Four Centuries of Great Music February 26, 2023 Chamber Music That Needs to be Programmed Episode 8

Today on Four Centuries of Great Music is the Eight episode of the series Chamber Music Works That Needs to Be Programmed.

We open today with Charles Martin Loeffler and his Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano. Written in 1901, the Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano are Loeffler’s best-known chamber music.

The Two Rhapsodies are a beautiful and mournful exploration of these three instruments and their distinct sonorities. The piano often plays in the lower registers, dramatic and stormy. The oboe and viola play a mixture of simple, haunting harmonies and ornately flowing lines. The three instruments follow and copy each other throughout both movements, progressing in fits and starts.
In the first Rhapsody, “L’Étang” (The Pond), the listener can hear both brash kerplunks and slowly dying ripples. Although both rhapsodies are based on poems about death and lost love, there is sweetness and even cheerfulness throughout the music - even jaunty, skipping moments. “The Pond” comes to a close with the oboe playing a major/minor arpeggio and the piano and viola softly trading high and low notes.

 In the second Rhapsody, “La Cornemuse” (The Bagpipe), the oboe flecks the music with pastoral lines, and at moments the oboe and viola together have an almost ancient sonority (Loeffler studied medieval chant for a year in Germany) – with the viola acting as the drone for the oboe’s chanter.  The piano plays watery accompaniment to the oboe’s plaintive calls, and, like “The Pond,” “The Bagpipe” contains an extremely dynamic ebb and flow: quick-then-slow, loud-then-soft, delicate-then-aggressive. Both Rhapsodies end with respite, and perhaps, looking inward, an acceptance of what is. Loeffler’s ability to combine colors to create landscapes was remarkable; the sound of the Two Rhapsodies brings together both mysticism and folksong.



Florence Price’s String Quartet in A minor is the largest scale work of Price’s chamber music that has not been lost. Dated 1935 on the manuscript, the quartet shares very similar formal features and idioms as the Piano Quintet in A minor and the Symphonies 1 and 3. The quartet is densely and virtuosically written with an abundance of double stops, fast arpeggiated flourishes, and brooding contrapuntalism. Each movement is like an entire world unto its own: a highly romantic and searching first movement, a profound spiritual-esque second movement, a boisterous juba third movement, and a blistering finale movement. It is truly a treasure to have such a monumental work for string quartet that captures so richly and dynamically the depth of Price’s unique Afro-romantic genius. This work deserves a place in the string quartet canon.

Florence Price: String Quartet in A minor I. Moderato
Florence Price: String Quartet in A minor II. Andante Cantabile
Florence Price: String Quartet in A minor III. Juba
Florence Price: String Quartet in A minor IV. Finale


Next is Manual Ponce’s Sonata for cello and piano in G minor The cello sonata was written in 1922 and dedicated to Uruguayan cellist Oscar Nicastro. The work opens with a stormy, surging Allegro selvaggio, the ‘wild’ momentum of the opening theme softening into romantic lyricism with a long-breathed cello melody. Contrasts between these two characters continue throughout the movement, explored via compelling dialogue between the cello and piano. The second movement bears the unusual marking Allegro alla maniera d’uno studio (‘Lively, in the manner of a study’), and opens with jangling piano and pizzicato cello, gaining in energy as the cello, now arco, articulates a vigorous theme. The movement reaches what feels like an ending before Ponce introduces a much slower section, the cello in its lower register and in contemplative mood, before the opening material is reprised. An Arietta follows, explicitly linking the cello with the human voice, its sonorous utterances coloured by the piano’s wealth of shimmering textures. Two arresting piano chords usher in the ‘burlesque’ finale, which marches forwards in a manner more purposeful than playful, but the slower, ardent cello writing that has cropped up throughout the sonata is recalled once more before the almost abrupt surprise of the final bars.

Manual Ponce: Sonata for cello and piano in G minor I.  Allegro selvaggio
Manual Ponce: Sonata for cello and piano in G minor II. Allegro alla maniera d’uno studio
Manual Ponce: Sonata for cello and piano in G minor III. Arietta
Manual Ponce: Sonata for cello and piano in G minor IV. Allegro Burlesco

Geraldine Mucha: String Quartet No. 1
Geraldine Mucha was born in London in 1917.  Mucha herself showed an interest in music from a very early age and her father, a professional baritone and professor at the Royal Academy of Music, impressed by her improvisations at the piano, taught her to read and write music.  She got harmony and composition lessons from Benjamin Dale and compositional advice from Arnold Bax even before she entered the Royal Academy of Music at the age of 18 in 1935.  The First String Quartet which she wrote in 1944 as a recent RAM graduate is a tight, well-argued work, inflected by the fiercely rhythmic folk idiom of Janáček and Bartók.  The first movement, based in the key of F sharp, is a set of twelve variations on a Hucul (Carpathian) folk-song bound together by a nervous rhythmic motif. The music juggles athletic counterpoint with passages of open-air lyricism, there is a strong sense of propulsive energy, and the movement ends with a short, quiet coda. The second movement is that staple of Czech music, a Dumka. It starts as a Lento espressivo lament in D minor, and carries over the first movement’s nervous rhythmic motif, first heard on the cello. The style is more romantic, with a rhapsodic central section close in mood to German late romanticism. The third movement is a rondo based on a Carpathian dance called an Arkan, with lots of drones, elaborate shifts of time signature and strongly contrasted episodes. Since she had yet to move to Prague where she lived much of her life, it is a mystery how completely she had absorbed the Central European idiom.

Geraldine Mucha: String Quartet No. 1  I. Variations on a Hucul Folk-Song
Geraldine Mucha: String Quartet No. 1  II. Dumka
Geraldine Mucha: String Quartet No. 1  III. Arkan



We are going to close today’s Four Centuries of Great Music with Joseph Bodin de Boismortier Cello Sonata in D Major from his Op. 50 set of sonatas