March 1-2, 2026

March Concert

Tomaso Albinoni
Trumpet Concerto in B-flat major, Op.7 No.3

Gioachino Rossini
String Sonata No. 2 in A major

Cécile Chaminade
Piano Trio No.2 in A minor, Op.34

Camille Saint-Saëns
Septet, Op.65

Sunday, March 1, 3 pm * Round Hill Community Church * 395 Round Hill Road, Greenwich, CT
Monday, March 2, 7:30 pm * Greenwich Historical Society * 47 Strickland Road, Cos Cob

Program Notes

Benedictine monks and Arab scholars, Margaret Maher, and Hugo de Vries helped save or revive works by ancient Greek writers, Emily Dickinson, and Gregor Mendel respectively, preventing their work from disappearing down history’s Orwellian “memory hole”. 

Sadly, because of wars, much of the world’s cultural legacy has disappeared. The massive loss of humanity’s heritage during WWII beggars description. For example, among the 200,000 items in the Saxon State Library that were destroyed during the bombing of Dresden were thousands of scores by Heinichen, Fasch, and Hasse, which may be why you have never heard of them, as well as opera scores by Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1751). 

Born and raised in opera-besotted Venice, Albinoni was celebrated for his 81 operas, most of which were lost in the bombing. As a result, with the post-war revival of interest in early music, Albinoni is remembered today for his instrumental music – sonatas, sinfonias, and concertos, music admired by Bach, who wrote fugues based on Albinoni’s themes and used Albinoni’s bass lines as teaching tools.

Albinoni’s best-known works are his oboe concertos from his Op. 7 (1715). In three movements (fast-slow-fast), those concertos, some of the first for oboe, illustrate the transition in baroque practice from using a group of soloists (the concerto grosso, exemplified by the Brandenburg Concertos) to one soloist. This performance of Op. 7, No. 3 also uses another baroque practice – swapping out the oboe for a trumpet. Oboe or trumpet, the music gives the soloist the opportunity to display their technical brilliance and lyric expression. 

Writings about Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) typically emphasize the comic. His opera buffas; his legendary wit (on writing an overture: “Wait until the evening before opening night. Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it be the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair. In my time, all the impresarios in Italy were bald at thirty.”); his soirées at his home outside Paris (where Liszt, Verdi, and Saint-Saëns were served Tournedos Rossini for dinner then listened to Rossini’s latest musical amuse-bouches, salon pieces he called Sins of Old Age); and even his birthday on February 29 (making 2024 - shades of Pirates of Penzance - his 56th birthday) gild that narrative.

But while we may delight in listening to Barbiere, L'italiana, and Cenerentola when we think of the silly plots, consider Wagner’s critique that "Rossini’s melodies are like perfumed soap bubbles – pleasing, brilliantly colored, but vanishing without a trace," and discover that chunks of Rossini’s operas were recycled from earlier works (ecologically sound composing?), Schumann’s slam that Rossini was a “butterfly” who could be crushed by the beating wings of Beethoven’s “eagle” suggests a different narrative – that Rossini’s music was trivial.  

But that viewpoint ignores Rossini’s craftsmanship in composing music that expressed his intent, comic or serious (half of his output was opera seria). Yes, once while in bed, he wrote a second aria rather than picking up one that fell to the floor. But which is more important – Rossini’s lassitude or his compositional facility? And that facility manifested early. 

In 1802, Rossini's parents, both musicians, befriended a young, wealthy businessman and amateur bass player named Agostino Triossi, who, in the summer of 1804, invited Gioachino to stay in his villa in Conventello, near Ravenna. Triossi asked the 12-year-old Gioachino to write string sonatas for Triossi, his cousins (on violin and cello) and Gioachino (on violin) to play. Written in three days, the original version of the six sonatas (Rossini’s earliest compositions) was somehow lost and rediscovered, somewhat improbably, at the Library of Congress in 1954.

The String Sonata No. 2 in A Major follows the template used for all the sonatas. In three movements (fast-slow-fast), the virtuosic parts have a lyric fluency and rhythmic élan that presage qualities that the adult Rossini would use so effectively.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “(Americans)… have commercial and industrial associations…., but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small.” And indeed, America has had the Rotary, the Kiwanis, Scouting, the PTA, the Grange, the Noah’s Ark Lodges (Elks, Moose, Eagles, Owls...) as well as societies devoted to the playing and promotion of a composer’s music – Chopin, Coleridge-Taylor, Wagner, and the Parisian-born Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944). 

Cécile Chaminade? A female composer who has had possibly over 200 clubs named after her and is practically unknown today? What happened? 

In her day, Chaminade’s music (character pieces for piano and songs) was enormously popular, allowing her to live off royalties and fees from her concert tours as a pianist playing her compositions. (Listen on YouTube).

But her focus after 1887 on sellable salon music, possibly due to financial pressures after her father’s death, also meant that her music would become unfashionable. Young enough to be friends with Saint-Saëns, yet living almost as long as Bartók and Webern, in the 20th century her French romantic style was deemed passé. (For a visual analog, compare The Snake Charmer (1879) by Jean-Léon Gérôme with works by Monet and Cézanne.) 

And then there was (yet again) the sexism. Chaminade’s salon music was considered “feminine” and “superficial”, while the large-scale pieces she composed before 1887 were “too virile” and “masculine”. So, while Scarf Dance (which sold over 5 million copies) can still occasionally be found in piano anthologies, substantial pieces such as the Piano Trio in A minor Op. 34 have been completely forgotten – until now. 

Premiered in 1886 with Chaminade at the piano and dedicated to cellist and teacher Jules Delsart, it is among the last group of large works Chaminade composed before changing her focus in 1887. Its three movements, from the dramatic, declamatory opening of the first, through the soulful, singing second, to the thrilling, driving finale, give lie to Chaminade’s music being too “masculine.” 

In 19th century France, ambitious composers wrote operas. French composers such as Bizet (Carmen took some time), Gounod, and Massenet as well as Rossini, Verdi, and even Wagner (for a while) all had a go at achieving Parisian operatic success. Instrumental music – symphonies and chamber music – was the bailiwick of German composers. 

Enter Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921). Born in Paris, he was not only a musical prodigy (he composed his first piece when he was 3) and a virtuoso pianist and organist (Watch on YouTube), but also a prolific writer of plays and essays on music, astronomy, philosophy, lepidopterology, and archaeology. Saint-Saëns (as well as Berlioz) is an outlier, most remembered as a composer of instrumental music (Carnival of the Animals, Symphony No. 3 [“Organ”], concert works for solo violin, cello, and piano, symphonic poems such as Danse Macabre, and the first original film score), rather than Samson and Delilah, Saint-Saëns’s only opera out of thirteen that still receives an occasional performance. 

This may be a result of Saint-Saëns’s youthful interests – his enthusiasm for the Germanic musical innovations of Schumann, Wagner (whom he knew), and Liszt (a lifelong friend), as well as his interest in early French musical forms and procedures. (He was editor-in-chief for a complete edition of Rameau.) These interests can be seen in Symphony No. 3, (dedicated to Liszt), which utilizes Liszt’s techniques of thematic transformation and structural experimentation, and the Septet, Op. 65, which looks back to French baroque traditions. 

In 1861 the French mathematician Émile Lemoine (1840-1912) and fellow students played string quartets during breaks in their studies at the École Polytechnique. Other students teased them, yelling, “There they are again, blowing their trumpets.” Lemoine decided to own the gibe, dubbing the group “La Trompette”, and establishing it as a private music salon that promoted (Germanic) chamber music in France for over fifty years, engaging performers such as Casals, Cortot, and Koussevitzky. 

Lemoine pestered his friend and salon member Saint-Saëns to compose a piece that included a trumpet part for the society. After demurring for years (“I’ll create a concerto for you for 25 guitars”), Saint-Saëns finally wrote a Préambule for trumpet, string quartet, bass and piano in 1879, adding three movements, Menuet, Intermède, and Gavotte et Final, in 1880. The music’s clarity and directness show Saint-Saëns’ use of baroque forms and his skill in balancing a heterogenous ensemble. Ironically, the Septet was a hit, and Saint-Saëns was tickled that “this piece that I did not want to write…has become one of my great successes.”

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