Roeland Hendrikx Ensemble

CLARINET QUARTETS. A JOURNEY TO MANNHEIM AND BUDAPEST

Nicolas Dupont, violin

Sander Geerts, viola

Sébastien Walnier, cello

Roeland Hendrikx, clarinet

Program

W.A. Mozart | Flute Quartet KV 285 (arr) J.N. Hummel | Clarinet Quartet   C. Stamitz | Clarinet Quartet op. 19 nr 1 R. Kokai | Quartettino (1952) 

Goethe once said that the string quartet was his favorite of all instrumental music: "one hears four intelligent people entertaining themselves with each other, and believes to understand something of their conversation." Goethe may have been talking about the string quartet, but you will find exactly the samething about the clarinet quartet after this concert. Only: we have to travel for that.

We begin our trip in Mannheim, where violin virtuoso Carl Stamitz (1745-1801) wrote six clarinet quartets in the shadow of the famous Court Orchestra, which appeared together in 1773 as his opus 8. Whereas Stamitz's first attempts were still disguised concertos with a dominant clarinet, his clarinet quartet op. 19 No. 1 from 1786 much better approached Goethe's ideal of equality between musicians. Moreover, that quartet documents like no other the cantabile qualities of a wind instrument that at that time had been in existence for barely 20 years.

From Mozart we "borrow" an older quartet that Wolfie had actually written for amateur flutist Ferdinand de Jean, whom he had met in the entourage of ... the Mannheim Orchestra. For this theft we need not be harshly ashamed, for Mozart declared after failing to pay that he "had to stop writing for instruments he could not actually like." That this magnificent quartet is much younger than Stamitz's can be heard, among other things, in the overwhelming virtuosity of the solo wind player and the relative subordination of the strings.

Mozart passed on his talent for quartet composition to his pupil Johann NepomukHummel (1778-1837), who succeeded Haydn as Kapellmeister at the Esterházy's in Eisenstadt, on the border of Austria and Hungary. Hummel conceived Mozart in 1808 with a beautiful, highly idiosyncratic Clarinet Quartet. It is sometimes said of Hummel that he applied the subjective, the passionate, and the excessive of Romanticism to his own music some 20 years before that term came into vogue. The dramatic and surprising Clarinet Quartet is clearly a bridging work between Classicism and Romanticism, and the first movement audibly contains traces of Hummel's sometimes warm, sometimes chilly relationship with Beethoven: Hummel audibly quotes Beethoven's Eroïca, but it is not clear whether this was done out of respect, or with a parodying intent....

With Hungarian Rezső Kókai(1906-1962), we enter the 20th century, and end up in Budapest. Kókai was a (film) composer, professor of musicology, and music director of Hungarian national radio. His Quartettino(1952) for clarinet, violin, viola and cello is a jewel of neoclassical intimacy: in form it tastes of Stamitz, Mozart and Hummel, but in atmosphere it exudes Slavic rhapsodic melancholy in every phrase.