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clarinet Sherman Walt, bassoon Boston Symphony Orchestra, dir. Seiji Ozawa (broadcast performance of 12 March 1988) "Richard Strauss composed the Duet-Concertino in late 1947, completing the score on December 16. It was first performed in Lugano, Switzerland, on April 4, 1948, with Otmar Nussio conducting a small orchestral ensemble from the orchestra of the Italian-Swiss Radio. The score bears the dedication 'Hugo Burghauser, dem Getreuen' ('to my faithful Hugo Burghauser'); the dedicatee had been the bassoonist of the Vienna Philharmonic. In October 1947, the eighty-three-year-old Richard Strauss made his first journey by airplane to accept an invitation to London, which allowed him to see some of his old friends, including Dr. Ernst Roth, his publisher. No doubt he hoped, too, that this journey would allow him to 'thaw' some of his royalties, which had been frozen in England during the war. (Two years earlier he had moved to Switzerland in the hope of receiving some royalties, which would not come to him as long as he remained in Germany.) In England Strauss was curt with the press, having little patience with the persistence of reporters who asked him what his plans were; to them he said simply, 'Well, to die.' But the old man still had music in him. Before his death two years later he turned out two substantial last compositions in a glorious 'Indian summer' of his life. Of the two pieces, the Duet-Concertino is as rarely heard as the eloquent Four Last Songs are familiar. Though the Duet-Concertino did not take palpable shape until 1947, Strauss had been thinking about it for some time. A year earlier he had written to the eventual dedicatee, Hugo Burghauser, a close friend and former bassoonist of the Vienna Philharmonic, who had moved to New York: 'I am even busy with an idea for a double concerto for clarinet and bassoon, thinking especially of your beautiful tone -- nevertheless apart from a few sketched out themes it still remains no more than an intention... Perhaps it would interest you; my father always used to say, "It was Mozart who wrote most beautifully for the bassoon." But then he was also the one to have all the most beautiful thoughts, coming straight down from the skies!' Finding a reference to Strauss's idolized Mozart in immediate juxtaposition to the first inkling of the Duet-Concertino should alert us to a certain Mozartean flavor that the score shares with many of Strauss's late works. Not that the piece is in any way a pastiche: rather it translates much of what Strauss saw as the soul of the classical era into a new guise. The concertante working out of two solo instruments, echoed by a second concertante relationship between the solo and massed strings, recalls the spirit -- without attempting to preserve the letter -- of classical forms. At some stage in the planning of the work, Strauss told conductor Clemens Krauss that he was thinking of Hans Christian Andersen's story 'The Swineherd,' in which a prince courts a beautiful princess by disguising himself as a swineherd at her father's palace. Later Strauss wrote to Burghauser to tell him that the clarinet was a dancing princess, with the bassoon representing the grotesque attempts of a bear to imitate her. Eventually she is won over by the bear and dances with it. Strauss told Burghauser, 'So you too will turn into a prince and live happily ever after.' In the end, though, the Duet-Concertino is pure music-making. Its three movements run together without break, but the first two are quite brief and serve essentially as an elaborate preface to the closing rondo." - Steven Ledbetter Painting: Human Ancestors, Nicholas Roerich