Featured on the Chamber Music Society's live performance in Alice Tully Hall on the WFMT Radio Network:

Serenade in E-flat major for Winds, K. 375

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composer
Stephen Taylor, oboe
James Austin Smith, oboe
David Shifrin, clarinet
Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet
Bram van Sambeek, bassoon
Peter Kolkay, bassoon
Radovan Vlatković, horn
Trevor Nuckols, horn

Program Notes: 

The Serenade in E-flat major, K. 375, exists today in two versions: a sextet of two clarinets, two bassoons, and two horns, and an octet that adds two oboes. The sextet came first, finished in October 1781 and premiered on the 15th at the home of Viennese court painter Joseph Hickel. Mozart documented what happened next in a letter to his father later that month:

"At 11 o’clock at night I was serenaded by two clarinets, two horns, and two bassoons playing my own music: I had written it for St. Theresa’s Day for Frau von Hickel’s sister, or rather the sister-in-law of Herr von Hickel, the court painter, at whose house it was performed for the first time. The six gentlemen who executed it are poor beggars who play together quite nicely all the same, especially the first clarinetist and the two horn players. But my chief reason for writing it was to let Herr von Strack, who goes there every day, hear something of my composition. And so I composed it rather carefully. It was well received, too, and played at three different places on St. Theresa’s Night, because when they had finished it in one place they were taken somewhere else and paid to play it again. And so these musicians had the front gate opened for them, and when they had formed up in the yard, they gave me, just as I was about to undress for bed, the most delightful surprise in the world with the opening E-flat chord. (Excerpted from New York Philharmonic program notes)"

The octet came the following year as Mozart’s attempt to get his music played at the imperial court (although William Mann suggests it was actually Prince Aloys Liechtenstein whose band first played both this and the contemporaneous Serenade in C-minor). Emperor Joseph II had established a Harmoniemusik ensemble at his court, creating a rush to compose new music for this ensemble. These usually consisted of pairs of wind instruments, often oboes, clarinets, French horns, and bassoons, as in this work, although basset horns and English horns sometimes also appeared. Very often they were used for light entertainment at parties (Mozart has one playing in the background during the ballroom scene of his 1787 opera Don Giovanni) or even to accompany the imperial supper. They were ideal for outdoor performances: many of the contemporary serenades written for Harmoniemusik were intended to be played outdoors, even with the musicians on the move as Mozart’s letter suggests.

This serenade is in five movements, all of which begin and end in e-flat. It begins with a rather impulsive allegro that regularly shifts moods and character and is anchored by the e-flat chords that Mozart mentions in his letter. The first of the two menuettos is fitting with the character of the contemporary dance, stately and built around easily identifiable melodies, but with some chromatic twists. The central adagio is a delicate sonatina that achieves full bloom in its recapitulation. The second menuetto begins energetic and turns pensive in its trio.  The finale blazes with enthusiasm to its final note.

Mozart Chamber Music for Winds

Mozart: Serenade in E-flat major, K. 375 ｜Radovan Vlatković, Trevor Nuckols, CMS Winds (Live)

Summer Music for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, and Horn, Op. 31 (1955)

Recorded Live in Alice Tully Hall from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center featured on the WFMT Radio Network:

Tara Helen O'Connor, flute
Stephen Taylor, oboe
Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet
Bram van Sambeek, bassoon
Trevor Nuckols, horn

Program Notes:

The American composer, Samuel Barber, was catapulted to fame in 1938 by Toscanini’s broadcast of his iconic Adagio for Strings, but by then he had already produced a rash of quite popular symphonic and piano works. He resisted turning to the experimental methods that were being taken up by many of his colleagues, and though some of his music has borrowings from jazz and popular styles, for the most part Barber was focused on
expanding the harmonic language of European Romanticism. He was criticized as conservative by many of his contemporaries, but the enduring presence of his music on concert stages is a testament to the effective balance he struck between new and old modes of music making.

His Summer Music for wind quintet, written in 1955 and premiered in 1956 on a commission from the Detroit Chamber Music Society, displays this balancing act. The piece is built on a tuneful refrain that Barber took from one of his own unfinished orchestral scores. As the melody develops, the density of the accompaniment ebbs and flows, alternating comfortably tonal phrases with sections that are harmonized more complexly. The whole ensemble then participates in a series of unison passages with
short, stopped notes in tonally chaotic counterpoint that creates a strangely static feeling. The group returns to the initial refrain, and gradually the players add more textures. After a climactic section where every instrument seems to be doing something unrelated, they quickly unite and bring the work to an abrupt and unresolved close.

Crowdfunding c. 1956
The Chamber Music Society of Detroit had a remarkably prescient approach to paying for Summer Music, the quintet they commissioned from Barber. The society asked members of the audience to donate to pay the composer (though they did guarantee up to $2,000). It turned out to be a huge hit with the crowd, who had apparently been very excited and motivated to attend by this commissioning process. The audience members got their money’s worth; at the concert, the work was played twice, once before intermission and once after.

Barber - Summer Music

Samuel Barber: Summer Music, Op. 31 ｜ O'Connor, Taylor, Guise-Langlois, van Sambeek, Nuckols (Live)

Octandre 

Edgard Varèse, composer
Jim Walker, flute
Cynthia DeAlmeida, oboe
Richie Hawley, clarinet
Dennis Michel, bassoon
Mark Lawrence, trombone
Paul Merkelo, trumpet
Trevor Nuckols, horn
Nico Abondolo, double bass

“I have always been an experimenter. But my experiments go into the wastebasket. I give only finished works to the public.” — Edgard Varèse, 1923, in a New York Times interview preceding the first performance of Octandre.

Varèse studied in his native Paris during the early years of the last century with Albert Roussel (counterpoint and fugue), Charles-Marie Widor (composition), and Vincent d’Indy (conducting). A subsequent sojourn in Berlin enabled him to make the acquaintance of Ferruccio Busoni and Arnold Schoenberg – to both of whom he remained indebted as informal teachers – and in 1915 he emigrated to New York, his chief residence for the remainder of his life, attracting during his career such modern icons as Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who regarded him as a major influence on their work.

Varèse is best known for his pieces centering on percussion, on electronics combined with traditional instruments, and one purely electronic piece, Poème électronique for three-track tape, created for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. His output consisted of only a dozen, painstakingly crafted works, with a few more posthumously completed by his student and literary executor, Chou Wen-chung. The brief Octandre is his one “intimate” ensemble work – in terms of the number of players involved, certainly not its sonority or emotional impact.

The first performance of Octandre, whose title refers both to its eight-player ensemble and the word’s literal meaning, a flower with eight stamens, was given in New York on January 13, 1924, under the direction of E. Robert Schmitz, founder of the Pro Musica Society, dedicated to the presentation of works by living composers, and a renowned interpreter of the piano music of Debussy.

The first movement is launched by a chant-like oboe phrase – reminiscent of the bassoon melody that opens Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps), employing the minor second and its inversion, the major seventh. The clarinet responds with a chattering bundle of repeated notes, succeeded by “pumping” sounds in the brass. The movement ends “with the feeling of the beginning (a little anxious),” the composer notes in the score. The second movement begins as a wind-blown scherzo featuring the piccolo’s repeated notes, which are pushed aside by the brass. The final chord is a fierce crescendo, which winds down to the solo double bass leading into the finale, which begins “grave” but blossoms into an energetic fugue with the successive entries of oboe, bassoon, and clarinet. Octandre ends with what can perhaps be best described as a screech.

Chamber Music

Edgard Varèse: Octandre (Live)

Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-flat major, K. 417 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composer
Trevor Nuckols, horn
Joshua Weilerstein, conductor
Academy Festival Orchestra

Program Notes:

Although Mozart was a pianist and violinist, wind instruments often won a special response from him. Whether in solo concertos, in serenades for wind ensemble, or just within the orchestral textures of his symphonies and piano concertos, his natural grace and lyrical warmth repeatedly showed themselves in his writing for the principal wind instruments of the day, namely flute, oboe, clarinet and horn. He appeared to have had a liking, too, for the musicians who played them, forming friendships with several in which professional admiration mixed with earthy good humour.

Mozart’s move from his native Salzburg to Vienna in 1781 brought a period of enormous growth and fulfillment for him, impelled by the city’s highly stimulating musical and intellectual atmosphere. Among his friends there was the horn player Joseph Leutgeb, a virtuoso of the relatively new ‘hand-stopping’ technique that had greatly extended the range of notes available on the 18th-century horn, whose performances drew praise for their ability to ‘sing an adagio as perfectly as the most mellow, interesting and accurate voice’, and who ended up the lucky recipient of no fewer than four beautifully made concertos. (The natural horn used throughout the 18th century consisted of a mouthpiece, a coiled length of tubing and a large flared bell, and was a precursor to the valved horn, which emerged in the 19th century. With no valves to alter the length of the tubing, horn players of the 18th century developed the ‘hand-stopping’ technique (moving the right hand in and out of the horn’s bell) to alter the pitch, enabling the player to reach notes beyond the instrument's natural capabilities.)

In fact, Mozart had already known Leutgeb in Salzburg, where both men had been members of the Archbishop’s court orchestra. Leutgeb had left for Vienna in 1777, however, there to combine his musical occupation with the profession of cheese and sausage-monger, and so it must have been with some pleasure (and perhaps amusement) that Mozart was reunited with him there. The fact that the manuscript of the first concerto he wrote for him in 1783 bears an inscription claiming that the composer had ‘taken pity on Leutgeb, ass, ox and fool’, and that the fourth carries even more ribald remarks at the soloist’s expense, suggests that friendship was established on fairly robust lines.

The Horn Concerto known as Mozart’s second was actually his first for the ‘ass, ox and fool’, and was completed on 27 May 1783. Despite the insults, Mozart evidently had faith in Leutgeb’s skills, although comparison with horn parts written for other players suggests that he took trouble to accommodate greater comfort in the higher register. The music’s character, too, is dignified and charming, particularly in the poetic lines of the central slow movement, which exploit Leutgeb’s famous lyrical skills. It is also true, however, of the majestic first movement and the finale, whose cantering rhythms evoke the horn’s customary associations with the post-horn.

Nuckols Plays Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Horn Concerto No. 2, K. 417｜Trevor Nuckols, Joshua Weilerstein (Live)

Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140

Johann Sebastian Bach, composer
Trevor Nuckols, horn/arranger
David Ball, organ

Bach's famous cantata was written in 1731 as music to be included in a church service - despite its simplicity, it's now one of Bach's most famous in the genre thanks to its inclusion of a well-known tune.

The opening words of this cantata, Wachet auf, which translates as ‘Sleepers Awake’, contains a tune written by a Lutheran pastor called Philipp Nicolai.

It caught Bach’s attention during his golden Leipzig period. It wasn’t unusual for Bach to transform original melodies by other chorale and hymn-tune composers into his own works of art. The most famous section of this cantata is Part IV: ‘Zion hears the watchmen calling’ and it is here that Nicolai’s tune features.

The first performance of this most beautiful of wake-up calls was on 25 November 1731, which was the 27th Sunday after Trinity – the specific day for which the work was written to be performed. It is notable that there can be only 27 Sundays after Trinity in years when Easter falls early. As a result, this now famous cantata was, in fact, rarely heard in the years after it was written.

Johann Sebastian Bach: Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, arr. Nuckols  | Nuckols, Ball (Live)

Hailed by the New York Times as "Outstanding" and an "Excellent Soloist", horn player Trevor Nuckols performs as a leading soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral performer across the globe. He won the Gold Medal at the Vienna International Music Competition, First Prize at the International Horn Society's Premiere Soloist Competition, the North International Music Competition, Music Academy of the West Concerto Competition, and the Juilliard Concerto Competition. He is a recipient of the International Horn Society's Barry Tuckwell Award, Sylff Fellowship, Kovner Fellowship, and Interlochen's Young Artist Award. 

Nuckols has performed & recorded as solo horn of the Münchener Kammerorchester & with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He has performed as guest principal horn with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Bad Reinchenhall Philharmoniker, and the Philharmonie Salzburg. He received his training at the Marlboro Music Festival, Tanglewood Music Center, Pacific Music Festival, & the Lucerne Festival. He has taught master classes at Seoul National University, Tokyo College of Music, New York University, and the University of Cartagena.

Nuckols is a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy, earned his Bachelor & Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School, and received a Postgraduate Diploma from the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg. His teachers include Michael Corcoran, Gene Berger, R. J. Kelley, Jens McManama, & Radovan Vlatković. He performs exclusively on a custom Alexander B flat horn and a Raoux Millereau.

Johann Sebastian Bach: Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, arr. Nuckols | Nuckols, Ball (Live)

Trevor Nuckols

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