Sunday Classics preview: Souvenirs of two concerts -- intriguing chamber curiosities by Camille Saint-Saëns and Fritz Kreisler

Fritz Kreisler, composer (yes, composer): The "Kreisler String Quartet" (Kreisler and Thomas Petre, violins; William Primrose, viola; Lauri Kennedy, cello) plays its namesake's Scherzo à la Dittersdorf in an EMI recording made in London on April 7, 1935.

by Ken

There's a story attached to this charming little piece, which I encountered in an online review by MusicWeb International's Göran Forsling (which I found on the Arkiv Music website) of a Kreisler CD reissue that included this very recording:

An oddity is the scherzo "in the style of Dittersdorf," played by the Kreisler String Quartet, an ad hoc group assembled to record Kreisler's String Quartet. One of the members was William Primrose, who remembered the sessions. It turned out that there was going to be a blank 78 side and producer Fred Gaisberg suggested that Kreisler write a filler, or arrange one of his pieces for quartet, which he did at once in his hotel room with Primrose waiting. He then rushed the score to the copyist and the next day it was recorded.

No, this isn't actually the Kreisler "chamber curiosity" of the post title. In the click-through we're going to hear the impudently striding finale of the Kreisler String Quartet itself, from that April 1935 recording by the "Kreisler String Quartet."

Yes, we still have much work -- or rather play, I hope -- to do on the epic opening scene of Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila, but it's been a curious week with two concerts, of very different sorts under very different auspices, that nevertheless somehow seem to want to be talked about together. With luck by Sunday I'll figure out how to do that. As it happens (by way of showing how everything in the universe is interconnected), one of them featured an early yet decidedly underperformed chamber work by none other than our man Camille Saint-Saëns!

For tonight we're going to sample a pair of chamber works that were featured on those two programs. First, as noted above, we're going to hear the finale of Fritz Kreisler's String Quartet in A minor, which was played Tuesday night by an ensemble of string-quartet all-stars in a Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center concert that featured six players from six different modern-day quartets -- two violinists, two violists, and two cellists. Then we're going to hear the lovely slow movement from the aforementioned chamber work by Saint-Saëns, the Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 14. which was played last night as the climax of a joint program by pianist Xiayin Wang and the current incarnation of the historic (celebrating its 66th anniversary!) Fine Arts Quartet.


FOR TONIGHT'S SAMPLES OF THE MUSIC
HEARD IN THE TWO CONCERTS, CLICK HERE

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