beach’s piano quintet in F-sharp minor, performed by a group of music performance fellows at the Tanglewood Music Center in Tanglewood, Massachusetts. (Fun fact: I played Brahms’ piano quintet with the first violinist in this ensemble at the Apple Hill Chamber Music Festival in 2009).  

Amy Beach was born in Henniker, New Hampshire in 1867. Unlike most composers, she was almost entirely self-taught. She came to fame in a crop of American composers that included George Chadwick, Arthur Foote, and the legendary Edward MacDowell, whose name is associated with the MacDowell Artist Colony (also in my beautiful home state of New Hampshire :).

Like most American composers of this era, Beach’s writing is quintessentially Romantic, with early strains of late romantic and even pseudo-harmonic characteristics. Her piano quintet is a perfect example of this. In the second movement, which you will hear today, she blends soaring piano solos with delicate textures in the strings, punctuated by what can only be described as Charles Ives-esque harmonic undertones.

Listen for the absolutely stunning return of the cello solo at 6:40. In my opinion, this is one of the most beautiful melodies ever written by an American composer!

Enjoy,

T

Posted on by tjphilbrick

Sublime Schubert

Hello all,

Our music for this week is the string quintet in C Major by Franz Schubert.

Schubert completed this quintet two weeks before his death in 1828. Rather than write a string quartet, however, he added a cello part and produced a quintet that sounds almost symphonic in its proportions. Listen for the interactions between the two cello parts; Schubert sometimes treats them as a pair of soloists, with violin and viola playing the part of “orchestra accompaniment.”

In writing for this unique mixture of instruments (almost every chamber music composition of his time was for a string quartet, with only one cello), Schubert broke open a new realm of possibilities for composers to experiment with. Before too long, Mendelssohn (https://thisweeksmusic.com/2021/04/30/octet-2-mendelssohn/) and Enescu (https://thisweeksmusic.com/2021/05/08/octet-3-enescu/) had written string octets, and later American composers (like Samuel Barber and Amy Beach) would combine strings, winds, brass, and vocals into even more unconventional ensembles. In short, Schubert’s cello quintet-his last composition before he died-was the start of an era.

Enjoy!

Posted on by tjphilbrick

Top 25 #9 – The Trout

Hello all,

This week’s music continues our series on the Top 25 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music. We will hear the Piano Quintet in A Major by Franz Schubert, popularly known as the “Trout” quintet. It is performed by the principal string members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (the first chair members of each string section – violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley, violist Mate Szucs, cellist Bruno Delepelaire, and double bassist Matthew McDonald) with Yannick Rafalimanana on piano.

The Trout Quintet is one of the most widely performed pieces of chamber music in all of classical music. Along with the Mendelssohn octet and a few other mainstays, it is featured at nearly every chamber music festival in the world.

Schubert wrote the Trout Quintet while on vacation in the Austrian alps. The fact that he was overwhelmed by the “inconceivable” beauty of the mountains is clearly evident in the joyous, even rapturous lyricism of the piece. Albert Einstein, himself an amateur violinist who loved chamber music, wrote that “we cannot help but love” the Trout Quintet. It is Schubert at his carefree best, with no hint of the somber colors that he began to explore after contracting syphilis in his later years.

It is important to note that this is chamber music. In other words, the Trout Quintet was not meant to be performed in a concert hall. It was meant to be performed in a living room or some other intimate setting for friends and family. This has significant implications not just for how the quintet is to be performed but also how it is to be heard.  

A few comments on each of the four movements:

  • The first movement is unforgettable. Listen for the main theme at 1:53.
  • The second movement has two parts – see if you can tell them apart.
  • The third movement, a Scherzo, turns the second movement’s two parts on their head, reverses their order, and doubles their speed.
  • The fourth movement is the most important. It is a set of variations on the tune of Die Forelle, or in German, “The Trout.” Die Forelle was a short song written by Schubert in 1817 for soprano and piano. He created this song by setting to music the text of a poem by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart about a trout being caught by a fisherman.
  • The Quintet finishes with an Allegro that revisits the Die Forelle theme a few times.

Enjoy!

T