Who: Stuart Malina, pianist, with flutist David DiGiacobbe, oboist Andreas Oeste, clarinetist Eric Just, bassoonist Joseph Grimmer, and hornist Jonathan Clark
What: Music by Stephen Sondheim, Sergei Prokofiev, Avram Dorman, and Francis Poulenc
When: 8:00 on Wednesday, February 18th, 2026 – note: due to a scheduling conflict, the usual 7:30 start-time has been moved back to 8pm!
Where: Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg.
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Stuart Malina at the piano (photo by Dan Gleiter) |
The great writer Goethe once wrote in a letter to a friend of his (who also happened to be the teacher of a boy named Felix Mendelssohn) that chamber music was “four rational people conversing.” To him – and certainly to many music lovers out there – chamber music meant “string quartets.” While a solo pianist is readily accepted by the audience in general, a single violinist might raise an eyebrow (“will there be enough variety to hold my interest?”) – how did you react to hearing Kerson Leong last month?
The “chamber” in chamber music originated in the room where it was to be performed, camera being Italian for “room” (before it was applied to certain photographic devices) or kammer in German going as far back as medieval days and the Renaissance. Instruments playing in a room played what was called a sonata da camera as opposed to music played in a church where it would instead be called a sonata da chiesa (a “church” sonata). So here we are, listening to a performance of “chamber” music in a church… Normally, this should not be confusing… (Remember, btw, it takes four people to play a Trio Sonata.)
We're about to listen to “chamber music” performed by… well, different combinations of musicians: two works for two instrumentalists, another for five, and the grand finale combining six (count ‘em, six). And not a string quartet in sight. This time, it's piano and winds. There’s a set of waltzes for oboe and piano by Stephen Sondheim, a sonata for flute and piano by Prokofiev, a relatively new work for oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, and piano by Avner Dorman, and a work for piano and wind quintet (add a flute to the last batch) by Francis Poulenc. Certainly a variety of sounds, textures, and timbres as well as styles, all composed over a span of 75 years.
The concert itself is part of an on-going series of chamber music concerts with the music director and conductor of the Harrisburg Symphony, Stuart Malina, now in his 26th year with the orchestra, performing as a pianist as he often does with members of the orchestra. In this case, he’ll be joined by principal flutist David DiGiacobbe, principal oboist Andreas Oeste, principal clarinetist Eric Just, principal bassoonist Joseph Grimmer, and Jonathan Clark, a member of the orchestra’s horn section.
Back in the 1970s, there was such a proliferation of “____ & Friends” programs in New York City including several with concertmasters of the New York Philharmonic, that critics began wondering if the idea of “and Friends” hadn’t outworn its welcome. Then along came the Phil’s new concertmaster, Rodney Friend, so, of course, now we had programs performed by “Rodney Friend & Friends”... New York wasn't the kind of town where people would automatically understand "Rodney & Friends."
One of my favorite definitions of “chamber music” describes it as “music played by friends for friends.” It also goes to say, here in Harrisburg, we don’t need a last name to tell us whose programs these are.
Welcome to Stuart & Friends 2026!
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When I mentioned that definition of “chamber music” as music “written for a small number of instruments,” the academic pedant could argue the first music on the program, despite being performed by two musicians, was written for the pit orchestra of a Broadway theater. Stephen Sondheim had, by the time he’d composed the originals, become one of the leading composers of “Broadway Musicals” – let’s say, “American musical theater” since Sondheim’s works have found a long and prosperous life well beyond the Great White Way – and would go one to create several more to ensure his place as one of the all-time greatest composers in the field.
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| Stephen Sondheim |
While he’s well known for his tunes – who hasn’t heard “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music? – his music as well as his lyrics have an unmistakably recognizable quality both rhythmic and structural with technical demands for the singers as well as the orchestra that go beyond the traditional aspects of the typical musical.
In 1992, English composer Richard Rodney Bennett arranged these three waltzes from two of Sondheim’s more popular musicals (call them “shows,” if you must) which opened on Broadway in the early-1970s. While the original plot for these waltzes (two of them, originally vocal numbers) may be unnecessary to enjoy Sondheim’s melodic writing, both musicals deal with ordinary people and their frustrated and failing relationships. This causes not only tension in the plot but also in the nostalgia and hopelessness reflected in their music.
Company, opening in 1970 and winning 6 of the 14 Tonys it was nominated for, was one of the first musicals to deal with (then) contemporary aspects of dating, marriage, and divorce as the central character, a bachelor named Bobby, faces his 35th birthday. After what he assumes will be a one-night-stand with April (or is it June…?), his date is ready to leave for Barcelona (Bobby: “Oh?) but after he gives up trying to convince her to stay, she decides she will after all (Bobby: “Oh God…”). Here’s a link to the 2011 live performance recorded at Avery Fisher Hall with Neil Patrick Harris as Bobby and Christina Hendricks as April.
Almost all the music of A Little Night Music (which takes its name from Mozart’s famous serenade, Eine kleine Nachtmusik) is written in 3/4-time; as critic Clive Barnes put it, “an orgy of plaintively memorable waltzes, all talking of past loves and lost worlds.” A series of “night waltzes” recurs throughout the score, mostly instrumental. Here’s Richard Rodney Bennett’s arrangement as played by saxophonist John Harle with Bennett at the piano.
After what passes for an overture, the main characters enter dancing to this Night Waltz, “each uncomfortable with their partner.” One of these characters will be the middle-aged Frederick with his “trophy wife.” He goes to see a former lover, a fading flower of an actress named Desiree (she who gets to sing “Send in the Clowns”). After she tells him about the young married dragoon she’s currently having an affair with, Frederick tries to “one-up” her by telling her about his young wife, fending off Desiree's interjecting quips and eventually revealing his sexual frustration in “You Must Meet My Wife.” Here is a link to the Original Cast Album with Len Cariou as Frederick and Glynnis Johns as Desiree.
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I was in my 20s when I saw the great (and then fairly new) flutist James Galway’s newly released RCA recording (with no less than pianist Martha Argerich) of a flute sonata by Sergei Prokofiev which, as I listened, turned out to be the 2nd Violin Sonata I’d been familiar with since I was in high school. Considering Galway paired it with the Franck Flute Sonata which clearly was a transcription of Franck’s famous Violin Sonata, I thought he was just raping the repertoire to find other things he could program. Yes, unfortunately, many great composers have never written great works for the flute (or for that matter most wind instruments) – so many instrumentalists will find something they like and appropriate for their own.
And why not? It’s certainly nothing new – Mozart himself did it, transcribing a woodwind serenade when he was behind on a deadline with his publisher for a set of string quintets.
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| Prokofiev, composing at the piano |
It was deep in the midst of the horrors of World War II when the Soviet Union had been invaded and much of it occupied by Nazi Germany. Like Shostakovich and numerous other artists, Prokofiev found himself “evacuated” to various remote locations deep in the heart of Russia, first to Tbilisi in the Caucasus, then to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, then Perm in the Ural Mountains, that north-south line of mountains serving as a convenient dividing point between Europe and Asia. He may have been far removed physically from the ravages of the war then raging with the horrendous siege of Leningrad (which Shostakovich commemorated in his epic 7th Symphony) and the devastation then wasting Ukraine, and as you listen to this music, you would have no idea what current events may (or may not) have been affecting his life.
Historically, artists often deal with the challenges of creating art “in the midst of traumatic events.” Think of Beethoven writing his A Major Cello Sonata in the midst of Napoleon’s bombardment of Vienna in 1809, or Robert Schumann composing short piano pieces for his Album for the Young with the sound of gunfire audible quite literally just down the street as revolution came to Dresden in 1849.
A famous example would be how many artists responded after the events of September 11th 2001. The impact of such physical and emotional upheaval varies from artist to artist, culture to culture, or time to time, and in Prokofiev’s case he was working on several large-scale works during this time, most notably the opera based on Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace, about the impact of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 (curiously, he had been thinking about it even before Hitler’s invasion was announced in the news in June of 1941).
While under evacuation in Alma Ata, he composed the filmscore for Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (music overshadowed by the score for Alexander Nevsky) but also worked on the ballet Cinderella, one of his most melodious scores, which occupied him throughout these four years. And, almost as an afterthought amidst these large-scale works, this Flute Sonata in D Major. He wrote to a friend describing his new work as a “sonata in a gentle, flowing classical style.”
I can find no specific references to why he chose to a write a sonata for flute – he’d begun a violin sonata in F Minor in 1938 but put it aside as events developed, left uncompleted until 1946, after the war. By that time, his Flute Sonata had received its premiere in Moscow in 1943 with flutist Nikolai Kharkovsky and pianist Sviatoslav Richter.
When that violin sonata was finished and premiered by violinist David Oistrakh and pianist Lev Oborin in 1946, the flute sonata had already been published as Op. 94. Somehow, the newer 1st Violin Sonata in F Minor became Op. 80, perhaps because Prokofiev was thinking more about having started it years earlier in 1938, two years after he returned to his native Russia – now the Soviet Union – to stay.
There’s a story, told by a student of the pianist, that at one point Oborin “played a certain passage, marked forte, too gently for Prokofiev's liking, who insisted it should be more aggressive. Oborin replied that he was afraid of drowning out the violin, but Prokofiev said ‘It should sound in such a way that people should jump in their seat, and people will say 'Is he out of his mind?’”
Later, Oistrakh remarked to the composer that Flute Sonata, you know, would make a very good violin sonata – and so Prokofiev made a few adjustments to cover the difference between how the violin would play a passage compared to the flute (the piano part remained untouched) and published it as the Violin Sonata No. 2, Op.94b.
It’s in the standard four movements of a classical sonata: a luxuriantly unfolding andantino (not slow but not fast, either) followed by a bustling (if not scurrying) scherzo, a tender, Mozartean slow movement, and then a positive and positively enthusiastic finale. Here’s that recording by Galway and Argerich I’d mentioned, released in 1975:
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At Market Square Concerts’ 40th Anniversary concert in March, 2022, one of the works on the program was the Guitar Quintet by Avner Dorman, a composer with academic ties to the Midstate, with Grammy-winning guitarist Jason Vieux – here’s an excerpt from the version for guitar and string orchestra.
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| Avner Dorman at his desk (photo by Wendy Halperin) |
For this concert, Stuart Malina will be joined by four wind-players for another quintet by Dorman, one written earlier in 2007. While the Guitar Quintet (from 2016) had been inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk and peace activist from Vietnam, where each movement took its title from one of the six mantras outlined at the end of his book, “How to Love,” the quintet for piano and winds is entitled Jerusalem Mix and also has a story of sorts behind it, which the composer explains:
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Jerusalem Mix takes its title from a popular Israeli dish made of an eclectic assortment of fried meats. The dish, much like the city of its origin, is a melting pot of flavors and characters - each preserving some of its unique characteristics while contributing to the whole.
When I was first approached to write a woodwind and piano quintet for the 10th anniversary of the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival I knew I wanted to write a piece that would reflect the spirit of the festival and of the city of Jerusalem.
As I started writing the piece, I discovered that the piano and woodwind quintet is a tricky ensemble as it embodies members of four different instrument families: the bassoon and oboe are both double-reed instruments; the clarinet is a single-reed instrument; the French horn is a brass instrument; and the piano is of the percussion family. I decided to use the diversity of this ensemble to mirror the diversity of Jerusalem. With this in mind I set out to write this piece as a collage of short scenes, each portraying one or more aspects of the city:
I. Jerusalem Mix – portraying the busyness of the modern city. Musically, this movement is based on Armenian and Turkish folk dance-styles in which the length of the beats constantly varies. In the middle part of this movement a prayer-like melody is introduced in the Oboe emulating its Middle-Eastern origins such as the Zurna or the Duduk.
II. The Wailing Wall – emulates the sound of a praying crowd. This movement is based on the characteristic sigh of the Jewish prayer and pays homage to the opening movement of Mordecai Seter’s oratorio “Tikun Hatzot.”
III. Wedding March – a humorous movement that is first inspired by Hassidic Music but gradually incorporates wedding music from Middle-Eastern Jewish traditions. As the wedding party reaches higher levels of ecstasy (and the guests are increasingly drunk) these different styles collide and collapse into one another.
IV. Blast.
V. Adhan (the Islamic call to prayer) – by hitting the strings of the piano with drumsticks the pianist emulates the sound of a Kanun and the prayers of the opening movement and of the “wailing wall” movement become the call to prayer of the Muezzin.
VI. Jerusalem Mix. All the movements are based on two simple melodic cells – one chromatic and the other made of a whole step. For me, the fact that these simple motives can lend themselves to the music traditions of Christianity (Armenian dance), Islam, and Judaism, express that on a deep cultural, musical, and humane level, our cultures are closer than we realize.
(from program notes, ©Avner Dorman)
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Here is the complete work, performed at the Piano Salon Cristofori, Berlin, on January 6th, 2017.
Born
in Israel, Dorman was 25
when he received the
Prime Minister’s Prize for
his Ellef Symphony, the
youngest composer to have won the award. He
studied composition with John Corigliano at Juilliard where he earned
his doctorate. With numerous works commissioned and performed around
the world – you can check his website
for more details –
he is currently Professor of
Music Theory and Composition at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music
at Gettysburg College right here in Central PA.
Having studied musicology (as well as physics) as a student in Israel, his music is not only influenced by the culture and history of the country and the wider region of the world, but as a third-generation Holocaust Survivor, of his family’s German heritage (he describes how the household he grew up in was full of German music and literature). Whether it’s the musical DNA that brings out the soul of this heritage or his meditative or hypnotic approach to contemporary minimalism, he has created music with a direct emotional impact that goes well beyond the surface so many composers have failed to penetrate.
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The oldest piece on the program is by that “witty Vulgarian” intent on tweaking the various noses of the Parisian establishment, a member of a group known as Les Six (an obvious and singularly unimaginative nickname for a group of six composers) and a follower of what was called Neo-Classicism, taking its influences more from the distant past of Mozart rather than the recent trajectory of the Late Romanticism of Wagner and Liszt into the 20th Century with Schoenberg’s atonality and Stravinsky’s early ballets.
When I was growing up in the ‘60s, I remember people still thinking the music of Francis Poulenc was “contemporary.” After all, most of it was written only 30 or 40 years ago and the man had died as recently as 1963. Perhaps no longer shocking, it is certainly sincere and smile-worthy.
One critic had described him as “half bad boy, half monk” – which reminds me of a photo that once inspired the composer as he was writing a distinctly religious work – his Gloria, a late work from 1959 – still infused with some of his trademark cheekiness: a bunch of Benedictine monks in their robes playing soccer.
As Lucy Murray points out in her program notes, “Filled with comic gestures and dissonances that suddenly turn lyrical, the work continuously pulls the listener back and forth between pathos and humor. One senses, in Poulenc, one foot in the cafĂ© and one in the grave.”
The Sextet opens like “a Paris traffic jam,” as Lucy puts it, with a contrasting slower, lyrical section ushered in by the solo bassoon building to a passionate climax before – okay, enough of this sadness – back to the comedy of the opening. The second movement opens in full classical clarity, evocative of a Mozart andante before everyone spontaneously decides it’s time to stop in at the dance hall but then (oh yeah) this is supposed to be a tender slow movement. The finale combines bits of jazziness (remember, this is only a few years after the Roaring ‘20s) with lyrical contrasts and then some Stravinskian rhythms (a bit of Les Noces perhaps? Poulenc had played one of the four pianos at its London premiere in 1926) before – another surprise – rather than the boisterous romp we’d expect to the finish line, it becomes this slow-motion reflection on themes from the previous movements (again, perhaps an inspiration from that magical conclusion to Les Noces), a solemn ending, by comparison, to what started off like a galop from Offenbach.
This performance is from a fairly new music festival in 2023, held in the port city of Pohang, South Korea:
It’s assumed Poulenc began work on the sextet in 1931, finishing it in 1933, the year after the Concerto for Two Pianos. Poulenc played the piano at the premiere with some of the best known wind players in Paris. It was, however, regardless what we might think of it today, not well-received by traditionalists: composer and critic Florent Schmitt criticized it as “wandering and vulgar.” A more positive review wrote that "with Poulenc, all of France comes out of the windows he opens."
Poulenc extensively revised the composition in August 1939 because he was dissatisfied with the original, telling Nadia Boulanger, "There were some good ideas in it but the whole thing was badly put together. With the proportions altered, better balanced, it comes over very clearly."
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Poulenc & Friend (1930s) |
Self-taught because his parents intended him for a career in the family’s pharmaceutical company, Poulenc, after coming under the influence of that great Parisian iconoclast Erik Satie, was convinced music was his life. He described himself as a “Vulgarian” who wrote in his trademark light-hearted style to his final years in the early-1960s, long after such a style had gone out of fashion. However, in the summer of 1936, after an unexpected religious awakening following the death of a close friend and fellow composer in a violent car accident and his visit to a famous religious shrine shortly afterward, he began composing with a new-found and often religious seriousness, writing dramatic choral works during the Nazi occupation setting words of Resistance poets, which culminated in his intensely dramatic opera, The Dialogue of the Carmelites of 1957.
Even though his contemporaries might disparage his style, he himself was more open-minded than we might think. In 1921, he traveled to Vienna where he met Arnold Schoenberg and “talked shop” with him and his pupils (Schoenberg at the time was developing what soon became his “Method of Composing with 12-Tones”). A fan of Pierre Boulez, playing recordings of his Marteau sans maĂ®tre for some friends, Poulenc wrote to him in 1961 how he was sorry to have to miss a performance of Boulez' recent Pli selon pli “because I am sure it is well worth hearing” (Boulez did not return the sentiment).
In 1942 he wrote to a friend, “I know perfectly well I am not one of those composers who made harmonic innovations like Igor [Stravinsky], Debussy or Ravel but I think there is room for new music which doesn't mind using other people's chords. Wasn't that the case with Mozart-Schubert?"
– Dick Strawser
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