Places and memories, Part 1

+ Eugene GOOSSENS (1893-1962): Five Impressions of a Holiday Opus 7 for flute, cello and piano (1914)

+ Somei SATOH (b 1947): Vortex for flute, clarinet, harp, piano and percussion

+ Arthur BLISS (1891-1975): Clarinet Quintet (slow movement commemorating the World War I battle of the Somme) (1931)

Johannes BRAHMS (1833-1897): Sextet for strings No 1 in B flat, Opus 18 (1860)


A collection in two parts of musical works recollecting places or times begins with Eugene Goossens’s whimsical, elegant and charming Five Impressions of a Holiday, written on the eve of World War I and remembering experiences soon to seem, in retrospect, only a lost dream. Arthur Bliss served in World War I and, in the slow movement of his strongly defined and thematically memorable Clarinet Quintet, pays eloquent tribute to the multitude of lives lost in its tragic conflict. Somei Satoh’s Vortex might represent the irresistible force with which lives are pushed towards a particular predicament by war or some other calamity or, equally, any real or imagined place or existence at the heart of a whirlpool or whirlwind. Brahms’s rich-textured and joyously melodic B flat Sextet for Strings has none of these stated or implied associations of place and time but might easily invoke in a listener associations and memories all the more vivid for being personal and private. Brahms’s flood of generous invention in this work lets us share in the creative happiness of a young composer becoming aware of the seemingly boundless extent of his own gifts.