Woodwind Quintet Program Notes

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Adolphe Deslandres was well known in late-nineteenth century Paris as an organist and composer of sacred music and a number of successful operas. His Trois Pièces en Quintette, written toward the end of his career, betrays nothing of the musical upheavals of the turn of the century, but rather is a delightful romp through French Romanticism, featuring a lyrical Andante, a lively Scherzo, and an exuberant Finale with some contrapuntal touches.

George Gershwin loved to improvise at parties, an inspiration for a number of his works, including the Preludes for Piano. An invitation to accompany and provide a new solo piano work for a series of recitals with the contralto Marguerite d'Alvarez in 1926 led Gershwin to provide six preludes for the performances. Three of these were published in 1927 and have frequently been performed and recorded ever since. Although certainly virtuoso piano pieces in their original version, there is something more substantive in their expression that has inspired a proliferation of arrangements for many different combinations of instruments over the years. Tonight we take a fresh look at them through arrangements specifically made for the Foothills Philharmonic Woodwind Quintet.

Ludwig Thuille, a contemporary and friend of Richard Strauss, spent most of his career in Munich where he became a professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater. Although he composed two operas and a handful of orchestral and piano works, his main contribution is a series of remarkable chamber works, of which the Sextet is the best known. Thuille's style remained firmly in the late-Romantic German tradition, reminiscent of Brahms and early Strauss, and, indeed, the Sextet holds up well in comparison to the chamber works of Brahms and Dvorak. It is a big work in four movements in which lyricism predominates in the first and second, a playful Gavotte

takes the place of the conventional Scherzo, and the finale gives all six players a chance to shine.