The Alauna Ensemble
George Hall, Thursday February 28th
7.30 pm.
 St Thomas’ Church, Neath, Friday March 1st
7.30 pm.
Glenalla Civic Hall, Llanelli, Saturday March 2nd
7.30 pm.
Danzi Wind Quintet in B-flat Op. 56 No.1
Reynolds Wind Quintet -
The Silver Apples of the Moon
Gounod Petite Symphonie
 
Beethoven Wind Octet Op. 103
 


The Alauna Ensemble
(from left to right)
Graham Mayger (flute), Alan Garner (oboe), Jean Marsden (oboe), Peter Morgan (bassoon), Roger Birnstingl (bassoon), 
Tom Whatmough (clarinet), James Mainwaring (clarinet), Alun Rees (horn), Marcus Bates (horn)

 

 

The  Alauna Ensemble was originally formed to give a performance in Chichester Cathedral of a piano quintet by the late Robert Stewart, composer, pianist,
repetiteur and organ scholar.
The ensemble was reformed six years ago and has performed concerts
in England and Wales,
including concerts in Oxford and London.

Graham Mayger (flute) won a Foundation Scholarship to the Royal College of Music, then a French Government Scholarship to study in Paris with Jean Pierre Rampal. Returning to London, he then played with most of the major London orchestras, and for 27 years enjoyed a special relationship with the Northern Sinfonia. He now holds principal flute positions with many freelance orchestras and is a member of the London Harpsichord Ensemble.
He has broadcast as a soloist in many recitals and concertos, including a concerto performance at the Promenade concerts. His recordings for Unicorn of Vivaldi chamber concertos, including the ‘Goldfinch’ have been very highly praised.
He was appointed to the staff of the Royal College of Music at the age of 24; becoming the youngest professor ever to be appointed. Several of his past students now hold important orchestral positions in this country and abroad. He is also professor of the flute at the Royal Military School of Music, Kneller Hall.

Alan Garner (oboe) studied at the RCM with Peter Graeme and Michael Winfield, and whilst there won all the major prizes for Oboe. On leaving he joined the BBC Scottish SO, and later moved to Scottish Opera where he was Principal Oboe for seven years. Since returning south he has been freelance, working as guest principal Oboe with many orchestras and ensembles, including the RPO, ROH, Philharmonia, LMP, CBSO and COE. Married to the Bassoonist Julie Price, they live in Hertfordshire and have two young children.

Jean Marsden  (oboe) was born in Blackburn, Lancashire. While still at school she received lessons from Evelyn Rothwell (Lady Barbirolli) before going to the Royal Northern College to study with Leon Goosens and Phillip Hill.
After several years of freelance work in the Manchester area with orchestras such as the Liverpool Philharmonic and Manchester Camerata she joined first the London Festival Ballet Orchestra as cor anglais and later the BBC Concert Orchestra as principal cor anglais.
Marriage and family brought Jean to Wales where she now lives combining a freelance career with teaching in schools and at the Welsh College of Music and Drama. Her interests include designing and making stained glass and decorative pieces. She is married to bassoonist Robert Codd

Thomas Whatmough (clarinet) was a student at the Purcell School and the Guildhall School of Music. Since leaving the Guildhall in 1993 he has worked with many of the British orchestras both at home and abroad. Thomas has also worked as a soloist.
‘an electrifying clarinet soloist’ – Edward Greenfield, The Guardian
‘eloquent and agile in the lead role’ – Barry Millington, The Times
‘an outstanding young player’ – The Independent

James Mainwaring (clarinet) was born in Morriston and is the member of a musical family with two brothers who play trumpet and viola. He started the clarinet at the age of nine and went on to study clarinet and saxophone at the Welsh College of Music and Drama and the Royal Academy of Music, with Angela Malsbury, Andrew Marriner and Richard Addison.
James has worked a great deal on the Continent and lived for three years in Hamburg, during which time he played with the Hamburg Mozart Orchestra.
Since his return to the United Kingdom he has pursued a busy and varied career, working with orchestras and chamber ensembles and touring West End shows.

Marcus Bates (horn) started his varied career by spending five years playing as principal horn in symphony orchestras in Gran Canaria, Majorca and Malaga in Spain, returning to London in 1993. Since then he has played with most major British symphony and opera orchestras and worked extensively in London's West End Theatres. He is currently playing in South Pacific at the National Theatre.

Alun Rees (horn) was educated in Ysgol Gyfun Ystalyfera where he started to play the horn at the age of twelve. He went on to study at the Welsh College of Music and Drama with Bill Davis, Robert Cook and James Beck.
A member of the Welsh Brass Trio and the Westgate Brass Ensemble, Alun follows a busy freelance career working with orchestras such as Welsh National Opera, BBC Now, The Hallé, the RPO and RPO Pops.

Roger Birnstingl (bassoon) took up the instrument at the age of fourteen in order to form a family trio and went on to study with Archie Camden at the Royal College of Music and later with Enzo Mucetti of La Scala, Milan.
He was a member of the Philharmonia with Herbert von Karajan touring the United States and has been principal bassoon with the London Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic and for thirteen years with the London Symphony Orchestra before joining the Suisse Romande Orchestra. During this period he played under all the great conductors of the time including Klemperer, Monteux, Munch, Stravinski, Bernstein, Solti, Abbado, Barbirolli and Sir Colin Davis.
Roger has recorded the complete wind repertoire of Mozart and Beethoven and all of Schönberg’s chamber music with groups such as the London Sinfonietta, the London Wind Soloists and the London Wind Trio.
In June 2000 he recorded, with pianist Sam Haywood, a CD of English music for bassoon (An English Serenade) for Sanctus.
He is professor of bassoon at the Geneva Conservatoire.

Peter Morgan (bassoon) studied with Roger Birnstingl and Martin Gatt at the Guildhall School of Music and with Mordechai Rechtmann in Tel Aviv. Peter has worked with many of the country's leading orchestras and ensembles and for twelve years, until 1996, was principal bassoon with the Orchestra of English National Ballet.

 

Franz Danzi (1763-1826)
Wind Quintet in B-flat major, Op.56 No.1

1. Allegretto  2. Andante con moto  3. Minuet & Trio  4. Allegro

In 1778, at the age of 15, Franz Danzi was a cellist in the famous Mannheim Orchestra before joining the Munich orchestra in 1783, by which time he had composed three operas. In 1807 he was appointed Kapellmeister in Stuttgart where he met Weber, whose music he later championed.

Danzi wrote some eighteen stage works, usually a mixture of music and spoken dialogue called singspiel. He also wrote songs, grand opera, sacred and secular choral music, masses, oratorios and cantatas and a great deal of orchestral music, much of it concerti. His chamber music includes trios, quartets, quintets, and sextets for a variety of instruments and combinations of instruments.

Danzi was the first composer to write extensively for Wind Quintet, often writing in a deceptively simple way while making virtuoso demands on the performers.

PQM

Peter Reynolds (b. 1958)
The Silver Apples of the Moon: Nocturnes for Wind Quintet

The Silver Apples of the Moon are a series of nocturnes for wind quintet and was completed in January this year. Although the music is, to all intents and purposes, an organically conceived structure of some thirteen or fourteen minutes duration, it is also permeated with the memories, detritus and musical nocturnal imagery that anyone familiar with the nineteenth century tradition will recognise. The title is taken from The Song of Wandering Aengus by W.B. Yeats, whose poetry is suffused with nocturnal imagery (Yeats’ knowledge of the cycles of the moon and stars was apparently encyclopaedic; the composer Philip Heseltine once recalled how Yeats’ once “talked for several hours about the moon, and the talk was illuminating and beautiful as the moon of the fourteenth night itself.”).

Naturally, I am aware that anyone venturing back into such a musical landscape faces the accusation of being a musical dinosaur. Consequently, whilst I was writing this piece, I was delighted to encounter a remark made by Professor Alexander Goehr to the effect that “One simply doesn’t write horn-calls in the late twentieth century.” Suffice to say, the music of The Silver Apples of the Moon is suffused with horn-calls… Beyond such external references though it is ultimately the duty of the music itself to confer some kind of unity of both form and content on these disparate elements.

The music is laid out as a series of four linked nocturnes. The first is a long elaborate upbeat to the rest of the work, containing much material that is later expanded on and developed (two prominent ideas for the oboe and horn in particular dominate much of what follows). The second nocturne is a fleeting scherzo retracing the same ground three times and culminating in a short cadenza for the horn. This gives way to the slow third nocturne, built around an oscillating figure, first heard in the clarinet. A brief return to the material of the faster second nocturne introduces the fourth and final nocturne in which much of the material of the first is again revisited and reworked.

The work was written for the Alauna Ensemble’s present short tour.

PR

Charles Gounod (1818–1893)
Petite Symphonie

Adagio – Allegretto    Andante Cantabile (Andante quasi Adagio)
Scherzo (Allegro moderato)    Finale (Allegretto)

Gounod is best known for his operas – Faust, Romeo and Juliet, Le médcin malgré lui and Mireille are amongst the stage works that made him a major figure during the second half of the nineteenth century. As a young man, he considered taking holy orders, but, Faust-like, was, in his own words, ‘tempted’ by the ‘fancy, imagination and romance’ of the theatre.

It seems surprising, then, in 1885, after many operatic successes, to find him turning his attention to chamber music. The reason was a commission from his friend, the celebrated flautist, Paul Taffanel, to write a piece for the Societé de Musique de Chambre pour instruments à vent which he (Taffanel) had founded to encourage the performance of chamber repertoire for wind instruments: the result was the Petite Symphonie. Gounod modelled his scoring on the wind serenades of the composer he most admired, Mozart; but, in deference to the work’s commissioner, added a flute to Mozart’s octet of two oboes, two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons.

The piece looks back to the world of the ‘classical’ symphony. The sonata-form first movement comes complete with a slow introduction; the second movement, Andante Cantabile, pays tribute to Taffanel’s flute playing; in the third movement, the Scherzo, the presence of horns and oboes seem to have reminded Gounod more of the hunt than of courtly dancing; and the whole is rounded off with a lively Finale. The Petite Symphonie is an elegant and charming work, full of sentiment but lacking in the sentimentality which can mar this composer’s work.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Octet in E-flat Major, Op.103

1. Allegro  2. Andante  3. Menuetto and Trio  4. Presto

In 1787 Beethoven left Bonn for Vienna to study with Mozart but the death of his mother caused him to leave prematurely. He wrote the Octet just before his departure from Bonn in 1792 to return to Vienna to study with Haydn, Albrechtsberger, Schenck and Salieri.

The music loving Max Franz, Elector of Bonn and Beethoven’s patron, maintained as part of his musical establishment what might be termed a dinner orchestra consisting of pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons. Although not published until almost forty years later, it was for this ensemble that Beethoven wrote both the Wind Octet and the Rondino.

A string quintet arrangement by Beethoven appeared in 1797 as Opus 4 but the octet wasn’t published until 1830, as Opus 103. It bears the heading Parthia dans un concert in Es a Due Oboe, Due Clarinetti, Due Corni, Due Fagotti Di L. van Beethoven.

PQM

Top of Page

[Home]