Program​

Thomas Adès:  Les baricades mistérieuses 

Arthur Foote: A Night Piece for Flute and String Quartet

Debussy: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun

Charles Martin ​​​Loeffler: Octet

​This concert showcases Graeme Steele Johnson and his album Forgotten Sounds, named one of The New York Times’ Best Classical Albums of 2024. The album features the premiere recording of Charles Martin Loeffler’s newly rediscovered Octet for two clarinets, harp, string quartet, and bass. Composed in 1897 by Loeffler, the German-born assistant concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, this work blends Impressionist color, Brahmsian lyricism, and shifting textures, creating a unique and evocative musical experience.

Date: April 23, 2025
​Time: 7:30pm
Location: Browning Hall Auditorium - Room 160 (1st floor)
Address: 8274 Big Bend Blvd, St Louis, MO 63119
Admission: Free

Concert Artists

 Graeme Steele Johnson, Clarinet

Ann Fink, Violin

Megan Stout, Harp

Garrett Hudson, Flute

Shannon Farrell Williams, Viola

Davin Rubicz, Cello

Tzuying Huang, Clarinet

David DeRiso, Bass

Xi Zhang, Viola

Eva Kozma, Violin

Seul Lee, Violin

Alvin McCall, Cello

Program Highlights 

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Rediscover Loeffler Octet
​Saint Louis Premiere - April 23, 2025

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“Fancy a Paganini who has read Maeterlinck; fancy an imagination fantastic and slightly strained in the path of the morbid; fancy perfect musicianship, a delicate sense of color, values, and a sense of the grotesque; fancy all these things and you have not yet grasped the half of Loeffler's music.”

—Philip Hale, Musical Courier, February 23, 1898​

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“[Loeffler’s Octet] survives as a vibrant example of the composer’s polyglot compositional vernacular and wide stylistic palette — the contrapuntal quartet at its core, the ‘smoke and mirrors’ of its twin clarinets, its effortless channeling of symphonic sound and breadth into the crisp articulation of a smallish ensemble.

“At the Library of Congress, the restored octet appears on a program with Johnson’s arrangement of Debussy’s prelude, as well as Franz Schubert’s beloved ‘Octet in F Major (D. 803)’ — another work that was almost lost to obscurity, composed in 1824 but published nearly a half-century after the composer’s death.

“‘It kind of goes with this lost-and-found theme,’ Johnson says. ‘With hope that Loeffler’s octet and all of the other wonderful, deserving music that has somehow slipped through the cracks will follow Schubert into the musical pantheon.’”

​ The Washington Post
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Read More

Thomas Adès: Les baricades mistérieuses
Thomas Adès, born in London in 1971, is an award winning composer, pianist, and conductor. After completing studies at King’s
College Cambridge in 1992, Adès taught at the Royal Academy of Music as Britten Professor of Composition. Since 2016, Adès
has been an Artistic Partner of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He also works closely as a composer and conductor with orchestras all over the world including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, London Philharmonic Orchestra,
the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and the Czech Philharmonic. He has composed three operas, numerous orchestral works, chamber and solo works, and has won several prestigious awards including a Grammy for his opera, The Tempest. The work Les baricades mistérieuses was originally composed by François Couperin in 1716. It is the fifth piece in Ordre 6ème de clavecin (6th Suite) in B-flat major from Couperin’s second book of solo harpsichord works. In 1994, Thomas Adès arranged the work for clarinet, bass clarinet, viola, cello, and double bass for his album America: A prophecy.

-By Ann Fink


Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
[arr. Graeme Steele Johnson]
Claude Debussy’s 1894 tone poem Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun has been reimagined from its orchestral origin several times, notably by fellow Impressionist Maurice Ravel, for piano four-hands, and later under the supervision of Arnold Schoenberg, for a hodgepodge band of thirteen players. My arrangement responds to both composers, taking its orchestrational inspiration from Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro (for the present forces minus the bass), and diverging from the Schoenberg-school version by restoring the harp of the original score and trimming other instruments. Moreover, by taking up the more personal vessel of chamber music, my arrangement seeks to reconnect Debussy’s Faun with the intimacy of the poetry that inspired it. Indeed, Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem "The Afternoon of a Faun" is tethered to the individual experience by its single narrator, the faun, as he daydreams of erotic encounters with a pair of nymphs. But even this most baseline narrative is riddled with ambiguity and dizzying imagery.Faun and reader alike aren't sure if he’s recalling actual experiences or fantasy: “Did I love a dream?” he wonders. Ironically, by packaging his bewildering verse in strict hexameter with Alexandrine rhymed couplets, Mallarmé contains his attacks on poetic meaning within classical forms.
Debussy mirrors this to a tee in his Prelude. Pierre Boulez called the piece "the beginning of modern music," and while Debussy’s
tritones and misbehaving harmonies do tear at tonality from the inside, his major cadences stay rooted in E major between
backward glances at Wagner. Resisting the Germanic impulse to struggle against these contradictions, Debussy’s music takes a
more languid approach by relishing this fundamental, Freudian division of the self. Instead of trying to reconcile its tonal and
chromatic tensions, it basks in them, like a faun in the afternoon. Half-asleep, half-man/half-goat, half charging into the twentieth
century and half hanging onto the glitter of yesteryear, it balances precariously, sensuously, at the dawn of a new era.

-Graeme Steele Johnson


Arthur Foote: A Night Piece for Flute and String Quartet
Arthur Foote (1853-1937) was born in Salem Massachusetts, but spent most of his life living in Boston. As a young boy he studied music theory at the New England Conservatory and entered Harvard University in 1870. In 1875, Foote earned a Masters of Arts degree in music. Harvard was the first American university to award this type of music degree. Foote became quite an accomplished organist during his years at Harvard, and for thirty years of his career he worked as a church organist for a Unitarian church in Boston. Foote was also a highly successful composer. His chamber music compositions were very popular and were performed at the World Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. His orchestral works were often performed by Boston Symphony, and he was also a highly sought after teacher and writer. He guest lectured at the University of California, taught piano at The New England Conservatory from 1921-1937, and co-authored a music theory book. He was a member of the Second New England School of composers, nicknamed the Boston Six, alongside George Chadwick, Amy Beach, Edward MacDowell, John Knowles Paine, and Horacio Parker.
A Night Piece for Flute and String Quartet was premiered in 1919, in San Francisco. The piece is the first part of a work originally
titled Nocturne and Scherzo for Flute and String Quartet. When Nocturne was published in 1923 as a new version for string
orchestra, the title was changed to A Night Piece for Flute and Strings.

-Ann Fink



Loeffler: Octet for Two Clarinets, Harp, Two Violins, Viola, Cello and Double Bass [revised and reconstructed by Graeme Steele Johnson]
It’s not every day that you hear a St. Louis premiere 128 years after the piece was written. Tonight’s audience will be among the
first in living memory to hear Charles Martin Loeffler’s forgotten Octet, a piece that was left unpublished, unrecorded and unheard since 1897. Ironically, it was during another period of silence that I stumbled upon Loeffler’s long-dormant Octet.
When performance opportunities dried up in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I turned to writing program notes for music festivals that had yet to cancel their concerts. I started researching Loeffler’s Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano, a work that mixes Brahmsian Romantic warmth with iridescent Impressionist harmony and French Symbolist poetry. The composer’s biography chronicles a similar identity crisis: Loeffler was born in Berlin and inherited a storied German musical tradition through his violin teacher Joseph Joachim (a close collaborator of Brahms and the Schumanns), but after an itinerant childhood he ultimately concealed his Germanness behind a heavy dose of Francophilia and falsely claimed Alsatian origin for most of his life.
After settling in Boston, he appeared to Americans as French and was analyzed as such throughout his life and long after. Given Loeffler’s Impressionist resonances, my mind went to my Faun arrangement when I came across a mention of his 1897 Octet for nearly identical forces. Hoping I had stumbled upon a convenient companion piece, I eagerly searched for a recording of Loeffler’s Octet. Then, for sheet music. Then, for any record of the piece beyond the list of works that had alerted me to its existence. Gradually, I came to realize that not only had the piece never been recorded, but it had never been published or
subsequently heard at all after two initial performances in 1897 by the Kneisel Quartet and members of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra.

But the Octet’s silence for more than a century should not be taken as an indicator of its quality any more than Loeffler’s obscurity today should represent his historical and musical significance. Hailed in obituaries as “the dean of American composers,” Loeffler joined the Boston Symphony as assistant concertmaster in 1882—the orchestra’s second season ever, and a time when Boston was “the musical Athens of America.” He rose to such prominence that he became something of a cult figure in Boston society, and the BSO clocked no fewer than 117 performances of his music by the end of his life. For the first four decades of the 20th century, Loeffler was one of the most performed American composers in this country and in Europe. One reviewer present at the 1897 premiere of Loeffler’s Octet “could hardly say enough” about the piece, writing, “the work took nearly everyone by storm.” 

Why, then, have Loeffler and his music faded from popular consciousness?Part of the answer lies in the same cosmopolitanism that made the transplanted composer so irresistible to Americans during his lifetime. In an era acutely inflected by nationalism, Loeffler’s complicated heritage made him something of a cultural chameleon. His flexible identity allowed him to assimilate at times, marked him as appealingly exotic at others, or condemned him to an awkward misfit position between the continents.
Despite his prominence on both sides of the Atlantic, for posterity Loeffler was ultimately too American for the European musical establishment, and too European for the maverick sound of the New World—a predicament that effectively wrote him out of both musical histories. A cosmopolitan in one sense, Loeffler, in another, belonged not to all countries, but to none.
When I finally tracked down the Octet’s 75-page manuscript in the archives of the Library of Congress, I gained perspective on
another reason for Loeffler’s disappearance from the canon. Like Brahms, Loeffler was intensely critical of his own work; he revised fastidiously in multiple rounds and withheld most of his music from publication, preferring it to be unheard than unappreciated. It took me a year to sift through the heavy revisions that mosaicked the Octet’s manuscript and reconstruct my own edition of the score, crossing my fingers all the while that I wasn’t wasting my time on a dud of a piece!

Far from a dud, the Octet reveals a kaleidoscopic collision of musical styles that embodies Loeffler’s cosmopolitanism and also the groping for national identity happening at the dawn of American music. The most interesting potential of the Loeffler Octet revival, however, is not about dusting off a bygone era, but about what it means for music today; not the immaculate resurrection of a forgotten piece, but the reinvigoration of the present moment with unheard sounds and unknown histories—the refraction of the past through the present. It’s a reminder that our modern sense of the canon and our whole musical frame of reference are based only on that narrow sliver of music we know today—the music that survived. And in this way, Loeffler’s seminal role in American music continues today, by helping us paint a more complete picture of musical history so that we can imagine a more colorful musical future.
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—Graeme Steele Johnson