Sony Anthology: Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet

Mosaic of the twelve album covers of the recordings included in the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet anthology (from the Amazon.com Web page for the collection)

At the end of last month, Sony Classical released its latest anthology, consisting of all the Columbia Album recordings of the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet. The ensemble consisted entirely of members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the First Chair performers of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and French horn. Those performers changed between the release of the first album in 1953 and the last in 1968. Three of them appear on all of the recordings: oboist John de Lancie, clarinetist Anthony Gigliotti, and Mason Jones on horn. There were three flutists during that span of time: William Kincaid, Robert Cole, and Murray Panitz. The bassoonists were Sol Schoenbach and Bernard Garfield.

I have to confess that these recordings have a personal context. My family moved to a Philadelphia suburb in 1963, and my parents attended many of the Philadelphia Orchestra concerts. Over the course of building up my record collection, I acquired two of the albums in this anthology. One combined two chamber music compositions by Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven with works by Paul Hindemith, Jacques Ibert, and Eugène Bozza. The other was an all-French album, the longest composition being Francis Poulenc’s sextet for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, and piano. What made the album particularly appealing was that Poulenc was the pianist! The other composers on the album were Darius Milhaud and Jean Françaix.

There are several other “guests” on the recordings in this collection. The most noteworthy of them would probably be the pianists. These included Rudolf Serkin for quintets by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Beethoven, Rudolf Firkušný for the concertino by Leoš Janáček, and Robert Casadesus, who contributed to the performance of quintets by Mozart and Beethoven scored for piano, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon. The most surprising was Ornette Coleman, playing the trumpet interludes for the wind quintet he composed entitled “Forms and Sounds.” (The first music teacher I encountered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would not shut up about Coleman, regardless of what the “lesson of the day” happened to be!) The most ambitious undertaking was probably the album of Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 26 quintet.

This summary of excerpts should provide the curious listener with a fair account of the rich diversity of compositions recorded by the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet and (when necessary) their colleagues. The fact is that, for the most part, woodwind quintets show up with far less frequency where chamber music programs are concerned. The good news here in San Francisco is that players of both winds and brass perform frequently in the Chamber Music programs presented by the San Francisco Symphony. Nevertheless, I suspect that those that listen to the new Columbia anthology will find that each of the twelve CDs will provide at least one journey of discovery (if not more).