Wednesday October 7, 2009

Colorado Music Festival Chamber Players (Calin Lupanu, Joseph Meyer, Rebecca Corruccini, Monica Boboc, violins; Shannon Williams, Matthew Dane, violas; Bjorn Ranheim, Greg Sauer, cellos)
Felix Mendelssohn: Octet in E flat, Op.20 33:34 (7/22/08)
Also, Charley talks with Colorado Chamber Players artistic director Barbara Hamilton-Primus about this weekend's concerts.
Maria Castelnuovo-Tedesco: "Allegro, vivo e schietto" (1st movement) from Guitar Quintet, Op.143
Colorado Chamber Players (Masakazu Ito, guitar; Jerilyn Jorgensen, Paul Primus, violins; Barbara Hamilton-Primus, viola; Katharine Knight, cello)



KVOD Performance Studio 9/30/09 MS
Isaias Savio: Little Music Box
Masakazu Ito, guitar
Muse 724 Track 14 2:06
And, Charley talks with Cherry Creek Chorale conductor Brian Leatherman about this weekend's concerts.


Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847): Octet in E flat major, Opus 20
I. Allegro moderato ma con fuoco
II. Andante
III. Scherzo: Allegro leggerissimo
IV. Presto

Late in life, Mendelssohn confessed that the Octet was “my favorite of all my compositions,” and added, “I had a most wonderful time in the writing of it!” He was just sixteen years old when he finished it on October 10, 1825. A week later he presented it to his violin teacher Eduard Rietz on his twenty-third birthday.
The Octet was first played at one of the Mendelssohn family’s regular Sunday afternoon musicales. Felix’s composition teacher Carl Zelter wrote enthusiastically to Goethe of “an octet for eight obbligato instruments, which is full of life.” His sister Fanny loved the piece. “Everything’s new and strange and at the same time most insinuating and pleasing,” she said. “One feels so near the world of spirits, carried away in the air, half inclined to snatch up a broomstick and follow the aerial procession. At the end the first violin takes a flight with a feather-like lightness--and all has vanished.”
Mendelssohn made it very clear that he conceived the Octet for eight separate parts, not two string quartets combined. Even Ludwig Spohr--no stranger to the art of double string quartets--admitted, “An Octet for stringed instruments by Mendelssohn belongs to quite another kind of art in which the two quartets do not concert and interchange in double choir with each other, but all eight instruments work together.”
Fanny insisted that the Scherzo was inspired by the last lines of the Walpurgis Night scene in Part I of Goethe’s Faust:
The flight of the clouds and the veil of mist
Are lighted from above,
A breeze in the leaves, a wind in the reeds
And all has vanished.
For the London performance of his First Symphony in 1829, Mendelssohn orchestrated the Scherzo as a substitute for the Minuet. The Scherzo was even used during a Requiem Mass in memory of Beethoven. “I can scarcely imagine anything more absurd that a priest at the altar and my Scherzo going on,” he said.
Sir Donald Francis Tovey called the Octet “unmistakably a work of genius. Its first movement is an admirable specimen of Mendelssohn’s most spirited and energetic style; and if sometimes the inner parts degenerate into orchestral tremolo, Mendelssohn as the first offender has received the whole blame for a vice which is cheerfully condoned when later composers indulge in it far more unscrupulously. The slow movement is rather vague in structure and theme, but extraordinarily beautiful in scoring and colour….The finale is very boyish, but so amusing that it wears a good deal better than many a more responsible utterance.”