Since we shot video of our recital and rere­corded two of the pieces later, I decided to present this con­cert as embed­ded YouTube videos rather than my stan­dard mp3s. You’ll see only three embed­ded videos below, but each one is actu­ally a playlist con­tain­ing mul­ti­ple move­ments. Click the arrows on either side of the player to jump between movements.

Le Tri­an­gle d’Or:
   Laura Medisky, oboe
   Les­ley Hughes, clar­inet
   Dave Wells, bassoon

French com­poser Joseph Can­teloube was sur­rounded by music at a very early age. His mother, an accom­plished pianist, arranged for him to begin piano lessons at age 6. Another early expo­sure to music occurred when his father took him on walks through the moun­tain vil­lages of the Auvergne, where Joseph heard the local dances and folk­songs. The French folk music he heard as a child would influ­ence him and his com­po­si­tions through­out his life. In 1906, Can­teloube moved to Paris to study with com­poser D’Indy at the Schola Can­to­rum. He quickly became part of an aca­d­e­mic cir­cle focused on the preser­va­tion of folk music and its incor­po­ra­tion into clas­si­cal music. Although not an eth­no­mu­si­col­o­gist, Can­teloube col­lected and cat­e­go­rized French folk music and often pro­vided sim­ple accom­pa­ni­ment to native songs. In much of Canteloube’s out­put, it is often dif­fi­cult to draw the line between a sim­ple arrange­ment, and actual com­po­si­tion. Through­out his life, Can­teloube remained devoted to pro­mot­ing French music and is now seen as a link between Impres­sion­ism and musi­cal nationalism.

Rus­tiques, from 1946, appears to have been influ­enced by folk music. After an impro­visatory intro­duc­tion fea­tur­ing the oboe, evok­ing a pas­toral mood, the three winds jump into what seems to be a series of folk songs. The sec­ond move­ment begins with a plain­tive melody in the bas­soon, but soon the bas­soon and clar­inet begin rip­pling line of 16^th notes over which the oboe floats. The slow melody returns in the clar­inet and even­tu­ally to all three instru­ments. The move­ment ends with a glimpse of the first move­ment. The last move­ment is labeled Ron­deau, which means the ini­tial melody in the oboe and clar­inet keep com­ing back. Lis­ten for the one of the melodies from the first move­ment to show up after the ini­tial ron­deau theme. After a jaunty tune in 6/8 time, the tempo and excite­ment increases until the very last bar.

Although known as a French com­poser and pianist, Alexan­dre Tans­man was born in Poland and con­ducted his musi­cal stud­ies at the Łódź Con­ser­va­tory and in War­saw. He was unable to attain the recog­ni­tion he desired, how­ever, and moved to Paris in 1920. He gave a suc­cess­ful debut recital shortly after his arrival, and soon befriended Stravin­sky (about whose music he would later write a mono­graph) and Ravel. Fol­low­ing his move to France, Tans­man quickly attained the inter­na­tional renown he sought; he toured Europe, Asia, and the Unites States exten­sively in the 1920s and 30s. He became a French cit­i­zen in 1938, but shortly there­after fled to Los Ange­les in the face of impend­ing war. There, he joined a num­ber of fel­low émi­grés, includ­ing Stravin­sky, Ravel, and Schoen­berg. Tans­man returned in 1946 to Paris, and main­tained a pro­lific out­put until shortly before his death in 1986.

Tansman’s Suite pour Trio d’Anches con­sists of four rel­a­tively short move­ments, arranged slow-fast-slow-fast in the man­ner of a ‘stan­dard’ Corelli sonata da chiesa. Osti­nati fig­ure promi­nently in the piece, par­tic­u­larly in the two fast move­ments. This, along with a ten­dency for dif­fer­ent voices to move at dif­fer­ent speeds lends the Suite a some­what Stravin­skian feel. In fact, the sec­ond move­ment — Scherzino — con­tains a musi­cal ref­er­ence to Stravinsky’s Fire­bird: the clar­inet plays an almost mock­ing ver­sion of an oboe solo from the ballet’s Berceuse. Tans­man later bor­rowed mate­r­ial from this move­ment (includ­ing the Fire­bird quo­ta­tion) for his 1952 Sonatine for bas­soon and piano.

Heitor Villa-Lobos received his ini­tial musi­cal train­ing from his father Raúl, an avid ama­teur musi­cian. This early edu­ca­tion involved learn­ing to play the clar­inet, cello, and gui­tar, and fre­quent atten­dance of con­certs, mainly of Euro­pean art music. The younger Villa-Lobos’s true musi­cal pas­sion, how­ever, was the var­i­ous tra­di­tional and pop­u­lar musics of his native coun­try. Fol­low­ing his father’s unex­pected death in 1899, Villa-Lobos immersed him­self in the vibrant musi­cal cul­ture of Rio de Janiero’s streets. This expe­ri­ence, cou­pled with numer­ous music-seeking for­ays into Brazil’s more remote pop­u­lated regions, instilled in the teenage Villa-Lobos a love for and under­stand­ing of tra­di­tional Brazil­ian music that would remain evi­dent through­out his com­po­si­tional career.

Villa-Lobos com­pleted his Trio in Rio de Janeiro in 1921, but the piece’s first pub­lic per­for­mance took place in Paris on April 9, 1924. Villa-Lobos had set­tled in Paris the pre­vi­ous year, with the finan­cial back­ing of friends and the encour­age­ment of pianist Artur Rubin­stein. The pre­miere took place as part of a ground­break­ing con­cert series orga­nized by com­poser Jean Wiéner. The same series intro­duced Schoenberg’s Pier­rot Lunaire to the Parisian public.

The Trio is some­what of an anom­aly in Villa-Lobos’s out­put. Most of the composer’s cham­ber works each com­prise a sin­gle move­ment; the Trio has three. The work is also one of only two of Villa-Lobos’s mature cham­ber works that is not directly con­nected to Brazil­ian music or cul­ture. In fact, the score gives no indi­ca­tions of any extra-musical asso­ci­a­tions. Its spare title and equally plain styl­is­tic indi­ca­tions — Animé, Lan­guis­sa­ment, and Vivo — belie the Trio’s mer­cu­r­ial and often vio­lent character.