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1. Allègre — 2. Très calme — 3. Vite Pierre Onfroy de Bréville (1861-1949) was a French composer, teacher and critic and a friend of Franck, Debussy and Ravel. His music was elegantly crafted but has not been performed much since his death. His Sonatine for Oboe and Piano (1927) could be the sound track for an imaginary Parisian art exhibit. It first paints a jaunty tapestry of interwoven colors and textures in the spirit of Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte*.  The second movement seems like a serene interlude, perhaps contemplating one of Claude Monet’s paintings from his floating studio on the Seine. The final movement, Vite  is a burst of kinetic exuberance in the spirit of a music hall poster by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. *Property of The Art Institute of Chicago. Featured in Sundays in the Park with George, a musical by Stephen Sondheim

William Alwyn's Oboe Sonata William Alwyn (1905-1985) was a respected English composer, teacher and conductor. He began his musical career as a virtuoso flutist, attended the Royal Academy of Music, and at the age of nineteen he was appointed professor of composition. Alwyn composed dozens of widely performed concert pieces and the musical scores of more than 70 films, including a classic Hollywood swashbuckler, “The Crimson Pirate,” starring Burt Lancaster.    Alwyn’s Oboe Sonata was published in 1934. It has three movements: I. Moderato e grazioso II. Andantino III. Allegro (quasi waltz tempo)The origami flower in the accompanying photo was created by Yukie Echizen.

Sue Yoast and Viva Knight became close friends in 2001 when both were newly widowed. Sue was diagnosed with scleroderma, a rare and incurable autoimmune disease, in 2008. She remained valiantly upbeat to the end, a dear friend and a loyal fan of Dolci. We will miss her. Her obituary is at Mykeeper.com. Autumn Night is a new composition by Eric Ewazen , written in memory of oboist Judith Ricker and pianist Joseph Werner of the Eastman faculty, who both died this year.

Felix Mendelssohn, Song Without Words, opus 85 No. 40, arranged for piano and oboe d'amore by David Walter. Fiber art in photo is by Martha Mae Jones.

Concerto for Oboe  (Piano reduction) by John Williams (b. 1932) Prelude: Exuberantly, Broadly Pastorale: Moderato, with Nostalgia Commedia: Playfully, Joyfully John Williams is a distinguished American composer, best known for his film scores. In 2005 the American Film Institute selected Williams's score for Star Wars as the greatest film score of all time. He has won 25 Grammy Awards and received 52 Academy Award nominations and 5 Academy Awards. He is also a composer and conductor of concert music. He wrote this concerto in 2011 for Keisuke Wakao, the principal oboist of the Boston Pops Orchestra, of which Williams was music director for many years.  Some composers try to create excitement by forcing the players to struggle with technical difficulties.* Not so John Williams, and certainly not his Oboe Concerto. Williams’ concerto requires practice and precision from the oboist, but mostly it demands fluency, energy and expressiveness in the moment. Its phrases fall naturally within a human breath. The oboe part is written in a range where it can produce a nuanced timbre, can start and end notes precisely, and has a speech-like potential to engage the listener’s emotions. The piano reduction is precisely notated to reproduce the complex ensemble playing and rich sonorities of the Boston strings without risking injury or public humiliation to the pianist. He lets both players’ hands move efficiently without straining for uncomfortably large intervals. This generous gift to the oboists and pianists of the world shows how well Williams can cast spells, play games, evoke moods and tell stories. It is a genial piece, composed in a language of beautiful, logically connected sounds, and with the sweet smile of reason. _________________________________ Essa-Pekka Salonen stated this in his comments to an audience at Hertz Hall, Berkeley, California, c. 2012. Fascination with virtuosic musical performance as a form of heroism has been part of Western music at least since the early nineteenth century when great soloists like Paganini and Liszt began to be idolized in the press along with popular heroes like Cook, Nelson and Napoleon. _________________________________ Photo by May Phan

Sonata for Oboe and Piano, 1938                           Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) Münter (Lively) Sehr langsam-Lebhaft (Very Slow-Fast) During his frantic last year in Germany before escaping with his family to Switzerland, Paul Hindemith wrote several important works, including his Oboe Sonata. Its first movement is quick and frisky, using overlapping 2-4 and 3-8 meters like the combined gaits of a little girl and her big brother hurrying hand in hand into an unknown forest. Like any a good Gothic story, its sunny beginning and end contrast with darkly threatening episodes. The harmony progresses in disorienting twists from unfamiliar to scary to downright weird. The second movement starts very slowly as a dreamy lullaby in slow 3-4 time, accompanied by a fantastically ornate accompaniment in eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second and sixty-fourth note subdivisions. The lullaby melody breaks into headlong flight as a lively 3-8 fugue, then pauses to hide, dreams, and resumes its running-away (fugue). The second escape winds through a cadence, long-winded enough to rival a Beethoven symphony, and leads us at last to safety.

John Steinmetz (b. 1951) grew up in Oakland, California, attended the California Institute of the Arts and was swept into Los Angeles' freelance whirlpool as a bassoonist and composer. He now teaches at UCLA and lives in Altadena. He wrote about this composition: “Many operas start optimistically but this piece imagines the opposite trajectory, beginning in pessimism or depression and working toward a happy ending... The five movements of the Suite might be scenes or musical numbers drawn from a longer opera... Whether it’s a drama between people or a struggle within a single person are questions for the audience’s imagination.”The movement titles are  Aria Dance Recitative Aria Apotheosis                                                                                     photo © 2010 Charlotte Castro

Six Studies in English Folk-Song by Ralph Vaughan WilliamsI Adagio, "Lovely on the Water" II Andante sostenuto, "Spurn Point"III Larghetto, "Van Diemen's Land"IV Lento, "She Borrowed Some of her Mother's Gold"V Andante tranquillo, "The Lady and the Dragoon"VI Allegro vivace, "As I walked over London Bridge"  When Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was a music student in London he became fascinated with rural English traditional songs, which then existed only in oral tradition and were gradually being forgotten. He visited rural churches and musicians, learned their songs by ear, wrote them out in music notation, and enlisted other musicians to help him save the music from extinction. He wrote this piece in 1926 for cello and piano, and later transcribed it for many other solo instruments, noting that his aim was that the songs be “treated with love.”"Lovely on the Water"  is a dialogue of a sailor with his love, before he is sent off to war. "Spurn Point" is a dangerous spit at the entrance to the Humber estuary from the North Sea, where a vessel stranded and its captain refused help from the life station there, sinking on the next tide and losing all aboard."Van Diemen's Land" is a cautionary lament of poachers who have been transported to a penal colony on Tasmania.The complete words for "She Borrowed Some of her Mother's Gold" have not been recovered, but the story does seem to have ended badly for her."The Lady and the Dragoon"  tells of a poor but valiant soldier who marries above his station yet earns his honor by rescuing his new father-in-law from the king's soldiers."As I walked over London Bridge" is the overheard tale of a pretty maid whose lover, though of royal blood, is to be hanged with a golden chain for having stolen and sold sixteen of the King's deer.

Three Romances, opus 22                                                   Clara Schumann (1819-1896) Andante molto — Allegretto — Leidenschaftlich schnell Clara Schumann probably wrote her Three Romances for Christmas, 1849, at the same time her husband Robert wrote his Three Romances for Oboe and Piano, but like many of her compositions they were not published immediately.  As the sole family breadwinner after Robert became ill, Clara was obliged to devote most of her time and energy to her career as a virtuoso pianist. She performed the Romances for King George V of Hanover in 1853 (he loved them) with the violinist Joseph Joachim, and finally published them in 1856 with a dedication to Joachim. They mirror Robert’s Three Romances in form; though there is no published oboe version, they suit it beautifully, suggesting that they might have been originally intended for that instrument.

Fratres,  ("Brothers") by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (1935–), is a set of nine variations on a slow, sustained melody that suggests liturgical chants of Estonian Orthodox religion. The composition uses three parallel voices, one high, one middle and one low, each with a distinctive tonality and rhythmic texture. The variations are six to nine measures long, the pitches dictated by an unchanging mathematical algorithm that generates variety and a sense of calm progression within a unified framework. Each variation ends in a percussive two-measure "refuge," used like the bell in a group meditation, signaling that the participants will pause, reflect and move on. Pärt refers to his compositional technique as tintinnabuli, Latin for the little bells carried in a procession.Fratres was first composed in 1977 as an instrumental piece for chamber orchestra with variable instrumentation. In 1980 Pärt scored it for piano and violin. It has become widely popular in concert music, in over a dozen films and documentaries, and in recordings for guided meditation. From 2011 to 2018, Pärt was the world's most performed living composer.Dolci thanks Gloria Cheng, our friend and mentor, for her invaluable help in adapting Fratres for piano and oboe and in preparing our performance. Our changes from the published score for violin and piano retain the original pitches and rhythms as best we can. Our occasional octave transpositions and instrumentation changes reflect technical and metabolic necessity.

Sonatine (1905)                                                                         Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)Arranged for oboe and piano by David Walter  1.    Modéré (moderate)2.    Mouvement de menuet (Minuet tempo)3.    Animé (animated)  Ravel opens each movement of his Sonatine with a two-note interval that establishes a precise mood with its color and rhythm. The first movement, marked Modéré, opens with a tentative-sounding descending fourth – F# to C#. This is an emotionally laden interval for Ravel. For example, in his opera “L’enfant et les sortilêges” (“The child and the magic spells”), he sets the word “maman” to this interval as a frightened child cries out for his mother.  The second movement, a minuet, opens with a stable, decisive interval, a rising fifth. The minuet form hints of a magnificently costumed ball in a palace long forgotten, like Ravel’s earlier “Pavane for a Dead Princess.”The final movement, marked Animé and then Agité, opens with the original notes of the first movement, but in reverse order: a rising fourth, C# to F#. It is a questing rising fourth, leaping forward. Between forays into mysterious realms, the melody rocks indecisively, its meter stretching into four- and five-note bar lengths. A second version of the two-note motto emerges, now back in its original shape as a falling fourth. 

Chansonette                                                                                               Sir Hamilton Harty (1879-1941)Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty, born in Northern Ireland, had a successful career as organist, conductor, accompanist and composer. He moved to London in 1900 and became known for his skillful accompaniments of such vocalists and instrumentalists as Fritz Kreisler. He composed constantly throughout his career, and published  Chansonette as the second of Three Minatures for Oboe and Piano in 1911. From 1932 to 1935, he was conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and spent the rest of his life guest conducting, despite the loss of his right eye from a brain tumor in 1936. Fantasy Pieces for Oboe and Piano, op. 2                                               Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) Romance Humoresque Carl Nielsen offered the following description in a program note for his 1889 Fantasy Pieces: “The first slow piece gives the oboe the opportunity to sing out its notes quite as beautifully as this instrument can. The second is more humorous, roguish, with an undertone of Nordic nature and forest rustlings in the moonlight.” Both pieces suggest fanciful tales in the spirit of Nielsen’s Danish compatriot Hans Christian Andersen.

Each of Felix Mendelssohn’s eight books of Songs Without Words is a cycle of six short, distinctive pieces in song form for solo piano. This arrangement of his Book 3 for oboe and piano is by the eminent French oboist and composer David Walter. Mendelssohn’s friend Marc-André Souchay once asked for permission to set his own poems to the Songs Without Words. Mendelssohn refused, and explained: “What the music I love expresses to me is not too indefinite to put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.” Song number 6 was given the title Duetto by Mendelssohn. It was composed in Frankfurt in June 1836, soon after he had met his future wife. Book III, opus 38 (1836-37) Con moto Allegro non troppo Presto e molto vivace Andante Agitato Duetto. Andante con moto

Marin Marais (1656-1728) was a composer and gamba player whose job was to provide bedtime music for King Louis XIV,  Les folies d’Espagne was a popular song on which Marais composed a set of 31 variations for this purpose, and published as part of his second book of “Pieces de viole” in 1701.  This version was arranged by Jennifer Paull. 

Sonata for Oboe and Piano (2009)                                                Peter Hope (1930 - )  Moderato Vivace  Allegro  Peter Hope’s Oboe Sonata opens with an elegaic theme that he weaves through the entire composition. He transforms it through increasingly lively dance forms, until it becomes a jitterbug over a boogie-woogie bass. This sonata challenges the performers with intricate rhythms and harmonies, and rewards the audience with a stream of singable, danceable, memorable music. Hope wrote title and theme music for a great many popular British radio and TV programs, making his music more familiar than his name to the British public. About the year 2000 he returned to writing concert music. He was commissioned in 2009 to write a tribute to the English oboist Lady Evelyn Barbirolli (1911-2008), who had played in the first symphony orchestra concert Peter Hope ever attended. The outcome of this commission was his Sonata for Oboe and Piano.

Three Romances, opus 94, by Robert Schumann (1810-1856)  Nicht schnell — Einfach, innig — Nicht schnell  Three Romances are a set of instrumental love songs Robert Schumann wrote in 1849 as a Christmas present to his young bride Clara. They open with confessional intimacy, the oboe personifying Robert, the piano Clara. At first the couple sing tentative questions and answers, but in the second Romance the voices become agitated as they interrupt each other in a staggered rhythm. In the last Romance, the lovers declare love in a recurring unison motive, but Clara’s piano answers each unison with a solo cadence, sadly prefiguring for us her long life alone after Robert’s suicide. 

Today’s compositions have been arranged for oboe d’amore and piano. Most were composed for other instruments, but Debussy designated oboe d’amore (on the top staff of the score!) in his orchestration of “Gigues” for Images for Orchestra.The modern oboe d’amore is a slightly larger and lower-pitched version of the modern oboe, with a globular bell. These differences from the standard oboe lend it a mellower, less edgy tone that blends nicely with other instruments and with the human voice. Its native pitch of “A” below middle “C” places it in the sweet spot among melody instruments.   1      “Andante sostenuto” (originally for solo piano) from Songs Without Words          by Felix Mendelssohn (Germany, 1809-1847)2      “Adagio” (originally for solo piano) from Songs Without Words3      “Salut d’Amour” by Edward Elgar (England, 1857-1934) (originally for violin          and piano)4      “Arietta” by S. M. Maykapar (Ukraine, 1867-1938) (originally for solo piano)5      “Gigues” from Images by Claude Debussy (France, 1862-1918) (originally for          oboe d’amore and orchestra,) #1-2 were arranged by David Walter and published by Billaudot. #3-5 were arranged by Robert Rainford and published by Forton Music

The oboe d’amore is the gentle mezzo-soprano member of the oboe family. It was developed in the 17th century, flourished as a solo instrument in the time of Bach and Handel, and was mostly ignored by the Romantic composers. Debussy and Ravel specified oboe d’amore for successful orchestral pieces, spurring the development of modern instruments with similar acoustics to their Baroque predecessors, but with key mechanisms similar to the modern oboe. “The Swan” was choreographed by Mikhail Fokine in 1905 for Anna Pavlova, who performed it over 4,000 times. Today’s compositions were  arranged for modern oboe d’amore and piano by Robert Rainford and published by Forton Music.  1.    “Qui Sedes” from Mass in B-minor by J. S. Bach (1685-1750) 2.    “Largo” from Serse by George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) 3.    “Voi, che sapete” from The Marriage of Figaro by W. A. Mozart (1756-1791) 4.    “Traumerei” from Kinderszenen by Robert Schumann (1810-1856) 5.    “The Swan” from Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) 6.    “Anitra’s Dance” from Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg(1843-1907)

The story continues. The miller-maid asks the young miller for the green ribbon by which his lute hangs, and he gives it to her, still imagining she loves him. Before he can summon the courage to tell her his love, a horn blows, dogs yap in chromatic cacophony, and a bragging, noisy hunter gallops down to the mill (all described in the text and echoed in the piano part (“The Hunter”). The miller's response, “Jealousy and Pride” is a hissy fit worthy of grand opera. The poor fellow nonetheless loses the miller-maid to his noisy rival (“Withered Flowers”). After a long dialogue in which the brook tries but fails to reassure him that better times will come to him in the springtime (“The Miller and the Brook”), he throws himself into the millpond, and the brook rocks him gently into endless sleep. These are today’s song titles, as translated by Michèle Lester.  13. With the Lute’s Green Ribbon  14. The Huntsman  15. Jealousy and Pride  16. The Beloved Color  17. The Wicked Color  18. Withered Flowers  19. The Miller and the Brook  20. The Brook's Lullaby 

Die Schöne Müllerin                         Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)(“The Pretty Miller-Maid”)            When the Austrian composer Franz Schubert wrote this song cycle he was chronically ill, frustrated in love, and knew he would soon be dead. He was fascinated, however, by Goethe's belief that experiencing the beauty of nature would purify his soul. This cycle of 20 songs is drawn from a long narrative poem by Schubert’s German contemporary Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827). We will present it in two episodes, beginning with Songs 1-12. In the story, an eager young miller has just completed his apprenticeship and sets off to find new work (“Wandering”). The water’s lively sound, which flows and burbles in the piano part through most of the songs, urges the youth to follow the stream (“Where To?”). He comes to a mill (“Halt!”) and is hired by its owner, who has pretty daughter. The young man falls in love at first sight. He works hard to impress them (“After the Day’s Work”). He sings to the brook, but not to her, of flowers, stars and dewdrops. She sits trustingly with him by the brook (“Rain of Tears”). He imagines she shares his love (“Mine!”). Unable to tell her how he feels, he hangs his lute on the wall. Untouched, its strings vibrate quetly in the air (“Pause”).  These are today’s song titles, as translated by Michèle Lester. 1.    Wandering2.    Where to?3.    Halt!4.    Thanks to the Brook5.    After the Day’s Work6.    Curiosity7.    Impatience8.    Morning Greeting9.    The Miller's Flowers10.  Rain of Tears11.  Mine12.  Pause  In Episode 25 we will present songs 13-20.