Good evening.

It's great to see everybody here.

Welcome.

The first piece of our program is by the English composer Gustav Holst.

Holst lived from 1874 to 1934, and he wrote this piece when he was only 29 years old in 1903.

He apparently didn't think much of the piece.

It laid dormant for a long time.

About a dozen years after he wrote it, he mailed it to a flute player, a colleague friend who promptly did nothing with it.

Holst died and was never performed.

It was lost essentially until 1978, where it was reconstructed and given a Premiere in 1982, some 80 years after Holst wrote the piece.

I was in college in 1982, and so far, none of my friends we we had heard of woodwind quintet by Holst.

And in the 90s, our quintet started to hear this, you know, in the 80s, news travels fast.

My apple News Feed didn't get the whole quintet.

So, yeah, it took a few years for us to all hear about the most Holtz quintet but we were very excited, especially when we started playing and we've played this piece.

I think this is at least our third performance of it over the years.

We love it.

Four movements.

The first movement is you'll hear the influence of Wagner on Holtz Holtz was a student in the 1890, he became fascinated by Wagner operas.

And you will hear that definitely as the first movement progresses.

The first movement starts with a clarinet solo that as sort of as soon as Kristen turned to me yesterday and said this sounds like it should be a clarinet.

And I agree.

And it's all sounds like it could be the third Brahms clarinet sonata after a second movement solo second movement, starting with a beautiful horn solo with the final two movements, harkened back to older forms and folk songs.

The third movement is a canon where you will hear a theme followed by that exact exacting a measure two measures later.

Row, row, row your boat.

The the tree of the control of the slow movement is especially rollicking.

The instruments are chasing each other.

And then the final movement, the air variations we hear.

The greatest influence of English folk song on Holst and the final theme played in the French horn may be the most English sound in the fall.

The second piece on our program is by the French composer Charles Lefebvre.

Charles Lefebvre lived from 1834 in 1917.

He studied at the Paris Conservatory with Gounod and Thomas.

He won the very prestigious Preda Rome in 1870 and became part of the faculty at the Paris Conservatory in 1895 as the head of the chamber music department.

He wrote a lot of chamber music in his career for both strings and winds, including two suites for woodwind quintet.

We are playing the first one tonight.

He also wrote solo literature for both strings, violin, cello, flute, oboe form, and a great piece called Scherzo Caprice that I've known about for 40 years.

And I've been teaching the piece for 30 years.

And if any of my students out here haven't played it, we need to look at this as a really fantastic piece Lefebvre, the pieces in three movements.

The first movement is a canon again.

So, you know, if you hear a nice melody that you like.

Wait a second.

And it's going to come back again.

The second movement is a scherzo with a trio.

And the finale of a rousing, very happy finale.

We played this third movement many times as a woodwind quintet, but we've never played the whole piece.

This is the first time we all have played.

Thank you.

Good evening.

For the final program, tonight is the final piece on today's program, we'll be performing Poulenc wonderful sextet for pianos and for piano and woodwinds.

Poulenc was the ultimate urbane and sophisticated Parisian.

And his music shows that very much.

He was brought up in a wealthy family and communicated very much in very sophisticated circles.

And his music is full of wit and irony and humor, and it's just very effervescent music.

This sextet for winds was composed in 1932.

And it's interesting to me because also in 1932, he composed another one of his popular pieces, his concerto for two pianos, an orchestra.

And I happened to record that just last weekend.

So I'm very familiar with both pieces now.

And it surprises me how similar they are, both in structure and even in some melodies.

Like apparently he was not scared at all of cowering from himself.

There are some direct quotes that are in both pieces.

I don't know which one came first because he wrote them both the left and same year.

So it's quite interesting in that way.

He had a lifelong love of the wind players, for the wind players that he composed a great deal of music for them in such a sophisticated way.

But he was also a virtuoso pianist.

So it's wonderful that we have the sextet has a very, very busy piece.

Everybody has a lot to do in it.

And it's, I think, the epitome of what makes Poulenc so wonderful.

In the first movement.

It begins with a bang and just keeps going.

Poulenc was a member of this piece A group of French composers who were trying to steer away from the French impressionism that you see in others and form a new school of clarity and directness of French music.

And he was very, very good at doing this in his music.

He sometimes he was a very serious composer and this wonderful series of pieces I would like.

But there's also many pieces, such as this sextet that almost blur the lines between classical music.

And it is a very sophisticated piece, but also entertainment.

He loved entertainment.

He loved Paris of the 20s and 30s.

And so you hear almost there's parts of this that sound like a French vaudeville or a circus or all these types of humorous aspects to it.

As I said, in the first movie, begins with a bang, goes headstrong very, very, very fast.

And then suddenly stops with a bassoon solo sort of lament, which gives way to a piano, a short piano solo or something very, very beautiful.

Of course, At this point.

This reminds me so much of a Poulenc being the preeminent composer of the melody of his age, the French romantic art song, because this this melody sounds so much like his beautiful, beautiful songs.

And it has a feeling of Paris in the 20s.

It feels like we could be in a cafe smoking a cigar and sipping brandy.

That is just very, very evocative.

After that, the best music come back comes to an end.

And the second movement is the opposite sequence of slow, fast, slow.

Begins with a beautiful, beautiful melody, played first by the oboe.

And everybody joins in and then suddenly goes into a very fast sort of galop.

It's just insanely fun, again, like circus music with tremendous forward motion.

It goes back again to the original beautiful melody.

Third movement.

Prestissimo is very, very fast.

Prestissimo and it just keeps going and going and going with with different instruments coming to the forefront and coming back again.

I think I read once that someone who likes music and I think this is a good example, is like playing a game of whack a mole, that when one instrument comes up the other leads, the next one comes up.

The leaves are so fast that you could barely keep track of it all, but it's so ingeniously put together.

So we hope you enjoy this piece!