CM Notes » Adaskin Trio
Murray Adaskin 1906 - 2002 Divertimento for String Trio. No. 9
The revered Canadian composer Murray Adaskin was the inspiration for the name of this ensemble. He prepared the work for the trio in 1998, adapting a piece he had written fifty years before, the Serenade Concertante for Orchestra. Frances James Adaskin, the composer’s first wife, delighted in this piece. It was played very frequently and she called it his “C sharp minor Prelude”.
Adaskin was born in Toronto, and made a living as violinist. In the 1950s he went into academic life, and served as chair of the music department at the University of Saskatchewan until 1966. He subsequently devoted himself to composition.
The conductor of the CBC Vancouver Chamber orchestra, John Avison, commissioned Adaskin to write the Serenade in 1954. The orchestra gave the first performance of the brief, one movement work. According to the music critic of the Toronto Globe and Mail, Frank Haworth, this is “an urbane and occasionally skittish work.” It blended “contrapuntal ingenuities with syncopated quips” in an accessible idiom. Adaskin firmly rooted the piece in standard harmonic and rhythmic systems but used more modern techniques to imbue the work with a fresh sound. Haworth thought the piece enjoyed “modern freedoms without going to modern extremes”.
Other critics have said essentially the same thing. It reflects the composer’s own witty and optimistic personality.
Benjamin Britten 1913 - 1976 Phantasy for oboe, violin, viola and cello opus 2 (1932)
Edith Britten’s youngest son was aptly named Benjamin. He was clearly musical as a very young child. In his mother’s mind he was the re-incarnation of the infant Mozart and at one time she confidently predicted he would be the “Fourth ‘B’: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and now Britten”. Mrs Britten lived long enough to see him launched on his exceptional career, winning prizes and becoming internationally known while still a youth.
Benjamin Britten wrote two Phantasies, both as entries in an unusual competition sponsored by Walter Willson Cobbett. Cobbett wanted to revive English music and offered the prize for a work in one movement, under the title “Fantasy”, to last no more than twelve minutes. The fantasy form was in honor of Purcell. Walter Cobbett devoted himself to chamber music, using his quite considerable wealth in very constructive ways. Britten won this prize in 1931 with his Phantasy Quintet while still a student at the Royal College of Music.
The Phantasy for oboe and strings did not win a prize but has become one of Britten’s most popular pieces. It contains references to several of the styles prevalent in the late 1920s yet one still recognizes Britten’s own voice. By turns brittle in the mode of the French “Les Six”, and rhapsodic in the English vein, it has a unique structure which faintly echoes Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
In a circular structure, the opening Marcia also closes the piece, each instrument receding in the order in which it entered. Even at such an early stage of his career Britten understood how to extract rich sonority from the very slender resources of four instruments. Arpeggiation in the strings anchors the descanting oboe in the first section. This contrasts with gossamer pianissimo in the middle section after the oboe has been silent and re-enters almost stealthily.
The great English oboist Leon Goosens gave the first performance of the Phantasy in 1933 in a BBC radio broadcast with the International String Quartet.
Ernst von Dohnanyi 1877 - 1960 Serenade in C major for string trio (1902)
It is very sad that the great Hungarian musician Ernst von Dohnanyi is known to today’s audiences primarily as the composer of Variations on a Nursery Theme. This extraordinary distortion of a once major reputation stems from many factors. Some of it is because his late Romantic style has been out of fashion for a long time. Some could be political, even though he was not a political person. In the dark days of the Fascist infiltration of Hungarian politics, he tried to protect the Jewish musicians in his orchestra. No charges were ever leveled against him. Everything was in the form of innuendo.
Unlike other musicians who came from the European upper classes, Dohnanyi did not have to struggle against his family’s disapproval. On the contrary, his father, an excellent amateur cellist, undertook his son’s musical education with the help of the local organist.
Ernst von Dohnanyi was born and grew up in Hungary but decided to study music in Berlin after a period at the Budapest Academy. Bela Bartok was one of his school friends and later followed him to Berlin.
Hans Richter was the conductor of the symphony orchestra in Berlin. In 1898, Richter took the orchestra to London on tour and Dohnanyi made his international debut playing Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto. The results were electrifying. By 1900, he was considered to be the legitimate successor to Liszt.
Brahms arranged for the first performance of Dohnanyi’s piano quintet before his death in 1897. Joachim persuaded him to teach at the Berlin Hochshule fur Musik. He stayed there for ten years, writing some of his finest works. In 1915, Dohnanyi returned to Budapest and worked there for almost thirty years, building the modern Hungarian musical scene. He did it largely by himself. From 1919 to 1921, he organized more than 120 concerts using only the resources available to him in Hungary. Dohnanyi resurrected many works by the great masters which had been neglected or ignored.
After the war he went first to England and later to the United States. He spent the last years of his life teaching and conducting at Florida State University in Tallahassee, active until the very end.
Dohnanyi composed in the late nineteenth century mode. He did not occupy himself with musical nationalism or the modern idioms. The Serenade is closer in style to Brahms or Wagner than to Bartok or Kodaly, diatonic and with rich harmony. Possibly he has been sidelined because of this lack of innovation.
For this work, he combined elements of sonata form and the suite in a very orderly fashion. The Serenade opens with a Marcia in binary form. Although this seems to be conventional he uses subtle shifts and changes to give it life. The second movement, Romanza, is in ternary form. A conventional Scherzo with a trio forms the third movement. Dohnanyi employs counterpoint here very imaginatively. There is an unexpected double fugue in the middle of the trio.
The theme and variations of the fourth movement are perhaps the most masterly sections in this piece. There are five variations, each becoming gradually more complex and richer in texture as the movement progresses. At the end of the fifth movement, a Rondo, the Marcia returns to round out the work and give it balance.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) String Trio in D major, Op.9 No.2
Joseph Haydn was the master of the string trio as much as he was the master of the string quartet. Beethoven’s opus 9 trios lack the deft epigrammatic wit that is such a hallmark of Haydn’s work but Beethoven projects an extraordinary sense of energy, propulsiveness, and sheer drama.
Traeg published the Opus 9 trios in 1798. Beethoven had dedicated the trios to Count Johann Georg von Browne-Camus, a military figure of Irish descent who had served as a senior officer in the Russian army, rather than to his longtime supporter Prince Lichnowsky. Browne-Camus had moved to Vienna in 1795, and was very supportive of the young composer. Beethoven had already dedicated a set of 12 piano variations on a Russian theme to his wife, and had been rewarded with a very nice horse. The Count was “one of the strangest men, full of excellent talents and beautiful qualities of heart and spirit on the one hand, and on the other full of weakness and depravity,” according to one of his servants.
Until his health failed, Browne-Camus supported Beethoven very generously. In spite of Beethoven’s curmudgeonly behavior, many aristocrats and noblemen saw to it he had enough money to live on. His most consistent supporter was the Archduke Rudolph, youngest son of the Emperor.
The opening material of Opus 9, no. 2, a five note turn, provides a constant background until the movement gets underway with the main theme, and later comes to predominate in the movement. The second theme provides a contrast to this thematic obsessiveness, with a calm repeated-note accompaniment from the viola as the violin and cello have a dialogue around the middle voice. The harmonic implications of the opening gesture are explored in the development, where it is used as a pivot for some surprising harmonic shifts. The busy five-note theme reappears in the recapitulation.
The rhetorical second movement, Andante quasi allegretto, opens with a series of questioning chords. After the chords have been answered, the movement proceeds with a rapturous theme in the violin, answered by the cello in its highest register, and completed finally by the violin and viola in unison at the octave. The opening chords return, and then a dropping arpeggiated motive comes to the fore, leading to a gentle coda.
The Menuetto is full of slurs over the bar-line, shaping the phrases in Beethoven’s own fashion. Its trio is about as minimal as one can get, a bare outline of a few progressions marked pianissimo. The main theme of the brilliant Rondo is presented each time by the cello in its high register, perhaps another trace of Beethoven’s visit to Berlin and the brilliant playing of Duport.
(Notes by Robert Mealy, edited by Judith Taylor)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756 - 1791 Quartet in F major, K 370, for oboe, violin, viola and cello (1781)
In the late 1770s, Mozart went on an extended visit to Mannheim and Paris. This enabled him to escape from the tedium of Salzburg and the tyranny of Archbishop Colloredo for a while. In 1779 he returned to Salzburg and lived there another eighteen months. He did not compose any string quartets during that time, partly because he did not receive a commission. We tend to forget that Mozart had a practical side and preferred to write for reliable money. Three of the four flute quartets from that period were the result of a commission.
By 1780, Salzburg began to pall again and he went to Munich. He had met Friedrich Ramm, the prominent oboist, and wrote this quartet for him in 1781. The oboe quartet had several new features, reflecting Mozart’s continuing growth and maturation. Alfred Einstein commented that Mozart could do in one year what took Haydn ten. Mozart had pored over Haydn’s quartets to learn all he could from the older man. The series of six string quartets from the mid-1770s show the benefit of this study. In general Mozart advanced with a “more sensitive feeling for melody, a new use for counterpoint and changed his habits in rhythm.”
The oboe functions as an equal partner with the other instruments, rather than dominating them. Mozart jettisoned the old system in which one instrument predominated with everyone else playing obligato. In spite of this innovation, the reality is that an oboe has such a piercing tone, it cannot help but stand out. Even when the chords are evenly balanced there is an inevitable imbalance of sound. There have been technical changes in the structure of the oboe since Mozart’s day but the tonal range and timbre are much the same.
There was no minuet, even though Mozart previously had used four movements in his quartets. The oboe quartet offers strong contrasts of expression. After a cheerful first movement in which the composer cunningly inverted the opening theme to introduce the middle section, the adagio is lyrical and deeply expressive. The oboe elaborates discursively on a cantabile theme and shows its many possibilities.
Startling rhythmic effects lift the final rondo from the ordinary. The strings play in 6/8 time but the oboe accompanies them in 4/4. The effect is so skillfully and tightly controlled the beat of two against three intrigues the ear without making it fully aware of any disparity. Listen for it and see if you can detect it.
The revered Canadian composer Murray Adaskin was the inspiration for the name of this ensemble. He prepared the work for the trio in 1998, adapting a piece he had written fifty years before, the Serenade Concertante for Orchestra. Frances James Adaskin, the composer’s first wife, delighted in this piece. It was played very frequently and she called it his “C sharp minor Prelude”.
Adaskin was born in Toronto, and made a living as violinist. In the 1950s he went into academic life, and served as chair of the music department at the University of Saskatchewan until 1966. He subsequently devoted himself to composition.
The conductor of the CBC Vancouver Chamber orchestra, John Avison, commissioned Adaskin to write the Serenade in 1954. The orchestra gave the first performance of the brief, one movement work. According to the music critic of the Toronto Globe and Mail, Frank Haworth, this is “an urbane and occasionally skittish work.” It blended “contrapuntal ingenuities with syncopated quips” in an accessible idiom. Adaskin firmly rooted the piece in standard harmonic and rhythmic systems but used more modern techniques to imbue the work with a fresh sound. Haworth thought the piece enjoyed “modern freedoms without going to modern extremes”.
Other critics have said essentially the same thing. It reflects the composer’s own witty and optimistic personality.
Benjamin Britten 1913 - 1976 Phantasy for oboe, violin, viola and cello opus 2 (1932)
Edith Britten’s youngest son was aptly named Benjamin. He was clearly musical as a very young child. In his mother’s mind he was the re-incarnation of the infant Mozart and at one time she confidently predicted he would be the “Fourth ‘B’: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and now Britten”. Mrs Britten lived long enough to see him launched on his exceptional career, winning prizes and becoming internationally known while still a youth.
Benjamin Britten wrote two Phantasies, both as entries in an unusual competition sponsored by Walter Willson Cobbett. Cobbett wanted to revive English music and offered the prize for a work in one movement, under the title “Fantasy”, to last no more than twelve minutes. The fantasy form was in honor of Purcell. Walter Cobbett devoted himself to chamber music, using his quite considerable wealth in very constructive ways. Britten won this prize in 1931 with his Phantasy Quintet while still a student at the Royal College of Music.
The Phantasy for oboe and strings did not win a prize but has become one of Britten’s most popular pieces. It contains references to several of the styles prevalent in the late 1920s yet one still recognizes Britten’s own voice. By turns brittle in the mode of the French “Les Six”, and rhapsodic in the English vein, it has a unique structure which faintly echoes Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
In a circular structure, the opening Marcia also closes the piece, each instrument receding in the order in which it entered. Even at such an early stage of his career Britten understood how to extract rich sonority from the very slender resources of four instruments. Arpeggiation in the strings anchors the descanting oboe in the first section. This contrasts with gossamer pianissimo in the middle section after the oboe has been silent and re-enters almost stealthily.
The great English oboist Leon Goosens gave the first performance of the Phantasy in 1933 in a BBC radio broadcast with the International String Quartet.
Ernst von Dohnanyi 1877 - 1960 Serenade in C major for string trio (1902)
It is very sad that the great Hungarian musician Ernst von Dohnanyi is known to today’s audiences primarily as the composer of Variations on a Nursery Theme. This extraordinary distortion of a once major reputation stems from many factors. Some of it is because his late Romantic style has been out of fashion for a long time. Some could be political, even though he was not a political person. In the dark days of the Fascist infiltration of Hungarian politics, he tried to protect the Jewish musicians in his orchestra. No charges were ever leveled against him. Everything was in the form of innuendo.
Unlike other musicians who came from the European upper classes, Dohnanyi did not have to struggle against his family’s disapproval. On the contrary, his father, an excellent amateur cellist, undertook his son’s musical education with the help of the local organist.
Ernst von Dohnanyi was born and grew up in Hungary but decided to study music in Berlin after a period at the Budapest Academy. Bela Bartok was one of his school friends and later followed him to Berlin.
Hans Richter was the conductor of the symphony orchestra in Berlin. In 1898, Richter took the orchestra to London on tour and Dohnanyi made his international debut playing Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto. The results were electrifying. By 1900, he was considered to be the legitimate successor to Liszt.
Brahms arranged for the first performance of Dohnanyi’s piano quintet before his death in 1897. Joachim persuaded him to teach at the Berlin Hochshule fur Musik. He stayed there for ten years, writing some of his finest works. In 1915, Dohnanyi returned to Budapest and worked there for almost thirty years, building the modern Hungarian musical scene. He did it largely by himself. From 1919 to 1921, he organized more than 120 concerts using only the resources available to him in Hungary. Dohnanyi resurrected many works by the great masters which had been neglected or ignored.
After the war he went first to England and later to the United States. He spent the last years of his life teaching and conducting at Florida State University in Tallahassee, active until the very end.
Dohnanyi composed in the late nineteenth century mode. He did not occupy himself with musical nationalism or the modern idioms. The Serenade is closer in style to Brahms or Wagner than to Bartok or Kodaly, diatonic and with rich harmony. Possibly he has been sidelined because of this lack of innovation.
For this work, he combined elements of sonata form and the suite in a very orderly fashion. The Serenade opens with a Marcia in binary form. Although this seems to be conventional he uses subtle shifts and changes to give it life. The second movement, Romanza, is in ternary form. A conventional Scherzo with a trio forms the third movement. Dohnanyi employs counterpoint here very imaginatively. There is an unexpected double fugue in the middle of the trio.
The theme and variations of the fourth movement are perhaps the most masterly sections in this piece. There are five variations, each becoming gradually more complex and richer in texture as the movement progresses. At the end of the fifth movement, a Rondo, the Marcia returns to round out the work and give it balance.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) String Trio in D major, Op.9 No.2
Joseph Haydn was the master of the string trio as much as he was the master of the string quartet. Beethoven’s opus 9 trios lack the deft epigrammatic wit that is such a hallmark of Haydn’s work but Beethoven projects an extraordinary sense of energy, propulsiveness, and sheer drama.
Traeg published the Opus 9 trios in 1798. Beethoven had dedicated the trios to Count Johann Georg von Browne-Camus, a military figure of Irish descent who had served as a senior officer in the Russian army, rather than to his longtime supporter Prince Lichnowsky. Browne-Camus had moved to Vienna in 1795, and was very supportive of the young composer. Beethoven had already dedicated a set of 12 piano variations on a Russian theme to his wife, and had been rewarded with a very nice horse. The Count was “one of the strangest men, full of excellent talents and beautiful qualities of heart and spirit on the one hand, and on the other full of weakness and depravity,” according to one of his servants.
Until his health failed, Browne-Camus supported Beethoven very generously. In spite of Beethoven’s curmudgeonly behavior, many aristocrats and noblemen saw to it he had enough money to live on. His most consistent supporter was the Archduke Rudolph, youngest son of the Emperor.
The opening material of Opus 9, no. 2, a five note turn, provides a constant background until the movement gets underway with the main theme, and later comes to predominate in the movement. The second theme provides a contrast to this thematic obsessiveness, with a calm repeated-note accompaniment from the viola as the violin and cello have a dialogue around the middle voice. The harmonic implications of the opening gesture are explored in the development, where it is used as a pivot for some surprising harmonic shifts. The busy five-note theme reappears in the recapitulation.
The rhetorical second movement, Andante quasi allegretto, opens with a series of questioning chords. After the chords have been answered, the movement proceeds with a rapturous theme in the violin, answered by the cello in its highest register, and completed finally by the violin and viola in unison at the octave. The opening chords return, and then a dropping arpeggiated motive comes to the fore, leading to a gentle coda.
The Menuetto is full of slurs over the bar-line, shaping the phrases in Beethoven’s own fashion. Its trio is about as minimal as one can get, a bare outline of a few progressions marked pianissimo. The main theme of the brilliant Rondo is presented each time by the cello in its high register, perhaps another trace of Beethoven’s visit to Berlin and the brilliant playing of Duport.
(Notes by Robert Mealy, edited by Judith Taylor)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756 - 1791 Quartet in F major, K 370, for oboe, violin, viola and cello (1781)
In the late 1770s, Mozart went on an extended visit to Mannheim and Paris. This enabled him to escape from the tedium of Salzburg and the tyranny of Archbishop Colloredo for a while. In 1779 he returned to Salzburg and lived there another eighteen months. He did not compose any string quartets during that time, partly because he did not receive a commission. We tend to forget that Mozart had a practical side and preferred to write for reliable money. Three of the four flute quartets from that period were the result of a commission.
By 1780, Salzburg began to pall again and he went to Munich. He had met Friedrich Ramm, the prominent oboist, and wrote this quartet for him in 1781. The oboe quartet had several new features, reflecting Mozart’s continuing growth and maturation. Alfred Einstein commented that Mozart could do in one year what took Haydn ten. Mozart had pored over Haydn’s quartets to learn all he could from the older man. The series of six string quartets from the mid-1770s show the benefit of this study. In general Mozart advanced with a “more sensitive feeling for melody, a new use for counterpoint and changed his habits in rhythm.”
The oboe functions as an equal partner with the other instruments, rather than dominating them. Mozart jettisoned the old system in which one instrument predominated with everyone else playing obligato. In spite of this innovation, the reality is that an oboe has such a piercing tone, it cannot help but stand out. Even when the chords are evenly balanced there is an inevitable imbalance of sound. There have been technical changes in the structure of the oboe since Mozart’s day but the tonal range and timbre are much the same.
There was no minuet, even though Mozart previously had used four movements in his quartets. The oboe quartet offers strong contrasts of expression. After a cheerful first movement in which the composer cunningly inverted the opening theme to introduce the middle section, the adagio is lyrical and deeply expressive. The oboe elaborates discursively on a cantabile theme and shows its many possibilities.
Startling rhythmic effects lift the final rondo from the ordinary. The strings play in 6/8 time but the oboe accompanies them in 4/4. The effect is so skillfully and tightly controlled the beat of two against three intrigues the ear without making it fully aware of any disparity. Listen for it and see if you can detect it.
