Program Notes
About the Author
Keith Horner currently provides program notes for presenters throughout North America. After taking a music degree at the University of Cambridge, Keith started his writing career as a freelance music critic with The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and as a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (leading to an MA (Cantab.). His interest in communicating with audiences was honed over four decades as a music broadcaster and Executive Producer for BBC Radio 3 and CBC Radio 2, based in London, then Toronto. Keith remains active as an independent recording producer, with well over 100 CDs and LPs to his credit, several Juno awards, and the Special Prize at the Prix Italia for a documentary production with composer Christos Hatzis.
Ehnes Quartet - September 30, 2025
Program Notes
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Born in Hamburg, Germany, February 3, 1809; died in Leipzig, November 4, 1847
Quartet No. 6, in F minor, Op. 80 (1847)
The F minor Quartet by Felix Mendelssohn opens and closes with anything but a smile. Intense and urgent, its agitated tremolo opening is punctuated only by the suspended agonies of the first violin, often poignantly poised high above the other three strings. The F minor Quartet is ‘late period’ Mendelssohn. Highly subjective music, it strains at the constraints of the medium of the string quartet itself.
In May 1847, Mendelssohn was devastated to hear of the death of his 41-year-old sister Fanny, a sister with whom he had maintained a close and productive creative relationship since childhood. She collapsed while rehearsing her brother’s music. Mendelssohn became so distraught that he was unable to attend her funeral. His wife Cécile arranged for him to take the waters at Baden-Baden. His insomnia continued. “I force myself to be industrious, in the hope that later on I may feel like working and enjoying it,” he wrote in July to his younger sister Rebecca. By September, the F minor Quartet was complete.
Structurally, Mendelssohn looks back to the classical sonata form of Beethoven in his middle-period. In each of the four movements, his attention is focused on emotion and passion, underpinned by a recurring thematic use of the notes of the F minor home key. By the end of the opening movement, after an increasingly intense coda, the anger and inner fury of the music has not abated. The second movement, a sardonic, angry scherzo, remains in the dark key of F minor. Its biting harmonies are prescient of the scherzos of Mahler. Economy of means is again a hallmark in the slow movement and little respite is offered. The restlessness of the opening movement returns in the finale. Again, Mendelssohn works with fragments and motifs rather than full-blown melodies. The anguish and drive continue relentlessly to the end.
On October 3, just weeks after completing the quartet, Mendelssohn wrote: “Now I must gradually begin to put my life and my work together again, with the awareness that Fanny is no longer here; and it leaves such a bitter taste that I still cannot see my way clearly or find any peace.” He died one month later, on November 4, 1847, at age 38.
LEOŠ JANÁČEK
Born in Hukvaldy, Moravia, July 3, 1854; died in Moravská Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, August 12, 1928
Quartet No. 2 Listy důvěrné (Intimate Letters) JW VII/13 (1928)
In 1917, while on holiday at a spa in Moravia, the 63-year-old Czech composer Leoš Janáček met Kamila Stösslová, a 26-year-old married woman. Their chance encounter sparked one of the most unusual and creatively charged relationships in music history. Over the next 11 years, until his death, Janáček wrote her around 700 fervent letters. What she inspired was nothing less than extraordinary: four operas, the Sinfonietta, Glagolitic Mass, two piano concertos, The Diary of One Who Disappeared, and the string quartet played tonight — Listy důvěrné (Intimate Letters).
The love was unreciprocated but enduring. Janáček, unhappily married, channelled his longing into a complex, idealised devotion. “All my works, all my operas contain one passion,” he wrote. His letters are unselfconscious and intimate, starting with polite requests for a meeting and ending with dreams of marriage and children. Stösslová, married to an antiques dealer, tolerated the attention with equanimity, neither encouraging nor rejecting him outright. She was with him, along with her husband and two sons, in 1928 when Janáček caught the pneumonia that was to lead to his death.
The String Quartet No. 2 is Janáček’s clearest, most impassioned musical declaration. “I have begun to write something beautiful,” he told her. “Our life will be contained in it. It will be called Love Letters . . . In this work I shall be alone with you.” The title changed to Intimate Letters, but the tone remained intensely personal. Janáček’s original idea of featuring the dark-toned and poetically named Baroque viola d'amore as a symbol of his love was dropped. The quartet, nevertheless, features a particularly expressive viola part, a symbol of Janáček’s yearning.
Each of its four movements – his ‘letters’ – reflects a different facet of the relationship. The first describes his love on first encountering Stösslová through two sharply contrasting themes. The second opens with a tender viola solo recalling their first meeting. The third, the emotional heart of the work, portrays the fervour and intensity of their love and Janacek’s dream of a shared child – “a vision which would resemble your image, transparent, as if in the mist.” The final movement navigates the many turbulent, contradictory emotions the composer wrestled with.
“I want [this] to be a great love – a great composition,” Janáček wrote after the première of what would be his final completed work. “I listened to their playing today – did I write that? Those cries of joy. But what a strange thing, also cries of terror after a lullaby. Exaltation, a warm declaration of love, imploring, untamed longing . . . Oh, it’s a work as if carved out of living flesh. I think that I won’t write a more profound and a truer one.”
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born in Bonn, Germany, baptised December 17, 1770; died in Vienna, Austria, March 26, 1827
Quartet in F, Op. 59 No. 1 (First Razumovsky) (1806)
With the three ‘Razumovsky’ quartets, Beethoven effectively ends the tradition of writing string quartets for Vienna’s early 19th century cultivated amateurs. His earlier Op. 18 quartets had suited this market. But Beethoven – both consolidator and innovator – quickly outgrew its constraints, demanding far more from his performers. With the three Razumovsky quartets, composed mainly between April and November 1806, the classical quartet, comfortably established as a congenial exchange of thoughts and pleasantries between four friends, now begins to speak loudly and argumentatively in public. Think of the beginning of the first Razumovsky and the end of the last one, the Beethoven scholar Joseph Kerman argues: "There's not much conversation in evidence on either page. A better term might be ‘determined ensemble shouting’."
And shout they did. Even the Schuppanzigh Quartet, Vienna’s leading professionals and Beethoven’s early champions, reportedly burst out laughing when they first saw the F major Razumovsky. Beethoven held their cheerful, chubby leader, Ignaz Schuppanzigh, in esteem, calling him ‘My Lord Falstaff,’ but still snapped: “Do you suppose I am thinking about your wretched fiddle when the spirit moves me?” Compromise was no longer part of Beethoven’s vocabulary.
The opening movement, Beethoven’s longest quartet movement to date, strains at the leash of classical form. With its grandeur and drive likened to the Eroica, and its serenity to the Violin Concerto, it stands among the most expansive structures of his middle period – symphonic in scope, ambitious in reach. The second movement is a scherzo like no other: a constantly developing structure around a rhythmic kernel, longer and closer to sonata form than the usual scherzo-trio-scherzo pattern. It foreshadows the expansive scherzos of Mahler.
Adagio molto e mesto – ‘very slow and mournful’ – is Beethoven’s unorthodox heading for the slow movement, whose two expansive themes unfold entirely in the minor key. A sketchbook note adds a cryptic clue to its mood: “A weeping willow or acacia tree on my brother’s grave.” The movement dissolves into a brief, ethereal violin cadenza. Consolation comes in the finale, a large-scale movement introduced by the cello with a folk-like Thème russe. Beethoven took it from a collection of Russian folk songs he owned – a likely nod to Count Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna and dedicatee of the set. The theme, transformed into the major and echoing earlier material in the work, brings unity and resolution to this bold, boundary-breaking quartet.
— Program notes copyright © 2025 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca
Tetzlaff/Tetzlaff/Doerken Trio
October 21, 2025
Program
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-91)
Piano Trio in E, K. 542 (1788)
Allegro
Andante grazioso
Allegro
BEDŘICH SMETANA (1824-84)
Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 15 (1855, rev. 1857, 1880)
Moderato assai
Allegro, ma non agitato
Finale: Presto
PYOTR IL'YICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-93)
Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50 (1881-2)
Pezzo elegiaco: Moderato assai – Allegro giusto
Tema con variazioni: Andante con moto – Variazione finale e Coda
Program Notes
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Born in Salzburg, Austria, January 27, 1756; died in Vienna, Austria, December 5, 1791
Piano Trio in E, K. 542 (1788)
Mozart was just eight when his earliest piano trios (K. 10–15) were published in London in 1764 as Six Sonatas for Harpsichord, with the accompaniment of Violin or Flute and Cello ad libitum. He then paused for nearly two decades. When he returned to the genre in late 1780s Vienna, he was writing for a city he called “true clavierland” – a place where the fortepiano had become central to domestic music-making. The older harpsichord still lingered in some homes, but the piano was where the future lay. Mozart was unsure how to label these new works. He titled the first, from 1776, Divertimento; the second was headed Sonata, though he entered it in his catalogue as Terzett, the term he came to prefer.
Mozart’s mature trios are ambitious, three-movement works that carry the imprint of the piano concerto in their keyboard writing. He composed most of them to play himself at public concerts, in the same years he was dazzling Viennese audiences with his virtuosic piano concertos. K. 542 was completed on June 22, 1788, during the same creative surge that produced his final three symphonies. The opening Allegro is generally mellow and restrained, spiced from time to time with a piquant shift in the harmony.
In the slow movement, it’s not the graceful theme that reveals Mozart’s touch, but the way it unfolds and transforms – an example of art concealing art. The final Rondo unleashes playful, concerto-like interplay between piano and violin. The overall mood is buoyant and clear-eyed, though a distinctively Mozartian ambiguity keeps the listener guessing.
BEDŘICH SMETANA
Born in Litomyšl, Bohemia, March 2, 1824; died in Prague, May 12, 1884
Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 15 (1855, rev. 1857, 1880)
Tragedy runs deep in Smetana’s chamber music. After marrying his childhood sweetheart Kateřina Kolářová in 1849, he endured the deaths of three of their four daughters, followed closely by Kateřina’s death from tuberculosis. When he composed his first string quartet, From My Life, he was already completely deaf. The work, intensely autobiographical, reflects on his life to the point of his deafness. His second quartet, completed in 1883 as syphilis ravaged his body and mind, continues the story. “The new quartet takes up where the first one ended, after the catastrophe,” he wrote. “It is a presentation of the whirl of music in a man who has lost the power of hearing.” Smetana died a year later, impoverished and institutionalised.
Smetana’s Piano Trio of 1855 is the earliest of his autobiographical chamber works and already suffused with grief. All three movements are in the minor key, and the music is emotionally raw. “The loss of my eldest daughter, an extraordinarily gifted child, inspired me to compose my piano trio,” he wrote in his diary. Bedřiška, just four years old, was precociously talented, capable of speaking German at two, singing in tune by three, and playing piano by four. The trio is a powerful outpouring of sorrow, more unified and emotionally direct than anything he had written before.
The first movement begins with a grief-stricken violin melody on the G-string – a chromatic, descending line that recurs throughout, embodying anguish and loss. A second theme, introduced by the cello, adds a softer melancholy. The development section is restless and complex, its chromatic counterpoint steeped in sorrow. The second movement, a polka-like scherzo, captures the fleeting joy of childhood play. But shadows fall across the music as the opening theme returns, darkening the dance. In between, two contrasting trios offer flashes of light, glimpses of a life that might have been. The finale, drawn from an earlier G minor sonata, is feverish and dramatic. It swings between elegy and funeral march, major and minor. In the closing bars, Smetana insists on the major key, offering a glimmer of hard-won hope in the face of overwhelming grief.
PYOTR IL’YICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Born in Kamsko-Votkinsk, Russia, April 25/May 7, 1840; died in St. Petersburg, Russia, October 25/November 6, 1893
Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50 (1881-2)
“There is no tonal blend,” Tchaikovsky insisted when his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, urged him to write a piano trio. “Indeed, the piano cannot blend with the rest.” Yet the idea took root. A year later, grief gave him a reason to try. “I have conceived the idea of testing myself in this sort of music which so far I have not touched,” he wrote. “I have already written the beginning of a trio. Whether I shall finish it, whether it will come out successfully, I do not know.” The Trio in A minor was premièred on March 11/23, 1882, the first anniversary of the death of Nikolai Rubinstein, pianist, composer, teacher and Tchaikovsky’s closest mentor – at once his fiercest critic and staunchest advocate. The Piano Trio, with its monumental piano writing, was dedicated “to the memory of a dear friend.”
Structure and scale are bold. Rather than adopt the classical model of three or four movements, Tchaikovsky opts for just two – inviting comparison with Beethoven’s final piano sonata, Op. 111. Both have a sonata-form first movement followed by an extended set of variations. But where Beethoven aspires to transcendence, Tchaikovsky faces his sorrow head on. The opening theme of the Pezzo elegiaco presents a feeling of infinite melancholy and this continues through the intensity of its development. Often, the dense textures of the music are piano driven. This, however, only heightens the wonderfully plangent dialogue between the strings, gently supported by the keyboard. This is music of extraordinary tenderness and emotional exposure. In it we hear – as Stravinsky once put it – Tchaikovsky letting himself go. Its baring of the emotions throws fresh light on the reprise of the opening material and the mournful coda that is stretched out of the opening theme.
The second movement – sometimes dubbed Tchaikovsky’s ‘Enigma Variations’ – is more relaxed in tone and far more varied in mood. Though Tchaikovsky avoids explicit identification, each of its eleven variations appears to recall an episode in Rubinstein’s life. “The variations,” he wrote to his brother in October 1882, “are only memories. One is a memory of a trip to an amusement park out of town [maybe No. 5] and another of a ball we both attended [likely No. 6], and so on.” The episodes range from an exuberant waltz to a Chopin-like mazurka (a nod to Rubinstein’s pianism) and a formal fugue (perhaps honouring his founding of the Moscow Conservatoire). The tone celebrates a life, rather than mourning a loss – until the Variazione finale e Coda, where the theme resurfaces as the second subject of a full sonata-form finale. The funereal final pages recall the Pezzo elegiaco, now as a parting farewell.
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio stands at a turning point in Russian chamber music. It was the first major Russian work in the genre to match the scale, ambition, and emotional depth of the great European tradition. It opened the door for a wave of Russian composers – including Arensky, Taneyev, and later Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich – to explore chamber music as a serious, expressive medium. It helped legitimise the piano trio as a genre in Russian music and established a model for personal, elegiac chamber expression that would resonate throughout the Russian tradition.
— Program notes copyright © 2025 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca
Michelle Cann
November 11, 2025
(COSE pre-concert program notes follow)
Program
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-97)
From Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118 (1892):
Intermezzo in A minor: Allegro non assai, ma molto appassionato
Intermezzo in A major: Andante teneramente
Ballade in G minor: Allegro energico
Romanze in F major: Andante
CLARA SCHUMANN, née WIECK (1819-96)
Variations on a theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 20 (1853)
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-97)
Two Rhapsodies, Op. 79 (1879)
No. 1 in B minor: Agitato
No. 2 in G minor: Molto passionato, ma non troppo Allegro
INTERMISSION
ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-56)
Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 14 (Grande Sonate) (1836, rev.1853)
Allegro
Scherzo: Molto commodo
Quasi Variazioni: Andantino de Clara Wieck
Prestissimo possible
Program Notes
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born in Hamburg, Germany, May 7, 1833; died in Vienna, Austria, April 3, 1897
Four pieces from Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118 (1892)
Brahms started his career with a hat-trick of large-scale piano sonatas, Opp. 1, 2 and 5. The third was completed in October 1853 under the appreciative, but considered encouragement of Robert and Clara Schumann. Schumann perceptively described the sonatas as “symphonies in disguise” – a prescient remark, as the F minor would be Brahms’s last in the form. From then on, his large-scale ideas turned orchestral, while his piano writing evolved through variation form (on themes by Schumann, Handel and Paganini), eventually, toward the inward, more intimately drawn forms of the intermezzo, capriccio, romanze, and ballade.
The music of his four late collections of short, intimate piano pieces (Opp. 116 to 119) speaks the language of the end of an era rather than its beginning. Their construction reflects a lifetime of study and practical application of the entire available literature of Western classical music. Although Brahms is in reflective mood, in these 20 late ‘miniatures’, as he referred to them, the discipline behind them is rigorous.
The passionate first Intermezzo, in A minor, is tonally restless to the point of making it unstable and without a home key until its closing bars. Once established, in preparation for the following piece, the tonality immediately turns to the major. The A major Intermezzo is then a piece of gentle beauty and moments of aching poignancy. Like all the late piano pieces, its structure – externally at least – follows a simple ABA pattern. Internally, the music is intricately interrelated. “Your piano pieces . . . are not only reflections on the past,” Brahms’s friend, the Bach biographer Philipp Spitta, perceptively wrote to the composer, “but also prophetic of the future. I believe I understand you correctly in venturing the opinion that you wanted to hint at something of the sort with the intermezzos.”
The G minor Ballade is robust and incisive in its outer sections, maybe casting a glance backwards to the youthful vigour of Brahms’s earlier keyboard music. The F major Romanze is serenely introspective, a sort of distantly remembered song without words that constantly develops and evolves out of itself.
CLARA SCHUMANN, née WIECK
Born in Leipzig, September 13, 1819; died in Frankfurt, May 20, 1896
Variations on a theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 20 (1853)
“I began to fantasise on the theme and was so carried away that I had to try and work it out on paper,” wrote Clara Schumann in a diary entry May 15, 1853. Clara, one of the 19th century’s great pianists, with a career, a large family and living with an already mentally fragile husband, had no time for composition for five years. “I now want to write variations on a theme of Robert’s out of Bunte Blätter, for his birthday,” she continued. “I was quite carried away by it and am grateful that I still have some creative power left.”
Just months after the birth of their seventh child, Eugenie, both Schumanns were honoured with a ‘Schumann Week’ in Leipzig. Clara received invitations to perform in England. Then, in early May 1853, she gave acclaimed performances at the Lower Rhine Music Festival – where a long running partnership with violinist Joseph Joachim began. Back in Düsseldorf, she spent the next few weeks crafting a birthday gift for Robert: seven variations on the fourth piece from his Bunte Blätter, Op. 99 (1841).
Its wistful, pensive, at times even melancholy theme clearly threads through all seven variations – from the skittish impetuosity of No. 2 to the storming octave étude of No. 5. No. 4 buries the theme between the hands, creating a third-hand illusion, while No. 6, written as a canon, recalls the Bach counterpoint Robert and Clara studied together as newlyweds. Hints of foreboding are gently eased by the consoling warmth of the major key in No. 3, and again as No. 7 glides into the major before closing in quiet reverence, chorale-like, with a subdued flourish.
“To my beloved husband on the 8th of June 1853, this humble, renewed essay by his old Clara,” she inscribed on the gift copy – adorned with borders, tied with ribbon. It was Robert’s 43rd birthday. It would be their last together.
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born in Hamburg, Germany, May 7, 1833; died in Vienna, Austria, April 3, 1897
Two Rhapsodies, Op. 79 (1879)
The two Op. 79 Rhapsodies, written during the productive summer of 1879, mark Brahms’s final works for solo piano before the introspective miniatures of his late years. The manuscript of the B minor Rhapsody shows that he first titled it Capriccio – a label that, even with some imagination, sits oddly with the music’s fiery passion, or with the equally agitated G minor Rhapsody, whose troubled undercurrents give it an unsettled edge.
When Brahms proposed changing the title to Rhapsody, the dedicatee – amateur pianist, friend, and briefly former pupil Elisabet von Herzogenberg – gave a response that seems to echo the composer’s own doubts. “You know, I am always most partial to the non-committal word Klavierstücke (Piano Piece),” she wrote. “But probably that won’t do. In which case the name Rhapsodien is the best, I expect, although the clearly defined form of both pieces seems at variance with one’s conception of a rhapsody.”
She was right. The B minor Rhapsody’s stormy grandeur and consoling central episode follow a clear ABA plan, while the G minor Rhapsody, more compact and tightly argued, uses a taut sonata form, weaving moments of inward brooding over a dark, ominous bass. Rhapsodic in spirit, perhaps – but architecturally, pure Brahms.
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Born in Zwickau, Saxony, June 8, 1810; died in Endenich, nr Bonn, July 29, 1856
Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 14 (Grande Sonate) (1836, rev.1853)
Schumann’s Piano Sonata in F minor is steeped in biography. In 1836, Robert and the young Clara Wieck were deeply in love, but her father, Friedrich Wieck (Schumann’s piano teacher), forcibly separated them. In March Schumann wrote: “[Wieck] is carrying on like a madman and forbids Clara and me to have contact under pain of death.” Schumann was devastated, and during that bleak summer – what he called his “darkest period” – he poured his longing into a large-scale five-movement sonata, later revised into what we know as Op. 14. At its emotional core lies a theme by Clara herself – an Andantino melody, now lost in her own output, but preserved in Schumann’s variations movement. This theme, with its subdued falling motif over a slow drumbeat, permeates the entire sonata, becoming a private cipher of love and separation.
The work went through three versions. The first, completed in June 1836, was a five-movement Sonata, with two scherzos. The published version later that year, now retitled Concert sans orchestra (Concerto without orchestra), dropped the scherzos and introduced a new finale. Seventeen years later, in 1853, Schumann made another sweeping revision. He restored the second scherzo, thoroughly reworked passages and textures of the opening movement, re-notated and adjusted the finale, and issued the four-movement Grande Sonate that will be played today.
The first movement, Allegro, opens stormily, with an angry statement of the Clara motif of a falling fifth in left-hand octaves. As the theme evolves, its restless, constantly developing gestures repeatedly circle back to the Clara motif, as if memory interrupts passion. Structurally unorthodox but nevertheless compelling, the development – traditionally centrally positioned – is here tautly contained within the opening section and its varied recapitulation, culminating in a powerful, still angry coda. The restored Scherzo in D-flat major follows, alternately vigorous and lyrical, but highly original in concept. Clara’s motif reappears somewhat in disguise in its opening phrase and later transformed into playful dance rhythms. Its trio is, strikingly, in D major and the transition back to D-flat is seamlessly handled.
The third movement, cryptically titled Quasi variazioni, presents four variations on an Andantino by Clara Wieck. Schumann leaves the theme virtually untouched, caressed rather than transformed, each variation shading its mood with tender resignation. The movement has an improvisatory feeling, perhaps because Schumann builds variations on different phrases of the theme in a non-linear manner. The finale, a fiery Prestissimo possibile, follows a similar structural trajectory to that of the opening movement, now with the motif resurfacing in fleeting glimpses amid cascading passagework and urgent rhythms. Technically, a formidable challenge with its breathless flow of triplets and exhilarating dialogue between the hands, the movement drives toward a forceful resolution bringing release with the concluding shift to F major.
For Schumann, the sonata was inseparable from Clara. In 1838, he confessed to her: “I wrote a concerto for you – one sole cry of the heart for you in which your theme assumed so many guises.” The ‘concerto’ was his ironic title for the earlier version of the sonata, but the sentiment still holds – Op. 14 is a passionate document born of love under siege. It has long remained little performed – its first public outing was by the young Brahms in 1862, six years after Schumann’s death.
— Program notes copyright © 2025 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca
COSE pre-concert: Fierbois
Caitlin Broms-Jacobs, oboe
Madeline Hildebrand, piano
Program
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958), arr. Caitlin Broms-Jacobs
The Lark Ascending (1914/20)
DAVID BRAID (b. 1975)
The Bird Fancyer´s New Delight (2023)
Clock-Caged Canary
Canary PTSD
Woodlark Dogfight
Trosil’s Wing
Country Linnett
CHARLES KOECHLIN (1867-1950)
Oboe Sonata, Op. 58 (1916)
Allegro moderato
Scherzo: Allegro vivo
JOCELYN MORLOCK (1969-2023), arr. Caitlin Broms-Jacobs
Halcyon (2003)
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS, arr. Caitlin Broms-Jacobs
Born in Down Ampney, England, October 12, 1872; died in London, August 26, 1958
The Lark Ascending: Romance for violin and orchestra (1914, rev. 1920)
The beloved piece, The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams, arranged for oboe and piano by Caitlin Broms-Jacobs, captures the spirit of a song lark at dawn, a metaphor for the resilience of the human spirit. The opening cadenza evokes a sense of quiet questioning, gentle wonder, and deep tranquillity. Moments of stillness give way to flurries of motion, then rise again into soaring, lyrical heights. Let the stillness in your own soul meet the music . . . and listen as the lark ascends.
DAVID BRAID
Born in Hamilton, ON, March 25, 1975
The Bird Fancyer´s New Delight (2023)
Clock-Caged Canary
Canary PTSD
Woodlark Dogfight
Trosil’s Wing
Country Linnett
The original manuscript, The Bird Fancyer's Delight (c. 1715) by the English composer, John Walsh, contains bird motifs, transcribed, extemporised, and reimagined in the year, 2023, to produce The Bird Fancyer's New Delight by Canadian composer, David Braid.
CHARLES KOECHLIN
Born in Paris, November 27, 1867; died in Le Canadel, Var, December 31, 1950
Oboe Sonata, Op. 58 (1916)
Allegro moderato
Scherzo: Allegro vivo
Composed between 1911 and 1916, Koechlin’s four-movement Oboe Sonata, Op. 58 blends Impressionistic colour, Romantic lyricism, and early Modernist nuance. The first movement subtitled "The Earth, Work in the Fields,” evokes a quiet majesty, suggesting the slow unfolding of nature, ripening crops, or the sun itself, vast and eternal, rising over the land. In contrast, the second movement, a Scherzo subtitled A Dance of Fauns in the Forest, is light and playful, capturing the mischievous spirit of mythical woodland creatures in a shimmering, elusive dance.
-- Program notes by Caitlin Broms-Jacobs
JOCELYN MORLOCK
Born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, December 14, 1969; died in Vancouver, March 27, 2023
Halcyon, (2003), arr. Caitlin Broms-Jacobs
Halcyon: a bird, otherwise known as the kingfisher, believed to calm storms during the time of its incubation. According to legend, Alcyon's husband Ceyx is downed at sea, with his last thought being of her and that, if he doesn't live, he may return to her after death. When his body floats back to her, out of grief she throws herself into the sea, but as she does, she is turned into a bird. In her sorrow, she flies over her husband and enfolds him with her wings. The gods take pity on them and turn both into kingfishers. During the two weeks around the Winter Solstice in which the kingfishers nest and incubate their young, the weather is unusually placid, hence the term "Halcyon Days".
-- Jocelyn Morlock
What Makes It Great? The Four Seasons
December 7, 2025
Program
ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741)
Le Quattro Stagioni (The Four Seasons)
Spring
Summer
Program Notes
LE QUATTRO STAGIONI (THE FOUR SEASONS) (1716-17)
ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741)
Born in Venice, March 4, 1678; died in Vienna, July 27/28, 1741
Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons open a set of twelve concertos published in 1725 as Op. 8, under the evocative title Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (The Contest between Harmony and Invention). In these four concertos, Vivaldi explores the balance between the rational structure of music and the imaginative world of sound painting. He is thought to have written the accompanying sonnets himself. When the music was published, he printed lines from each poem directly into the score, linking them precisely to the music.
Each concerto follows a structure Vivaldi helped to standardise: that of two fast outer movements, framing a slower middle movement. The fast movements include recurring ritornelli (literally ‘little returns’) where the full orchestra returns regularly with familiar material. In between these passages are episodes featuring the soloist. In Spring, these episodes evoke birdsong, murmuring brooks, breezes, a sudden thunderstorm – and then the return of calm.
The middle movements usually capture a single mood. Yet even here, Vivaldi creates vivid soundscapes. In Spring, the slow movement layers rustling leaves (rocking violin figures), the quiet song of a sleeping goatherd, and – most memorably – a barking dog, where the violas growl molto forte e strappato: very loud and rough.
Three centuries on, Vivaldi’s imagery still leaps off the page. In Summer, a shepherd trembles (halting violins) beneath buzzing insects and distant thunder (gritty tremolos near the bridge). In Autumn, the hunt is on: horn-like calls, barking dogs, gunfire, and fleeing prey fill the solo violin line. From the bright F major key of la caccia, Vivaldi turns to the darker, more desolate key of F minor for Winter. Now we shiver against the icy wind (frosty string notes clash together) and stamp our feet (accented notes).
Vivaldi’s sense of humanity’s place in Nature feels strikingly modern. The Four Seasons go far beyond musical picture-painting. Like Romantic programme music, they aim – in Beethoven’s words – to be “more an expression of feeling than painting.”
— Program notes copyright © 2025 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca