DIE FORELLE

Report

==== Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828)
=== Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 (The Trout)
=== Adagio and Rondo concertante, D. 487

Franz Schubert, the son of a Vienna school-master, enjoyed a musical
education as a chorister in the Imperial Chapel, which he left to train, in 1814,
as a teacher, a vocation for which we showed no particular aptitude and which
he soon abandoned, after serving initially as an assistant to his father, to whose
house he returned intermittently in later years. He spent much of his short life
in the company of friends in Vienna, a circle of young poets, artists and
musicians and never held any salaried position as a musician, nor was he a
virtuoso performer as Mozart and Beethoven had been. Nevertheless
publishers were beginning to show more interest in his compositions by the
time of his death in 1828.

In March, 1817, Schubert met the distinguished singer Johann Michael Vogl
at the house of his friend Schober. Vogl was to become a closer friend of the
composer and an important interpreter of many of his songs. In the summer
of 1819 the two, curiously dissimilar in apperance and disparate age, set out
to visit Vogl's native district of Steyr and it was there that Schubert set to work
on the A major Piano Quintet, known from the theme and variations that form
its fourth movement as The Trout Quintet. It was intended for Vogl's friend
Sylvester Paumgarner, a local amateur who played wind instruments and the
cello and held regular musical evenings at his house, and was completed in
Vienna on the composer's return there. At Paumgartner's request the work is
scored for the same instruments as Hummel's E flat Piano Quintet, violin, viola,
cello, double bass and piano. It seems that Paumgarnet also suggested the
use of the theme from Schubert's song Die Forelle (The Trout) for the fourth
movement.

The delighful first movement has a characteristic principal melody,
reminding us of Schubert's genius as a creator of songs, and leads through
typically remoter keys during its idyllic progress. This is followed by a second,
slower movement in the key of F major, in which the piano announces the first
melody, leading to two other thermatic elements in the more distant keys of F
sharp minor and D major and to further harmoinc complexity in deceptively
simple guise. The third movement, a scherzo and trio, is followed by the
original key of A major, adding a second theme that has about it touches of
The Trout. The movement lacks a formal central development, but discusses
the proposed thermatic material in passing, providing a concolusion in the same
happy mood with which the work had begun.

Schubert wrote the Adagio and Rondo concertante for piano quartet in 1816
at the request of Heinrich Grob, brother of Therese Grob, with whom Schubert
had been in love at least since 1814, when she sang the soprano solo in his F
major Mass at Liechtental. Ideas of marriage to Theresa came to nothing and
in 1820 she married a master baker, a match more acceptable to her widowed
mother than an alliance with an unemployed musician. Heinrich Grob played
the cello, but The Adagio and Rondo, the latter in sonata form, treat the string
instruments of the accompanying trio with reasonable equality of attention.

=== Jeno Jando

Jeno Jando was born at Pecs, in south Hungary, in 1952. He started to learn
the piano when he was seven and later studied at the Ferenc Liszt Academy
of Music under Katalin Nemes and Pal Kadosa, becoming assistant to the latter
on his graduation in 1974. Jando had won a number of piano competitions in
Hungary and abroad, including first prize in the 1973 Hungarian Piano
Concours and a first prize in the chamber music category at the Sydney
International Piano Competition in 1977. In addition to his many appaearances
in Hungary, he has played widely abroad in Eastern and Western Europe, in
Canada and in Japan. He has recorded all Mozart's piano concertos
and sonatas for Naxos. Other recordings for the Naxos label include the concertos
of Grieg and Schumann as well as Rachmaninov's second concerto and
Paganini Rhapsody and the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven.


=== Kodaly Quartet

The members of the Kodaly Quartet were trained at the Budapest Ferenc
Liszt Academy, and three of them, the second violin Tamas Szabo, viola-player
Gabor Fias and cellist Janos Devich, were formerly in the Sebestyen Quartet,
which was awarded the jury's special diploma at the 1966 Geneva International
Quartet Competition and won first prize at the 1968 Leo Weiner Quartet
Competition in Budapest. Since 1970, with the violinist Attila Falvay, the quartet
has been known as the Kodaly Quartet, a title adopted with the approval of the
Hungarian Ministry of Culture and Education. The Kodaly Quartet has given
concerts throughout Europe, in the Soviet Union and in Japan, in addition to
regular appearances in Hungary both in the concert hall and on television and
has made for Naxos highly acclaimed recordings of string quartets by Ravel,
Debussy, Mozart, Haydn and Schubert.

=== Istvan Toth

Born in 1951 Istvan Toth studied violin and then double-bass at the Ferenc
Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. Since 1974 he has been the solo
double-bass player of the Hungarian Radio Orchestra. He is a member of
Concentus Hungaricus and has performed throughout Europe, Asia and
U.S.A..

Production

Artist: FRANZ SCHUBERT

Categories

Categories: Classical (Instrumental)

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