October 12 & 13, 2025
october concert
Joseph Haydn
Divertimento in E-flat major, Hob.IV:5
Max Bruch
8 Pieces for Clarinet, Viola and Piano, Op.83
Ernő Dohnányi
Sextet Op. 37
Sunday, October 12, 3 pm * Round Hill Community Church * 395 Round Hill Road, Greenwich, CT
Monday, October 13, 7:30 pm * Greenwich Historical Society * 47 Strickland Road, Cos Cob
Program Notes
The Julliard String Quartet. The Beaux Arts Trio. The Dorian Wind Quintet. The American Brass Quintet. These ensembles perform(ed) a wealth of music written for established instrumental combinations, combinations that composers prize for their utility, flexibility, and lineage. But composers have also explored the potential of other instrumental combinations: Stravinsky paired high and low members of each major instrumental group wedded with percussion in The Soldier’s Tale when his access to orchestras was limited while living in Switzerland during WWI; Brahms, hoping for a tidy profit, conceived his Liebeslieder Waltzes for mixed voices and piano four hands for domestic music-making before the era of sound reproduction; Bartok devised his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion as a solution to his conviction that piano is a percussive device ill-suited to blending with most other instruments. The unique instrumental requirements of such pieces limit how often they are performed. But not today in Greenwich.
As majordomo of Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy’s sprawling musical establishment at Schloss Esterházy and Esterháza, part of Joseph Haydn’s (1732-1809) job was to compose music – lots of music – for many different purposes. A new piece for Prince Nikolaus to play that evening on his favorite instrument, the baryton? (“…tell him at the same time that he is to write six more pieces like those he has just sent me, together with two solos, to be delivered as soon as possible.”) Right away! (Haydn eventually wrote over 200 pieces using baryton). A new opera for the court marionette theater honoring a visit by Empress Maria Theresa? Done. A concerto to feature a player in the court orchestra? Another symphony? More string quartets?
And then there were the divertimenti. Whatever a divertimento was (and Haydn wrote close to 100), its instrumentation (typically modest), its form (it could have anywhere from a couple to ten movements), and its musical techniques were very flexible. But whatever its manifestation, a divertimento was meant to provide light entertainment or background music.
Haydn’s Divertimento in E-flat major, Hob.IV:5, (1767), for the unusual combination of natural (rather than the modern valve) horn, violin and cello, may have been light entertainment for Haydn’s royal patrons, but it was a heavy lift for the horn player from the prince’s court orchestra. Its two movements, a theme with two variations followed by a brief finale, feature a high flying, florid horn part that confounds scholars today. Was it written for a player who could manage the extremely high notes of the natural horn’s harmonic overtone series? Or did the player use the recently developed technique of altering the pitch by placing their hand in the bell of their instrument? No one knows for sure. What everyone does know is that the part remains a virtuosic showpiece, even on the modern valve horn.
The German composer Max Bruch (1838-1920) was a man of his time who had the misfortune of living a long life. He formed his musical sensibilities during the heyday of Brahms, Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner and planted his flag firmly in conservative soil, composing operas, symphonies, chamber music, concertos, choral pieces, et.al., while choosing not to compose the music dramas and symphonic poems favored by the “New German School.” And while he deepened his craft throughout his life, his music never ventured far beyond the conservative style he embraced as young man. His last work, the intensely romantic Octet for strings, written in 1920 (post WWI!), was composed after the death of Debussy and the premieres of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (1913), Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912), and Norworth/Tilzer’s “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (1908). Yet, as is the case with Dohnányi’s Sextet later on the program, we can now listen for what Bruch’s music has to offer rather than judge it by its date of composition.
Bruch composed his Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola and Piano, Op. 83 in 1910 for his son Max Felix Bruch, a clarinetist and music theory professor at the Hamburg Conservatory. The lush instrumentation (which Bruch reuses in his 1911 Concerto for Clarinet and Viola) features two coequal alto voices accompanied by piano (Bruch even considered adding a harp part) and follows prototypes by Mozart, Schumann, and Brahms. Each brief movement is a character piece that evokes a specific mood or emotion, à la Schumann. Movement No. V, “Rumänische Melodie,” uses a folk tune, a favorite technique of Bruch’s. Melodies are lyrical, harmonies, opulent.
But surprisingly, Bruch did not compose Op. 83 as a unified concert work. Rather it is a compilation of pieces that were also published separately, with Bruch suggesting that the performers choose and reorder movements as they wish – the musical equivalent of build-ing with LEGO blocks. Not to worry. The lapidary beauty of each piece ensures, whatever the final layout, that the result rewards the listener.
At the beginning of the 20th century, there were three composers who seemed to represent the future of Hungarian music: Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály and Ernő Dohnányi (1877-1960). But while the music of Bartók and Kodály has flourished, Dohnányi’s music is rarely played today. Why? A clue may be that Dohnányi published his works as the Germanized Ernst von, rather than the Hungarian Ernő, Dohnányi.
Like Richard Strauss and Sergei Rachmaninov, Dohnányi came of age as a composer just before the magnificent splintering of Western musical practice at the turn of the 20th century, finding his early bearings in German, rather than Hungarian, music, especially the music of Brahms. He was 18 when he completed his first published work (a piano quintet praised by Brahms), graduated early at age 20 from the Budapest Academy, made his first international tour as a pianist in 1897, later leading and teaching the Budapest Academy, becoming music director of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra and the Hungarian State Radio… all in the service of expanding, promoting, and improving Hungarian musical culture. In short, according to Grove Music Online, “by 1900 (Dohnányi) had established himself, in both Europe and the USA, as the greatest Hungarian pianist and composer after Liszt.”
But while Dohnányi was at the center of Hungarian cosmopolitan musical life, his slightly younger colleagues, Bartók and Kodály, were in the countryside collecting and recording folk music. This exposure to folk music became their inspiration and the source of their compositional language. And during the musical tumult of the early 20th century (think Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg), music employing such influences displaced music composed in the German Romantic style Dohnányi favored.
Not that Dohnányi discouraged his colleagues’ musical explorations. Indeed, Dohnányi promoted their music and careers, even losing his position at the Budapest Academy for refusing to fire Kodály from the faculty. And sadly, Dohnányi’s music and career were plagued by illness, scurrilous allegations in Hungary of being a Nazi sympathizer (even though both his son and his son-in-law were executed by the Nazis in 1945 and he disbanded the Budapest Philharmonic rather than fire its Jewish players), and, like Strauss, Rachmaninov, and Bruch, a reputation of composing music stuck in the Romantic era. And, like Strauss, Rachmaninov, and Bruch, the passing of time allows present day listeners to appreciate the character and achievement of Dohnányi’s music.
An excellent example of that character is the Sextet, Op. 37, his last chamber work. Composed in 1935 when Dohnányi was bedridden with a bout of thrombosis, it is scored for the rarely used combination of horn, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano. Dohnányi wrings every bit of color he can over the course of four movements, uniting the very different character of each movement with a descending two-note gesture. The dramatic, turbulent first movement, the counterintuitive Intermezzo with a sinister march bracketed by wistful Adagios, and the capricious third movement (a theme and variations) build up to a dramatic finale signaled by the horn call that began the first movement. Or so Dohnányi leads you to expect. Rather, the character of the finale is playful, even jazzy. Indeed, one writer wrote that “the music sounds like an inebriated Viennese hotel band’s haphazard attempt to render Gershwin.”
© 2025 Ubaldo Valli