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02FEB2025|12:00H
ROBERT SCHUMANN | Märchenerzählungen, Op. 132
MAX BRUCH | Ocho piezas para clarinete, viola y piano, Op.83 (Selección)
GORDON JACOB | Trío para clarinete, viola y piano
JEAN FRANCOIX | Trío para clarinete viola y piano
Clarinet | JOSÉ LUIS FERNÁNDEZ SÁNCHEZ
Viola | ARIADNA BOISO REINOSO
Piano | ÁNGELA MORAZA MOLINA
Program notes
It was Mozart, fascinated by the discovery of the clarinet, who first paired it with the viola and piano. As lower-register instruments, though not excessively so, they lend a special warmth, flexibility, and even a sense of mystery to pieces written for this ensemble. Perhaps for this reason, Schumann titled his Op. 132 Fairy Tales (Märchenerzählungen), though it does not correspond to any specific programmatic reading. This penultimate work in his catalog was composed just weeks before he threw himself into the Rhine and was admitted to a mental asylum.
There is nothing stormy or dramatic in this piece—only the interplay of instruments as innocent creatures chattering and fluttering above the German forest of fairy tales.
The German composer Max Bruch (1838–1920) is best known for his first violin concerto, one of the most frequently performed in the repertoire. The selected pieces performed today reveal a new dimension of the sweet combination of these timbres. Written in 1910, they belong stylistically to the twilight of Romanticism, reveling in minor modes and the elegiac sadness typical of the fin-de-siècle era. In 1911, Bruch would compose a double concerto for viola and clarinet, for which these short fragments may have served as preparatory exercises.
The English composer Gordon Jacob (1895–1984) and the French composer Jean Françaix (1912–1997) belong to the same generation and lineage of composers who, in the vein of Britten or Stravinsky, embraced formal classicism as a counterpoint to the serialist avant-garde of the 20th century. Their interest in forms explored by Mozart and Schumann gives rise to these two pieces of neoclassical or neo-Romantic heritage. Françaix’s trio has been described as a French Märchenerzählungen. Jacob’s piece, like Bruch’s before it, is imbued with a deep melancholy that seems to emanate from another time. Jacob has been called the most conservative of English composers, but this nostalgia takes on a new dimension when one considers that, having been a prisoner in the Great War, he was one of only sixty men to survive a battalion of eight hundred. Every note of his prolific output was, therefore, always an affirmation of life.
José María Jurado García-Posada