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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Quintet for Piano and Winds K. 452 (1784)

“The best thing I have ever written,” is how Mozart exuberantly characterized this Quintet to his father Leopold, a few days after its premiere on April 1, 1784, in Vienna’s Burgtheater. “How I wish you could have heard it, and how beautifully it was performed! The audience was enthusiastic.” Ludwig van Beethoven modeled his own Op. 16 Quintet on the work in 1797.

Mozart was in the middle of a great period of piano concertos–six in 1784 alone–and the keyboard part in the Quintet reveals many signs of this. Yet the work is also a deftly scored partnership of true chamber intimacy. Mozart was developing a fresh style for obbligato wind parts in his concertos of this period, which this Quintet allowed him to expand. (The Piano Concerto in D major, K. 451, with its prominent winds, was also on the program with the premiere of this Quintet, as well as two symphonies, and some of Mozart’s piano improvisations.)

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)
Trio for Piano, Oboe and Bassoon (1926)

A native Parisian, Francis Poulenc associated with the most creative and experimental figures of that legendary time in the 1920s, all involved in incubating the chief modernist trends of the early 20th century. Poulenc was part of the informal group of French composers known as Les Six, whose agenda was to consciously craft a new music separate from the dominance of Germanic Romanticism, the intellectualisms of Schoenberg, and the pat associations with Impressionism. Embracing clarity, simplicity, wit, and even parody, they refined a genre influenced by Stravinsky and Satie called neo-classicism.

Poulenc had a great fondness for chamber music with winds. Color, pointillistic clarity, and poise characterize many of his works, including the Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano. The piece evokes the spirit of Haydn, alludes to a well-known Beethoven melody, and has a final movement perhaps patterned after a piano concerto by Saint-Saëns–all of this in the unmistakable and personal language of Poulenc. The worked is dedicated to Manuel de Falla, whom Poulenc had met at the house of his teacher Ricardo Vines in 1918.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
Sonata for Clarinet (1921)

The Saint-Saëns Sonata for Clarinet is one of three woodwind sonatas composed shortly before the composer’s death in 1921. Saint-Saëns’ unabashed Classicism is evident in his adoption of the Classical four-movement sonata for this work, rather than the more typically Romantic three-movement design. The first movement, Allegretto, features a broad clarinet melody set atop flowing piano arpeggios. Though brief in comparison to many opening movements, the long and effortless clarinet lines give the sense that a journey has truly taken place by the time we reach the end. The Scherzo epitomizes the clarity and elegance often sought by Saint-Saëns, yet at the same time it features some delightfully coloristic touches. The finale is the most virtuosic portion of the sonata, exploiting many of the acrobatics for which the clarinet is so well-suited. To conclude, Saint-Saëns returns to the slower and more elegant material of the first movement, coming full circl