Programme Note
Sextet for Piano and Wind was commissioned by the Fishguard International Music Festival. In this original form the work comprised four movements for the traditional combination of Flute/Oboe/Clarinet in B flat/Horn in F/Bassoon/Piano. The movements took as their starting point the six-piano work ‘Never Odd or Even’ and were all palindromic in structure. A palindrome is something that reads the same backwards as forwards – e.g. Solos. The four movements were given their premiere at the 2016 Fishguard Festival.
The Sextet was subsequently expanded to six movements and the existing four movements were re-numbered. The final version entitled ‘Six Palindromes’ was premiered on May 16th 2018 in Penarth Pier Pavilion by Ensemble MidtVest (Denmark) as part of the 2018 Vale of Glamorgan Festival. Prospective performers and listeners should refer to this version listed elsewhere as Six Palindromes. A recording of Six Palindromes by Ensemble MidtVest (Denmark) was released on May 15th 2018 on Ty Cerdd Records TCR017.
Performance History
World Premiere
Fishguard International Music Festival
25th July 2016 St. Peter’s Church, Goodwick
London Winds with Peter Donohoe – piano
Supporting Information
The programme note for the 2016 premiere follows here. It is displayed for interest, background information and research only and is not for other use or publication.
“The Wind Quintet could be considered the archetypal 21st century extended family. This ensemble of two double reed instruments, a single reed instrument, a metal flute and a brass instrument has travelled far from its ‘woodwind’ roots, Maybe it is that that has encouraged composers to favour the witty, the bucolic and the quirky when writing for it.
Behind every atypical chamber music combination is a well-known work. Ask composers about The Soldier’s Tale by Stravinsky or Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. In this instance, if you add a piano to our distinctive quintet, you have the wonderful Poulenc Sextet for Piano and Winds. Without it we might not be here tonight.
One of the fascinations about being a composer is the demand of very strict intellectual structures, as Bach shows us in The Musical Offering. My starting point for the writing of this work was a piece I wrote in the 1990’s for Six Pianos entitled NEVER ODD OR EVEN. Before a grammarian points out that that should read Never Odd nor Even, I should mention that the incorrect version is titled for a palindrome.
For this work I took Never Odd or Even (now the fourth movement) as a starting point and wrote three further palindromes. I haven’t been too strict with the palindromes since palindromes don’t always make as much sense as you would like. So it is safer to describe the four movements as ‘palindromic’ rather than palindromes.
Despite this, a musical feature common to all four movements is a set of chords in five parts. Each set is palindromic in itself so, for example, set 1 of the first movement is a sequence of 11 chords of which chord 6 is the central chord and chords 5 and 7, 4 and 8 are the same and so on. There are many other palindromic devices in the work concerned with melody, rhythm and dynamics (as befits a composer brought up on, but who has subsequently rejected, serialism.)
All this may or might well not occupy musicologists at some point in the future. For the composer and the first time listener alike this is essentially a light-hearted piece in four movements. Following tradition (to some extent) movements 1,2 &4 are predominantly fast while movement 3 is slow. Movements 1 & 3 work with the same chord sequence, as do 2 & 4. Movements 1 & 4 are essentially the same material in a different harmonic context. Movement 2 has a ‘jazz’ bass and Movement 3 features solos (itself a palindrome) for all five wind instruments.”
