Nature, Myth, and Modernity

Simon Mazalek came across the fourteenth century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight while browsing an old English literature anthology, looking for a story to set. He found it on the first page he opened and knew immediately it was the right one. The poem follows Sir Gawain, a knight at King Arthur's Round Table, who accepts a beheading challenge from a mysterious Green Knight and then must journey to receive the return blow, facing tests of courage, honesty, and virtue along the way. It is one of the great moral adventures in the English literary tradition, and it gave Mazalek exactly the dramatic arc he needed.

The Quintet was composed during the summer of 2026, which Mazalek spent in the Appalachian mountains. He describes nature as having taken hold of the piece through him, transforming it into what he feels is a more authentic recreation of the medieval world: stone walls, mossy ruins, dark forests, and the particular quality of light that belongs to myth. The work is in five movements, each carrying a title from the story: Sir Gawain, Riding Off, The Forest, The Lord's Manor, and The Green Chapel. The clarinet is treated as a full member of the ensemble rather than a soloist, its voice woven into the texture of the string quartet on equal terms throughout.

There are several things worth listening for. The Sir Gawain theme, heroic and charming in the first movement, returns transformed in the fifth, darker and more troubled by the time it reaches the Green Chapel. A brief and deliberate quotation from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony appears in the second movement, Riding Off, where Mazalek pictures the dotted rhythm of horses' hooves carrying Gawain through a cheering town. The third movement, The Forest, features extended bow techniques in the strings that create an atmosphere of strangeness and danger, with a moment of loud minor chords at its centre marking the point at which Gawain begins to understand that his journey may not end well. The work closes in the ominous ruin of the Green Chapel, and Mazalek describes the ending as a meditation on the inevitability of death and the human journey toward it: a remarkable subject for a seventeen year old composer, and a remarkable place to end a first major work.

Where the Quintet reaches toward myth and mortality, the String Quartet that precedes it in composition, though follows it tonight, turns toward something quieter and more intimate. Mazalek describes a specific image that stayed with him throughout the writing: a quaint meadow surrounded by trees with an innocent little stream passing through. The four movements visit different places within that landscape, each one a different aspect of the same small world.

As a violinist first, Mazalek describes the String Quartet as an inevitable reality for any composer, the first of what he expects will be many. He drew on the two string quartets of Alexander Borodin for their warmth and melodic generosity, alongside the pastoral writing of Grieg and Delius for their sense of landscape and atmosphere. The first movement is populated by the insects in the grass, bouncy and varied, each theme shining a light on something new. The second movement takes a broader view, the meadow as a whole, with romantic violin slides in the melody that Mazalek singles out as a moment he particularly hopes the audience will notice. The third movement sets two opposing ideas against one another: the intensity of fish pushing against the current and the elegant freedom of birds in the sky above. The fourth and final movement draws everything together, moving through a pizzicato opening, a fugue-like section with solos from each instrument in turn, and a return to the meadow's character before a sudden unison pluck at the very end, which Mazalek describes with characteristic directness as feeling like a punchline: as if it was all a joke.

The Quartet is the earlier work, completed nearly a year before the Quintet, and the growth between the two is audible. Both are confident and fully imagined. But where the Quartet is content to wander and observe, the Quintet drives toward something, and the darkness of the Green Chapel is nowhere to be found in the meadow.

Francis Poulenc was a member of Les Six, the loose grouping of French composers who in the 1920s set themselves against the perceived excesses of late Romanticism, seeking instead clarity, wit, and a love of popular song. That places him, historically, in direct opposition to the Romantic tradition that Mazalek draws on so freely in the two works that precede this one. And yet the Poulenc Sonata, heard after an evening of medieval knights and summer meadows, does not feel like a rebuke. It feels like a different kind of honesty.

The Sonata was composed in 1962, commissioned by the clarinettist Benny Goodman and dedicated to the memory of Arthur Honegger, one of the original Les Six. Poulenc died suddenly of a heart attack in January 1963 before it was published, and an editor was employed to supply missing dynamics and articulations. The premiere was given at Carnegie Hall by Benny Goodman and Leonard Bernstein on 10 April 1963. It was the last work he completed.

The Sonata is in three movements. The opening Allegretto tristement establishes the bittersweet quality that runs throughout: lyrical but touched by melancholy, the clarinet singing a broadly shaped line over a piano part that is both supportive and harmonically restless. The Romanza is the work's most intimate movement, tender and unhurried. The finale, Allegro con fuoco, brings the work to a brilliant and slightly impertinent close. The Sonata is tonal but never quite settled, tuneful but never simple, and marked throughout by a characteristic mixture of warmth and irony. As a final word from a long career, it sits in quiet and illuminating contrast to the two first words that open this programme. Mazalek is beginning. Poulenc, without knowing it, was saying goodbye. Both, in their different ways, were writing exactly what they needed to write.