Trois Pièces brèves pour quintette à vent

The catalogue of Jacques Ibert testifies to his fondness for wind instruments (Concerto for cello and ten wind instruments, Flute Concerto, Capriccio for wind and strings, Five Pieces for oboe, clarinet and bassoon, Deux Mouvements for two flutes, clarinet and bassoon, etc.) and his predilection for the world of the theatre (several operas and ballets, numerous sets of incidental music for plays). The Three Short Pieces for wind quintet lie at the intersection of the two domains, since they come from the music he wrote for Le Stratagème des roués. This French adaptation by Maurice Constantin-Weyer of the Irish dramatist George Farquhar’s play The Beaux’ Stratagem was given at the Théâtre de l’Atelier in March 1930 in a production by Charles Dullin. Immediately after the performances, Ibert selected three excerpts and gave them a life of their own, but without modifying the original scoring: for reasons of space and budget, he had composed his incidental music for wind quintet. While this chamber work is no longer attached to the theatre, it still reflects the general spirit of Farquhar’s comedy, which relates the adventures of two ruined gentlemen in search of a rich heiress. The Trois Pièces brèves share the same transparency of texture, melodic elegance and character of freshness. Ibert also achieves delicate colouristic nuances by interweaving the flute and clarinet lines in the Andante (the other three instruments play only in the last bars of this movement) and introduces a very theatrical suspense at the start of the third piece.