As a Working Musician

Luigi Bassi was born in Cremona and studied clarinet at the Milan Conservatory, going on to become the principal clarinettist of La Scala. He composed exclusively for his own instrument, writing a total of twenty-seven works for clarinet, fifteen of which were operatic fantasias based on the operas he performed at La Scala. He was, in the most literal sense, a working musician writing for himself: a virtuoso who heard the operas from the pit every night and found in their melodies the raw material for the kind of showpiece that would demonstrate everything his instrument could do.

The opera fantasia as a form developed from improvisations by performers on popular operatic themes, a practice that existed as far back as Mozart, and by the mid-nineteenth century had become an accepted format for virtuoso performers to show off their technical skills. The Concert Fantasia on Motives from Rigoletto was first published in 1865 by Ricordi and combines several melodies from Verdi's opera into a dazzling showpiece that has remained a programming favourite. It draws from across the opera: the Act I prelude, a father-daughter duet, and the famous quartet from Act III among other passages, threading them together with cadenzas and passagework that exploit the clarinet's full range and agility. Bassi was alive when Rigoletto premiered in 1851, and the melodies he chose were among the most celebrated in Italian opera. The result is a piece of unashamed brilliance, written by someone who knew precisely what his instrument was capable of and was not shy about showing it.

Bernhard Henrik Crusell was born in Finland into a family of bookbinders. His early passion for music was frowned upon, and at the age of thirteen a benefactor took him away from his parents to become an apprentice in a military band. From 1801 to 1833 he was principal clarinettist in the Swedish court orchestra and earned a reputation as one of the finest soloists of his time. He studied composition seriously, travelling to Berlin and Paris to work with leading teachers, but his identity throughout his career was that of a performer first. The heyday of the wind virtuoso, during which he lived, came at a time when great changes were taking place in the style and taste of musical composition, and Crusell played an important part in adapting these transitions to compositions for the clarinet.

The Third Clarinet Quartet dates from 1823 and is the most ambitious of his three quartets, written for clarinet in A rather than the more common B flat, with the strings given a greater role than in the earlier works. The outer movements have a military flavour and are full of excitement, while the slow movement is elaborate and worked out in careful detail. Throughout, the clarinet leads with a natural authority that reflects its composer's performing identity, the part written with an ease and instrumental fluency that could only come from someone who had spent decades on stage. The Quartet was premiered to considerable acclaim and performed frequently throughout the nineteenth century before gradually dropping from view, a fate that has more to do with the fickleness of fashion than with the quality of the music.

Carl Frühling studied piano and composition at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, where he was awarded the Liszt Prize upon graduating in 1889. For many years he enjoyed a career as an accompanist to some of the most important instrumental soloists and vocalists of the era, including Pablo de Sarasate, Bronisław Huberman, and Leo Slezak, and he often served as pianist to the Rosé Quartet, then Vienna's premier string ensemble. Frühling composed throughout his life, but his primary identity was that of a working pianist, and it was in the service of other musicians' careers rather than his own that he spent most of his professional life. The catastrophic inflation following the First World War left him in severe financial difficulties, and by the time of his death in 1937 he and his music were all but forgotten.

The Trio in A minor is his most substantial surviving chamber work. Although the Trio recalls the style of Brahms and to a lesser extent Wagner, Frühling's own originality is front and centre and the work cannot in any sense be styled as imitative. The writing for the clarinet leaves nothing to be desired, and the Trio is a genuinely essential addition to the scanty repertoire for this combination. What is striking, given that Frühling's daily professional life was spent at the keyboard in service of other soloists, is how confidently and idiomatically he writes for all three instruments. He knew from the inside how a great soloist played and what they needed from their partners, and that knowledge is present in every bar.

Édouard Lalo spent the first three decades of his composing life in near-total obscurity. He had trained as a violinist and cellist in Lille before moving to Paris, where he spent years as a chamber musician, eventually becoming a founding member of the Armingaud String Quartet, playing viola. It was as a chamber player, not a composer, that he made his living, and his earliest compositions attracted little attention. It was not until the 1870s, when the newly founded Société Nationale de Musique began championing French instrumental music, that his work found an audience.

The turning point was his friendship with Pablo de Sarasate, the Spanish violin virtuoso whose playing electrified European audiences throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Lalo wrote the Symphonie Espagnole in 1874 specifically for Sarasate, who gave the premiere in Paris in February 1875. Despite its title the work is not a symphony but a concerto in five movements, described by one commentator as a mix of symphony, concerto, and German Romanze. Spanish idioms permeate the melodic writing throughout: gypsy and flamenco gestures, alternating two and three rhythms, and a vivid sense of dance and colour that reflects both Sarasate's heritage and Lalo's own distant Spanish roots. The work had an immediate and lasting impact: it is widely credited with influencing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, which was written three years later. Tonight's performance presents the first and fourth movements in a reduction for violin and piano, bringing one of the great orchestral showpieces of the Romantic era into an intimate chamber setting.