Music@Menlo: wind chamber music

This actually took place before the vocal chamber music program, but my review of it wasn't published until today.

Part or all of a wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn), with or without piano, played pieces by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and a couple lesser-known composers, with all the piquancy that these instruments can provide.

As with the vocal program, it was preceded a couple days earlier with a lecture, this one on the history of wind instruments, given by one of the actual performers at the concert, oboist James Austin Smith, who was witty and sly.

He made much of the fact that the wind instruments are all different, producing sound in different ways (suggesting that the single-reed clarinet, a relative latecomer to the ensemble, was invented by someone who found the double-reed oboe too difficult to play), noting that, because flutists blow wind across the mouthpiece, that the flute is the only instrument that can be played by sticking it out the window of a moving car. As a result, they all sound distinct.

In the Renaissance, he told us, wind instruments were often played in consorts, larger and smaller (and hence lower- and higher-pitched) versions of the same instrument playing together. And he played us a video of a crumhorn consort honking away. In the late 18th century, the most common form of wind ensemble was one formed of pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns, and Mozart wrote some memorable serenades for this combination or (in the Gran Partita) an extended version of it.

In the 19th century, wind chamber music became focused on the wind quintet, as we heard it in the concert, but there wasn't much music of this kind from major composers until the 20th century.