The Debut of Demarre McGill

FEBRUARY 20/21, 2022

Demarre McGill, flute

Christopher Pell, clarinet

Stefani Matsuo, violin

Jan Grüning, viola

Ilya Finkelshteyn, cello

The renowned flutist, Demarre McGill makes his Linton Chamber Music debut with fellow celebrated Queen City artists. The UC-CCM professor joins Cincinnati colleagues to perform on a vibrant program featuring selections for winds and strings, including a work by award-winning composer and CCM alumnus, Brian Raphael Nabors.

Program Notes

Brian Raphael Nabors (b. 1991)
Seven Dances for Flute, Clarinet, and Cello

Seven Dances was commissioned by the Atlanta Chamber Players with other participating ensembles—Voices of Change, Dallas; Boston Musica Viva; and Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings—for the 2019–20 season as a result of the 2018–19 Rapido! Composition Contest. The piece consists of seven contrasting miniatures representing various styles of dances/musical styles. In this piece, I sought to insert my style into all seven movements, becoming a chameleon of sorts, in hopes of serving each style well with the given instrumentation and the stylistic attributes of mood, color and timbre. The piece consists of a tango, foxtrot, hip-hop groove, waltz, salsa, march  and hoedown. 

Seven Dances was first performed by the Atlanta Chamber Players at Shakespeare Tavern Playhouse, Atlanta, GA. 

Notes by the composer

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791)
Flute Quartet in D Major, K. 285

At age 21, Mozart set out with his mother on a trip across Europe in search of permanent employment beyond his native Salzburg. His first stop was Mannheim—at the time the instrumental music capital of Europe. Although his five-month stint ultimately proved unfruitful, Mozart took a number of commissions for smaller chamber works during his time in the city. The D Major Flute Quartet was one such work; it was commissioned by a wealthy Dutch amateur flutist named Ferdinand Dejean, who hired Mozart to write three flute concertos and “a couple” of flute quartets. Mozart was unenthusiastic about the flute as an instrument and found it difficult to find time to compose while in Mannheim. As a result, he ultimately completed only a portion of the requested commission, of which the D Major Quartet is the most complete and most enduring.

Despite this fraught origin, the quartet is a light-spirited work filled with idiomatic writing for the flute. Like many of his early chamber compositions for a wind instrument, the work is primarily in “concertante” style with the flute enjoying the prominent role as the strings artfully accompany. The quartet is compact, with only three short movements, the last two joined without pause. It opens with a lively sonata form as the flute announces the themes with concerto-like prominence, only sharing the spotlight with the strings in the development. The Adagio middle movement is a wistful serenade, with the flute playing a pensive melody against delicate pizzicato strings, which immediately gives way to an exuberant finale. The seemingly effortless perfection of the finale stands as a testament to Mozart’s genius, even in the face of mounting challenges throughout his time in Mannheim. 

Albert Roussel (1869 – 1937)
Trio for Flute, Viola and Cello, Op. 40

To listen to Roussel’s music while considering when he lived is, in a word, surprising. He was a contemporary of Debussy, but his style often leans decidedly Baroque and Classical. This disconnect becomes even more pronounced when you consider that music was Roussel’s second career—he served in the French Navy until he was 25 and didn’t pursue formal music training until he was almost 40. Despite this late start, Roussel proved a gifted composer, quickly mastering a variety of styles and going on to teach counterpoint to the likes of Erik Satie, Edgard Varèse and Bohuslav Martinů.

The three-movement, fast-slow-fast structure of the Trio for Flute, Viola and Cello, Op. 40 highlights Roussel’s Classical influences with just enough polytonality to hint that the work was, in fact, composed in the 20th century. The scoring for flute, viola and cello ensures a crystal-clear texture by virtue of both its distinctive sonorities and the spacious separation of the instruments’ ranges from high to low. While the flute often establishes the primary melody, the trio frequently gives way to two-part counterpoint and trios built of three independent voices, each with their own figuration, rhythm and texture. The end result is a work that is both distinctly classical and modern—a beautiful blending of influences that allows Roussel to explore the depths of his creativity within the structure of a Classical form.

Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828)
String Trio in B-flat Major, D. 581

Schubert’s compositions for string quartet fall into two distinct periods—the early quartets written when the composer was still a teenager, and the three undisputed masterpieces composed in the final years of his life. During the intervening decade, Schubert rarely wrote for strings, with the notable exception of a pair of string trios composed in 1816 and 1817. Today’s trio, the latter of the pair, also bears the distinction of being one of Schubert’s few large-scale works with two published versions. As he continued to master this exacting medium, Schubert undertook subtle but thorough revisions of the score, refashioning melodies, redistributing part-writing and smoothing transitions. Yet both versions hint at a Classical style tinged with bits of Schubert’s distinct musicality, which can, perhaps, be seen as early indicators of his string compositions yet to come.

The quartet opens with a flexible melody whose rhythms frequently change in a nearly unrestricted flow of motion. The movement’s second theme presents simply as a variation on the ideas already established, somewhat confounding the sonata style before moving into a bravura development and a nearly exact recapitulation. The following Andante is both graceful and humorous, as Schubert’s siciliano-like main theme gives way briefly to a minor-key episode before the violin provides an ornamented version of the opening tune to end of the movement.

During the trio section of the Minuet, the viola is allowed to take center stage for a while, but as we move into the final Rondo, the violin once again asserts itself. The finale seems all in good fun, and one senses that even the dramatic forte-pianos, bravura triplets, and mysterious pianissimo sixteenth notes at the close are to be taken more-or-less as musical tongue-in-cheek. As a whole, the trio can be viewed as an indicator of the composer’s growth—more profound than many of the string works that preceded it, but not yet ascending to the heights of the late quartets. Nevertheless, it has an undeniable charm all its own, and the adventurousness of its sudden rhythmic and harmonic shifts demonstrate Schubert as a young composer beginning to find his own distinctive voice.