Chamber Music

Stravinsky’s Eight Instrumental Miniatures: The Land of Children at Play

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In 1921, Igor Stravinsky composed a set of simple piano pieces for children titled, Les cinq doigts (“The Five Fingers”). Charmingly spare and neoclassical, each of the eight whimsical keyboard exercises are built on five notes, played in the right hand. Stravinsky returned to this music in 1962 to create the 8 Instrumental Miniatures for 15 Players. It is music which inhabits the innocent, magical land of children at play. The brief …

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Brahms’ Trio in E-flat Major for Horn, Violin, and Piano: Music of Nature

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In May of 1865, following the death of his beloved mother Christiane three months earlier, Johannes Brahms retreated to the picturesque seclusion of Baden-Baden in Germany’s Black Forest. It was here that Brahms composed his Trio in E-flat Major for Horn, Violin, and Piano, Op. 40. He worked in a room which, in his words, “looks out on three sides at the dark, wooded mountains, the roads winding up and down them, …

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Fauré’s String Quartet in E Minor: A Mystical Farewell

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The String Quartet in E minor, Op. 121 was the final work of Gabriel Fauré. Completed in September of 1924, a month before the composer’s death at age 79, it is a quiet musical farewell, solemn, intimate, and lamenting. It unfolds in three movements, all of which return to the same mystical space. In contrast with Fauré’s earlier works, this music is hazy, austere, and less firmly rooted in its tonal center. …

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Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 2 in A Major: Klezmer Strains

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Dmitri Shostakovich composed his String Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 68 over the course of 19 days in September of 1944. He had just completed the haunting Second Piano Trio, and (a year earlier) the Eighth Symphony. While the Second World War still raged, the tide had turned, and a Soviet victory over the Nazis was all but assured. Shostakovich found refuge at a “house of rest and creativity,” a …

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Jean Françaix’s Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano: Music to “Give Pleasure”

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Jean Françaix (1912-1997) began composing at the age of six. When he was ten, his first published work caught the attention of the legendary composition teacher, Nadia Boulanger. In a comment to the boy’s parents, Maurice Ravel said, “Among the child’s gifts I observe above all the most fruitful an artist can possess, that of curiosity: you must not stifle these precious gifts now or ever, or risk letting this young sensibility …

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Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major: Sublime and Valedictory

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Franz Schubert completed the String Quintet in C Major in the late summer of 1828, less than two months before his death at the age of 31. Sublime and valedictory, it is music which inhabits mysterious and celestial spaces. It achieves the “heavenly lengths” (Robert Schumann’s words) of Schubert’s “Great” Symphony No. 9 in C Major, which was finished two years earlier. We get a sense of the monumental expanse of Bruckner …

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Michael Torke’s “October”: Autumn Music

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Although usually free of a literal program, the music of the American composer, Michael Torke, is highly evocative. Even if we don’t share the composer’s experience of synesthesia, in which musical keys are involuntarily associated with specific colors, Torke’s suite of Color Music from the 1980s makes us feel the essence of green, bright blue, and ecstatic orange. Other orchestral pieces such as Run (1992) and Javelin (1994) convey an exhilarating sense of motion, while December suggests …

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