III. Abyss of Birds
The versatile Gunther Schuller is well-known as a composer of both jazz and classical music, as a conductor, and also as a horn player. It comes as no surprise then that the writing for horn in his Romantic Sonata for Clarinet, Horn and Piano is effective and idiomatic. The current revision of this piece was completed in 1983, but the composition was originally written in 1941 when Schuller was only 16 years old. Even as a young man, he was skilled at creative rhythmic and instrumental combinations, and this early piece also shows the influence of jazz on his compositions.
In the opening of the adagietto first movement, the horn plays the exact same ascending four-note pattern six times, while the added sonorities of the clarinet and piano develop the theme into different and interesting textures. The remainder of the movement embodies a slow and dramatic Neo-Romantic character. The second movement contains a precariously high, haunting melody first presented by the clarinet, then the horn, then the horn and clarinet in a unison which has an ethereal and beautiful quality. Agitation and tempest stir the middle section before the music relaxes back into a restatement of the original melody. The last movement begins with a march- like tune in the horn and punctuated jazzy chords in the piano. A brooding tone overtakes a short middle section, and the light-hearted march returns to round everything off.
In 1940, composer Olivier Messiaen, a Roman Catholic and spiritual mystic, was captured and held as a prisoner of war in a German war camp. It was there that he wrote his Quartet for the End of Time. Himself a pianist, he found among the other prisoners a clarinetist, a violinist, and a cellist. On January 15, 1941, Messiaen’s group of musicians debuted his quartet for about 400 fellow prisoners. The music is based on chapter 10 from the Book of Revelation in which the seventh angel descends to announce that there will be time no longer. Messiaen musically builds on this idea by doing away with the standard time signatures of Western classical music and instead developing a varied and flexible rhythmic system, based in part on ancient Hindu rhythms. In a preface to the score, he describes the third movement for solo clarinet in this way: “Abyss of the birds. Clarinet alone. The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness. The birds are the opposite to Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.”
En Fôret was written in 1941 as a final exam piece for Paris Conservatory graduate students by composer, conductor and violinist, Eugène Bozza. Exam pieces, by design, contained a variety of playing styles and effects to test the competency of the students. Such exams provided composers like Bozza with a unique outlet for the creation of virtuosic and ingenious showpieces for solo instruments. In En Fôret, Bozza borrows from Ottorino Respighi’s Feste Romane and incorporates quotations from St. Hubert’s hunting call as well as the Gregorian chant “Victimae paschali laudes.” Along with these melodic themes he includes many technical aspects of horn playing such as trills, glissandi, muted and stopped passages. The title means “in the forest,” and the music provides the listener with a vivid journey through a wooded setting in which one comes upon various scenes and characters ranging from hunters to monks.
The great Russian musician Sergei Rachmaninov, masterful and lush composer for the piano, frequently performed his own works, the recordings of which give modern performers valuable insight into the interpretation of his own works. His Etude-Tableau in C minor, Op. 33, No. 3 is one of two piano solos that was written in 1911 to be a “picture piece” or a musical manifestation of visual stimuli. The writing of these etudes is rather advanced and less predictable than some of his earlier preludes, while Rachmaninoff biographer Max Harrison calls the études-tableaux "studies in composition" that "investigate the transformation of rather specific climates of feeling via piano textures and sonorities.” Although Rachmaninoff wrote nine pieces for Op. 33, he only published six in 1914. No. 3 is one that was published posthumously but is often inserted, along with No. 5, among the first six.
Carl Reinecke was a celebrated concert pianist, conductor, director of the Leipzig Conservatory and composer whose many works were frequently performed during his lifetime. An impressive list of his students includes Edvard Grieg, Christian Sinding, Leoš Janáček, Isaac Albéniz, Johan Svendsen, Richard Franck, Felix Weingartner, and Max Bruch. For his accomplishments, it is surprising that his fame has faded in modern society. His Trio in B flat, Op. 274, composed in 1905, is written in a style similar to Brahms’ Horn Trio. The piano writing is thick and lushly Romantic while the horn and clarinet frequently trade off statements of the melodies and sometimes play in unison to create a unique texture.
The piece opens with an octave statement from the horn which serves as the thematic material for the rest of the first movement. A slow second movement allows the listener’s ear to take in the rich harmonies, while the third movement is a fast paced Scherzo and Trio written in 3/4 time. The final movement frequently displaces the beat using ties over the barlines which elongates the melody and delays its resolution. As a whole, the Romantic style of the trio make for pleasing melodic and harmonic listening.
Franz Schubert’s Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, which translates to The Shepherd on the Rock, was composed in 1828 during the last few months of the composer’s life. It was written for soprano Anna Milder-Hauptmann who wanted a work that expressed a wide range of emotions. While the piece is characterized as a lied, it can also be thought of as chamber music for a trio, the voice and the clarinet having equally challenging parts. The song is in three sections, each containing a contrasting mood echoing the sentiments of the text. The first section speaks of a lonely shepherd standing on a rock and singing down into the valley which echoes back to him. The solitude of the echoes cause him grief, and the music of the second section turns dark and mournful. But he does not remain in misery forever and is cheered by the idea of the coming of Spring which signifies new life and is characterized by rapidly ascending scales in the voice and clarinet.
-Notes by Gina Gillie
About the Performers
Dr. Gina Gillie is an Assistant Professor of Music at Pacific Lutheran University where she teaches horn and aural skills, conducts a horn choir, and performs frequently with faculty groups and in solo and chamber recitals. As an orchestral player, she is currently Assistant Principal with the Tacoma Symphony and has also played with the Northwest Sinfonietta, the LaCrosse Symphony Orchestra, the Central Wisconsin Symphony Orchestra and the Beloit-Janesville Symphony Orchestra. She is a member of two faculty chamber ensembles at PLU, the Camas Wind Quintet and the Lyric Brass Quintet. Dr. Gillie studied horn performance with Douglas Hill at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she received her Masters degree in 2006 and her Doctorate of Musical Arts in 2009. She completed her Bachelors degree at Pacific Lutheran University in 2004 studying with Kathleen Vaught Farner. As a vocalist, Dr. Gillie has participated in many choirs including the Choir of the West at PLU and PLU’s Choral Union. She frequently incorporates vocal chamber music into her yearly horn recitals as an outlet for vocal performance.
Craig Rine is an Affiliate Artist and Lecturer at Pacific Lutheran University. Mr. Rine is currently principal clarinet of the Tacoma Symphony and the Northwest Sinfonietta. Since moving to the Pacific Northwest in 1988 he has worked extensively with the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera, Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Northwest Chamber Orchestra and the Auburn Symphony. In addition, Mr. Rine teaches band at Curtis Junior High School.
Amy Grinsteiner holds a Diploma of Postgraduate Performance and L.R.A.M. Teaching Certificate from the Royal Academy of Music in London, a Master of Music Degree in Piano Performance from the Eastman School of Music, and Bachelor of Music degree in Piano Performance from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her primary teachers were Dennis Alexander, Angela Cheng, Nelita True and Christopher Elton, with additional studies with Paul Lewis. Ms. Grinsteiner is on the piano faculty at Pacific Lutheran University and performs regularly at PLU as an Affiliate Artist in addition to performances on the Second City Chamber Series and the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Michigan. This past summer she served as the Faculty Program Coordinator for the first University of Washington Summer Piano Institute, and traveled to London on a Student-Faculty Wang Center Grant. The research grant project, "Music as a hub in the London community," involved studying audience development and the impact of community outreach work. Since 2007, Ms. Grinsteiner has also been Director of the Young Chamber Players, the educational arm of the Second City Chamber Series. She is currently a D.M.A. candidate at the University of Washington in Seattle where she studies with Dr. Robin McCabe.
