Sextet                                                                                                                 John Ireland 
     Allegro non troppo 
     Andante con moto 
     Intermezzo.  Andante con grazia 
     In tempo moderato 

Phantasy Quintet                                                                                               York Bowen 

Sextet                                                                                                             Ernö Dohnányí 
     Allegro appassionato 
     Intermezzo.  Adagio - Alla marcia 
     Allegro con sentimento 
     Finale.  Allegro - Vivace giocoso 

“All Brahms and water, me boy, and more water than Brahms… Study some Dvorak for a bit, and bring me something that isn’t like Brahms.  And write your stuff in ink - no pencil sketches here.”  Such was the advice given to the 18 year old neophyte composer and child prodigy pianist John Ireland (1879-1962) at his first lesson with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, the mentor of a generation of British composers.  One of the first pieces of music Ireland wrote with this in mind was the Sextet for clarinet, horn and strings, completed in 1898 but neither published nor performed in public until 1960. 

Notwithstanding Stanford’s command, a seminal influence on Ireland was hearing a performance in London of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, by Richard Mühlfeld and the Joachim Quartet.  Ireland enthused:  “The clarinet in Mühlfeld’s hands was like something we had never heard before… so on this occasion there was not only the thrill of a new and splendid work from the pen of the greatest living composer, but the revelation of Mühlfeld’s clarinet playing”.  While the voice of Brahms is stil strongly in evidence in the Sextet, the style and spirit are in general closer to those of Dvorak.  In the last movement, the individual voice of Ireland begins to be heard, perhaps for the first time.  The addition of the horn augments the richness of the tonal palette and the pastoral, serenade-like nature of the work.  Overall it is the creation of a young mind filled with sunny exuberance, written with skill and assurance.  That Ireland suppressed it is perhaps not surprising, since it is vastly less characteristic of his personal voice than the music he wrote only a few years later, and he was renowned for the ruthlessness with which he judged his own work and that of his students.  We breathe a sigh of relief, though, that Ireland (unlike, say, Dvorak with his lost clarinet quintet) allowed it to see the light of day in the end.

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York Bowen (1884-1961) was born in London as Edwin Yorke Bowen, the son of the founder of a whiskey distillery.  He showed talent early on as a pianist, making his concerto debut at the age of eight and entering the Royal Academy of Music at the age of 14 (the same age as John Ireland), and developed into one of the most brilliant performers of his day.  He also performed at a professional level on the horn (in the Band of the Scots Guards during the First World War) and, particularly, the viola, on which he was sufficiently accomplished to work as a sub for Lionel Tertis, and which remained a favourite instrument throughout his career. 

On graduating from the Royal Academy, Bowen was dubbed "the most remarkable of the young British composers" by Camille Saint-Saëns.  His compositions include two symphonies, four piano concerti, orchestral tone poems and a large number of chamber and piano works.  Bowen’s music is written in a rich Romantic language that fell out of fashion early in his career; as a consequence his work languished in obscurity for much of the 20th century, and his later life brought little public acclaim.  Much of his output has remained unpublished and hence unheard by modern audiences until very recently. 

The Phantasy Quintet Op. 93, for the apparently unique but very welcome combination of bass clarinet and string quartet, was written in 1932 and was broadcast on BBC radio that year.  It is composed in the one-movement "phantasy" form which proved so fruitful in the hands of other British composers of the early 20th century, spurred on by the annual Cobbett Prize for new works in that form.  While much of Bowen's music is light and genial, featuring singable and sometimes folk-influenced melodies (the Sonata for clarinet and piano and the Rhapsody for viola and piano, presented in previous seasons by the Riverdale Ensemble, are examples of this), the Quintet is darker and more intense.  It is also one of his more complex and compositionally adventurous works.  Bowen’s own primary instrument, the viola, is given an especially prominent part, matching the sombre tone of the bass clarinet.

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Like his rather better-known compatriot Béla Bartók, Ernö Dohnányí (1877-1960) was born in the then-Hungarian city of Pozsony (now Bratislava in Slovakia).  Following his early years as a child prodigy pianist, he made the unusual decision to undertake his further education at the Academy of Music in Budapest, in preference to Vienna; in this he was followed by Bartók, Kodály and others, and hence became one of the principal shapers of formal music in modern Hungary.  Several years of concert tours established his reputation as the premier Hungarian pianist and composer since Liszt.  In 1915 he settled in Budapest and became entrenched as the godfather of the musical establishment there, as director of the Academy (until his ouster for political reasons) and as conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic.  It was said that no piece of orchestral music was performed in Budapest in the 1920s and 30s without his approval. 

Dohnányí’s choice to remain in Hungary during the Second World War, his coexistence (albeit uneasy) with the Fascist authorities, his decision to flee to Vienna near the end of the war, and his stint teaching in Argentina in the late 1940s, all contributed to his later life being dogged by persistent rumours - in all likelihood unjust - of pro-Nazi sympathies.  Eventually Dohnányí ended up as composer-in-residence at Florida State University; one of his tasks there, which he reportedly found completely baffling, was to write a new fight song for the university football team.  He died with his boots on, while recording in New York. 

Dohnányí’s music manages to remain firmly in the late 19th century in its materials while being uniquely characteristic in style.  It has been described as “highly lyrical and vivacious music, often tinged with a rare sense of humour”, displaying “an unerring mastery of form and instrumental fluency, and a rich but utterly natural sense of harmony which enabled him to make unbridled chromatic extensions without ever losing the tonal centre.  He succeeded in blending the Brahmsian preservation of classical form with the Lisztian concept of motivic strands binding together a large-scale work” (Bálint Vázsonyi).  The Sextet Op. 37 for clarinet, horn, violin, viola, cello and piano, composed in 1935, demonstrates these qualities to the fullest.