Giuseppe Cambini was born in 1746 in Livorno, Tuscany. Much about his early life and career is unknown to us. The stories that do exist about him are dubious: there is one tale of his playing string quartets in his youth, before the known invention of the string quartet, and another he liked to tell of his being captured by pirates while on a trip with his fiancee. He moved to Paris in the 1770s, and from the 1770s until 1810, his career and life are better-documented. Unlike many composers of the period, he survived and thrived both before and during the French Revolution, switching effortlessly to turning out revolutionary hymns as the status quo demanded. The circumstances, location, and year of his death are unknown. There is one account that he died in Paris in 1825, but it is also possible that he retired to Holland in the 1810s and died there. Today, Cambini’s name is most known for a dispute with Mozart: Mozart believed that Cambini blocked the performance of one of his works out of jealousy. Other reports of Cambini’s personality do not indicate that he was a jealous man, but listening to this work, the second of his three wind quintets, one can speculate that he may well have been jealous of Mozart, or at the very least, inspired by his music. This work is stylistically reminiscent of some chamber music by Mozart, but Mozart never wrote for a group of this instrumentation. Cambini was among the first people to write for an ensemble comprising flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon. Although we may not, today, remember much else about his life or works, we have him partly to thank for the existence of the genre.
The quintet in D minor is dedicated to the clarinetist who premiered the work, and each of its three movements begins with a clarinet solo introducing the principal theme of the movement. The first movement is in sonata-allegro form, typical of the Classical style. Although the clarinet begins the piece, each instrument gets a chance to shine in the middle section, with concerto-like solos for every player. The second movement, in 6/8, is a sicilienne, a lilting dance style only vaguely associated with Sicily. One can imagine undergoing a rocking motion, perhaps taking a nap on a raft under a Mediterranean sun. In the third movement, the piece gains momentum and pizzazz—maybe our raft has landed on the shore, and we have arrived at a lively and chaotic street fair.
Carl Nielsen was born in Sortelung, Denmark in 1865. He grew up there, in a small village on the island of Funen, and moved to Copenhagen in 1889 when he got a position in the second violin section in the Royal Danish Orchestra. He would remain in Copenhagen for the rest of his life, making his living as a violinist, conductor, and composer. In the first part of the twentieth century, Nielsen experienced both the global turmoil of World War I and some personal turmoil in the form of a turbulent, strained marriage—from this was born what he called the “psychological” period of his music. The wind quintet came later. It was written in 1922, by which time the war had ended and he and his wife had separated. At this time in music history, there was a trend of composers reacting to the expressive and chromatic excesses of the music of the late Romantic era (in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) by returning to forms, structures, and harmonies of earlier periods, like the Classical and Baroque—this is sometimes called neo-classicism, and Nielsen’s wind quintet can be considered a neoclassical work. He wrote the piece for the Copenhagen Wind Quintet after overhearing a rehearsal of theirs in the background of a telephone call. Apparently, each member of this group had a distinct, strong personality, which he used to great advantage, writing music where each instrument has individual character. Nielsen’s biographer Robert Simpson describes this work as, “composed deliberately for five friends,” and this seems to be how it has become so beloved by wind quintets and by audiences for the past hundred years.
The first movement of this piece is in sonata-allegro form (the very same one that Cambini used over two hundred years earlier). The second movement also hearkens back to an old form: the menuet, a dance in triple time. Both of these movements have moments of drama and tension that arise from what is mostly very pleasant and melodic music. This tension comes to a head in the prelude to the third movement, with its virtuosic cadenzas and strong harmonic dissonances. But then, out of this dissonance and turmoil arises a hymn of hope and peace. Nielsen uses the melody of a hymn he had written in 1914, “Min Jesus Lad Mit Hjerte Få” (“My Jesus, make my heart to love thee”), which remains a beloved church hymn in Denmark, for the theme of this final movement. In the rest of the movement, Nielsen develops this serene theme in a series of variations, which feature individual instruments as soloists and go through a wide range of styles and musical feelings. The piece ends with a return to the grandeur and simplicity of the theme’s religious origins, with an organ-like rendition of the hymn played by the entire quintet.
Maurice Duruflé was born on January 11, 1902 in Louviers in the northwest of France. His first musical education was at a choir school at the Rouen Cathedral, where he learned plainsong—unaccompanied chant with a single melodic line and generally free rhythm. This training, and his education at the Paris Conservatory in organ and composition, would influence his work, including these four motets on Gregorian themes. These are polyphonic choral works where Duruflé takes a theme from chant and expands it into something rich and more textured, with up to six parts at once in the choir. Ubi Caritas is a chant used in Holy Thursday services whose text begins, “Where charity and love are, God is there.” I have arranged this movement for a quintet of double reed instruments.
Igor Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882 in the outskirts of St. Petersburg. From 1902 to 1909, he lived at home and studied law, although he always wanted to write music. He befriended the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and had several pieces premiere at a weekly Wednesday concert series Rimsky-Korsakov held. At first, Stravinsky stayed under the wing of Rimsky-Korsakov, but in 1907, he wrote three works that disturbed Rimsky-Korsakov, including a song without words. This was the little Pastorale, whose static harmony and musette character Rimsky-Korsakov found strange. This represents a modest beginning of his later drastic originality. In 1933 Stravinsky and violinist Samuel Dushkin arranged the piece for violin and piano.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg on January 27, 1756. As children, he and his sister toured giving piano concerts. After Mozart’s days as a child prodigy had ended, he got a position as chief court composer at Salzburg. Within a few years, dissatisfied with the court at Salzburg, Mozart was seeking employment elsewhere when he received a commission from Munich to write the opera Idomeneo. The opera debuted in early 1781 to great success, and he stayed in Munich for two more months during the run of the opera. During that time, he wrote his Oboe Quartet, which itself has operatic qualities—the second movement sounds at times like it could be one of Mozart’s soprano arias. The third movement, which uses the same melodic cell as the first movement to begin, contains a rare instance of polyrhythm in Mozart’s music. In the middle of the movement, the strings stay in 6/8, while the oboe goes into cut time and plays a vibrant string of sixteenth notes.
Henri Dutilleux was born on January 22, 1916 in the town of Angers. He attended the Paris Conservatory and won the Prix de Rome in 1938 but had to leave Rome when World War II broke out. After leaving Rome, he worked as a medical orderly in the army for a year and then returned to Paris. Between 1942 and 1950, Dutilleux wrote four competition pieces for students at the Paris Conservatory, the oboe sonata among them. Claude Delvincourt, director of the Conservatory, commissioned these competition pieces, and his aim was, in Dutilleux’s words, “to make young composers explore instrumental technique (you can’t write any old thing for young players) and, at the same time, to force instrumental students to work on new scores, which Delvincourt wanted to be full of traps and technical difficulties.” The Sonata for Oboe and Piano was written in 1947. In 1948, Dutilleux would publish his Piano Sonata, written in a new style, and disown nearly all of his earlier work, including the oboe sonata, deriding it as too derivative. Nonetheless, this sonata has become a much-beloved staple of the repertoire for its plenitude of characters and moods.