On Monday afternoon at St. Stephen's Church, the Jupiter Players gave their last recital of the season. The ensemble has been a mainstay on the Upper West Side for lovers of chamber music and this season alone gave twenty superlative performances that took the time to explore the work of lesser known composers as well as that of the masters. It was not surprising then that this final performance featured works by artists - Reicha, Mozart and Dvořák - whose styles differed radically from one another.
The program opened with Anton Reicha's Variations for Bassoon and String Quartet (n.d.). This was such an obscure work that I could find nothing online relating to it when I attempted to research its history before attending the recital. Its date of composition is unknown and no opus number was ever assigned it. Reicha himself, of course, was hardly a household name even in his own time and has been largely overlooked since the close of the nineteenth century. This lack of recognition was due partly to the politically fraught political situation in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century. Reicha was forced by the wars raging about him to relocate from Bonn to Hamburg to Paris to Vienna until finally he returned to Paris where he spent the rest of his career teaching composition at the Conservatoire. Another factor that caused the composer to be forgotten was his own refusal to put himself forward. As his Wikipedia biography pithily notes:
"None of the advanced ideas he advocated in the most radical of his music and writings (not used in the 25 great wind quintets), including polyrhythm, polytonality and microtonal music, were accepted or employed by nineteenth-century composers. Due to Reicha's unwillingness to have his music published (like Michael Haydn before him), he fell into obscurity soon after his death and his life and work have yet to be intensively studied."
The present work was certainly interesting, In it one could hear the influence of both Mozart and Beethoven. What struck me as I listened to it was how unfamiliar are present day audiences with works that so prominently feature woodwind instruments such as the bassoon. Instead, we are much more used to hearing winds play as part of an ensemble at orchestral concerts. I believe this lack of appreciation for wind instruments is yet another reason Reicha is so often overlooked in our era.
The next work was Mozart's Serenade No. 11 in E flat major, K.375 (1781). The piece was originally written for performance on St. Theresa's Day and was arranged for two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons. Shortly after Mozart had completed the serenade in this form, however, a wind octet was established at the Viennese court that featured two oboes in addition to the aforementioned instruments. Mozart was forced to hurriedly rework his manuscript to include these instruments and, as a result, the final composition displayed a number of unusual features, such as the horn solo that appeared out of nowhere in the first movement recapitulation. The overall structure, though, remained traditional - a central slow movement with two minuets on each side which were in turn flanked by two fast outer movements. The current performance was unusual in that made use of the original arrangement without oboes. With or without those instruments, this is still a heartrendingly beautiful work that only Mozart could have written.
After intermission, the program ended with one of the best known works in the chamber repertoire, Dvořák's Piano Quintet No. 2 in A major, Op. 81 (1887). The work began as an attempt to revise an earlier quintet, also in A major, the Op. 5. Luckily for future generations of music lovers, the composer soon enough decided the task was hopeless and instead wrote an entirely new quintet to take its place. If nothing else, this gave Dvořák the opportunity to continue his exploration of Czech folk sources as can be clearly heard in the second movement Dumka that forms the heart of the work. In the past few seasons, I've heard excellent performances of this work by both the Chamber Music Society and the ACJW Ensemble, but I still found the Jupiter Players' rendition eminently satisfying. The performers were Gilles Vonsattel (piano), Mark Kaplan and Lisa Shihoten (violin), Dmitri Murrath (viola) and David Requiro (cello).
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