Quintet for winds and piano

André Caplet’s quintet for winds and piano was one of the composer’s first works. Written in 1898 and finished in early 1899, it was given a partial first performance (1st movement) on 19 April 1899, before the work was heard in its entirety on 30 March 1900, the year in which the composer received the SACEM Prize. The piece had an unusual history: after disappearing, it was rediscovered in the late 1930s and only published sixty years later, in the late 1990s. The work dates from the musician’s early years of maturity, when he had just embarked on his singular career path. Written by a composer, who “resembled none of his contemporaries […] [and] represented in his own way and in his own place an art that was always wide-awake and always fresh” (Maurice Boucher), who drew his inspiration from the most disparate subjects (Edgar Poe, an Egyptian legend, Christian mysticism, etc.) and who adopted some unusual forms (including a septet for three female voices and string quartet), this quintet reveals Caplet’s preoccupation with pure lines and an architectural harmonic structure. Cast in four classical movements, alternating fast and slow tempi, Caplet links distant keys: D major, F sharp minor, A minor, and B minor and major for the last movement. A simple, childlike joy bursts from the first movement, in sonata form, with its elegant dialogue between the wind instruments and the piano, which is given a prominent role. The second movement unfurls, after some static chords, in an unbroken lament in the winds, in which the tender clarinet surfaces, leading a set of modulations towards distant keys before returning to the initial F sharp minor. The scherzo is light and full of hemiolas and syncopations. The concluding finale develops a spirited rondo-sonata form over the relentless agitation of the semiquavers in the piano, and quotes the theme from the first movement in the coda.