Our Musical Greenway, the traditional walk through sundry pleasant places with music at each stop that LacMus delivers every year, focuses on chamber music for strings and woodwinds. Once again, the cornerstone of the program is Maurice Ravel’s celebrated, haunting Introduction and Allegro for harp, string quartet, flute and clarinet. Before and after, there are two quite extended compositions in four movements, only the second half of which was chosen for performance. The opening woodwind Octet by Carl Reinecke, a German musician born in the same year as Anton Bruckner, is scored for flute, oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons and two horns. It sports a turgid, flowing melodic voicing, which is an utter pleasure to the ear. Jean Françaix’s bubbling music, with occasional melancholy touches, awaits the audience at the end of the walk. His Dixtuor, or “tentette”, or piece for ten instruments, brings together — and often pits against each other — the traditional woodwind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon) and the string quintet with double bass. This work exudes the casual and worldly charm of French music of the 1930s, in the wake of the Groupe des Six, and yet it was written in 1987—as if time had magically stopped at the golden age of modern European music.
