Love Untamed explores the pastoral world, where tragedy often lurks just below a lovely bucolic surface. Musical depictions of this idyllic environment cover the expressive gamut, from the lighthearted to the deranged, sometimes within a single movement or work. And as this program demonstrates, we have yet to abandon this venerable cultural ecosystem.  

Our opening work first appeared in 1733 as part of an encyclopedic publication whose extensive initial subscriber list confirms that Georg Philipp Telemann was the most successful and perhaps the savviest composer of his day. Entitled Musique de table, this large collection includes works in all the popular instrumental genres of the day: ouverture-suites, quartets, concertos, trios, solos, and symphonies. As “table music,” it provided stylish music for many a court ensemble, which had a long history of playing music at celebratory feasts. Its contents also inspired many a composer: Telemann’s good friend George Frideric Handel, for example, borrowed nearly twenty of its melodic ideas.  

The Concerto for Flute, Violin, and Cello TWV 53:A2 comprises four movements in contrasting tempi, all in the sunny key of A major. All four follow the Italian convention of a vigorous ritornello played at the outset by the full ensemble and varied throughout, with frequent interjections of more delicate solo material. Writing for three soloists, Telemann leaned into the different textural possibilities this kind of concerto offers. Because they inhabit the same register, the flute and violin are often paired with each other, with the cello offering distinctive material; at other moments, however, the soloists enjoy brief moments in the spotlight by themselves.  

We’re delighted to include on this program a work by Houston’s own David Ashley White, who taught composition for many years at the University of Houston and served as Director of the Moores School of Music. In 1974 White created a song cycle for mezzo soprano and piano on five poems by Wendell Berry (b. 1934) including The Peace of Wild Things, among the most beloved gems of contemporary American verse. He returned to the work multiple times, rescoring and expanding it at each opportunity. The 1996 version, heard this evening, adds one additional song and rescores the whole for mezzo and a period-instrument ensemble comprising Baroque flute, cello, and harpsichord. White dedicated this commission (from the Houston Harpsichord Society, the predecessor to Houston Early Music) to Katherine Ciesinski and the Westport Ensemble, which gave the initial performance. 

Berry’s vivid yet plain-spoken verse finds a congenial partner in White’s eclectic and always lyrical musical idiom. “October 10” sets an autumnal scene for the entire cycle, in the “loosening bright gold” of leaves falling from a sycamore tree, which White illustrates with open sonorities and poignant bits of melody. “The Peace of Wild Things” summons the calm beauty of a humble pond, so that we may “rest in the grace of the world” while leaving behind (if momentarily) despair and fear. “Grace” returns to falling leaves, now multi-colored and elegant as they float gently to the ground. For this song White reduces the ensemble to just flute and voice, whose intertwined sounds likewise glide with great delicacy. “The Burial of the Old,” marked “as a dirge” by the composer, reminds us that we, too, go through an analogous process of aging and transformation, while the more agitated stanzas and music of “The Want of Peace” recount the ways we harm ourselves and each other along the way. Peacefulness returns, finally, in “A Poem of Thanks,” for which White supplies a comparatively lush texture as the poet reminds us of “the joy we make but may not keep.”  

“October 10” sets an autumnal scene for the entire cycle, in the “loosening bright gold” of leaves falling from a sycamore tree, which White illustrates with open sonorities and poignant bits of melody. “The Peace of Wild Things” summons the calm beauty of a humble pond, so that we may “rest in the grace of the world” while leaving behind (if momentarily) despair and fear. “Grace” returns to falling leaves, now multi-colored and elegant as they float gently to the ground. For this song White reduces the ensemble to just flute and voice, whose intertwined sounds likewise glide with great delicacy. “The Burial of the Old,” marked “as a dirge” by the composer, reminds us that we, too, go through an analogous process of aging and transformation, while the more agitated stanzas and music of “The Want of Peace” recount the ways we harm ourselves and each other along the way. Peacefulness returns, finally, in “A Poem of Thanks,” for which White supplies a comparatively lush texture as the poet reminds us of “the joy we make but may not keep.” 

The Italian composer Vittorio Rieti established himself in Paris but emigrated after the outbreak of World War II to the US, where he taught at various institutions in New York and Chicago. Like Francis Poulenc and Igor Stravinsky, both close friends during his years in the French capital, Rieti embraced the neo-classical style of the mid 20th century, which emphasized clear textures and reintroduced standard formal schemes. His output includes several ballets, chamber operas, film scores, and a significant body of chamber and orchestral music, including several works incorporating harpsichord, several of which were commissions from Sylvia Marlowe, a pioneering mid-century American harpsichordist. Like much of his work in this idiom, Rieti’s Pastorale e fughetta (1966) bears witness to the composer’s fascination with both contemporary dance and learned counterpoint.  

Though celebrated still as the “father” of the symphony and string quartet, Joseph Haydn also wrote operas, sacred music, songs, and cantatas. Among the latter is a work that revisits the abandonment of Ariadne, wife of Theseus (hunter of the Minotaur), subject matter that has inspired artists of all kinds for centuries, especially during the Baroque era. Functionally these larger-than-life characters were a means of bringing to life passionate feelings while simultaneously keeping the strongest emotions at arm’s length: better to weep over Ariadne’s fate, after all, than over one’s own.  

Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos (1789) begins with the heroine acknowledging, though confused and vulnerable, that Theseus has left her. She goes to look for him only to see his ship slowly receding in the distance. Ariadne’s reaction veers from disbelief into madness, as she struggles to find rest for her “trembling soul.” Haydn left two versions of this singular work, one for voice and harpsichord or fortepiano and a later arrangement for voice and strings. This program offers the latter version of the work, which injects an operatic sense of scale into Haydn’s musical drama.

© Matthew Dirst