Humoreske (Zemlinksy)
Movements
Notes
A pupil of both Schoenberg and Mahler, Alexander Zemlinsky was an Austrian composer and conductor who notably taught composition to Berg, Webern and Korngold. Whilst not hugely prolific, his corpus of works, initially Brahmsian in style, has struggled to achieve the fame that they arguably deserve. With his later pieces. containing intense concentration of emotion, this light work is very much an aberration.
A single movement rondo, the music features constant bubbly chatter democratically passing around the group, the ultimate wind quintet manifestation of Goethe’s quote of the string quartet being “four rational people in conversation.” This often creates the effect of orchestral soli passages for, for instance, “two flutes,” or “two horns.”
