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Cosi fan tutte is the last of the three great comic operas that Mozart composed to a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte — the other two were The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. Mozart’s music captures and accentuates the mixed emotions this opera evokes in its audience.

In the opera, the two male friends, Ferrando and Guglielmo (two officers) claim that their fiancées (Dorabella and Fiordiligi, respectively) will be eternally faithful. Don Alfonso joins the discussion and lays a wager with the two officers, claiming he can prove in a day’s time that these two women (like all women) are fickle. The wager is accepted.

Over the course of 24 hours, we follow the love interests of two sisters whose fiancés pretend to have gone off to war, but who actually disguise themselves to try to seduce the other sister. Many of the arias (includ­ing Fiordiligi’s “Come scoglio” and “Per pietà”) rank among Mozart’s greatest.

The overture is playful, almost frivolous at times, and the modulations in a fast-paced tempo under­score the complexity of the human nature. During the early romantic era, the opera was rarely heard. Today, Mozart’s insights into the complexities and ambiguities of the human heart is widely recognized.

Jean Yves Daniel-Lesur, known simply as Daniel-Lesur was born in Paris in 1908. From childhood he composed music under the aegis of his mother, Alice Lesur, herself a com­poser. At the age of 12, he joined the Paris National Conser­vatory of Music where he attended classes with prestigious masters such as Jean Gallon (harmo­ny), and Georges Caussade (fugue). At the same time, he studied piano and organ with Charles Tournemire, a French composer famous for his piano and organ compositions. In 1927 he be­came Master’s deputy at the Ste Clotilde organ in Paris. From 1935 to 1939 and again from 1942 to 1944 he was organist for the Benedictine Abbey in Paris. In 1935 he was called upon to teach counterpoint at the Schola Cantorum, the famed private music school, which he was to head twenty-two years later.

Daniel-Lesur was to compose three operas, a ballet, sym­phonic and concertante works, vocal and liturgical works, as well as works for solo instruments, especially piano and organ. He died in Paris in 2002.

Daniel-Lesur’s “Nocturne pour hautbois et orchestra à cordes” (Nocturne for Oboe and strings) was commissioned for the 1974 oboe competition of the Paris National Conservatory of Music. Its first performance was given by Pierre Perlot and l’Ensemble Orchestral de France in 1975 as part of the “Les Nuits de La Ferté-d’Allais”. It is a beautiful piece, written in three parts, Adagio-Allegro-Adagio. The style is resolutely tonal and one can appreciate the French influence in its harmonic and melodic development.

Ravel originally composed the Mother Goose Suite (Ma Mère l’Oye) as a set of piano pieces in 1910. The Mother Goose Suite was composed as a duet for two young piano students, Mimi and Jean Godebski, the children of one of his friends. Ravel’s original inten­tion was that this music serve as an incentive for these children to practice although it apparently failed in that aim.

The choreographer Jeanne Hugard had asked Ravel to produce a ballet score, and he arranged it in five movements, together with a newly-composed prelude  and interludes.

Ravel subsequently extracted the five original movements, each based on children’s fairy tale, as an orches­tral suite which was first performed in 1912. He was known for having a habit of rearranging his music from piano to orchestra and back again.

d’Indy (1851-1931), Fantasy on French Popular Themes for Oboe

Paul Marie Théodore Vincent d’Indy (March 27, 1851 – December 2, 1931) was born in Paris into an aristocratic family of royalist and Catholic persuasion. Being born into musical surroundings, he had studied piano from an early age. To please his family, he studied law, but later decided to be a musician. He became a devoted student of César Franck at the Conservatoire de Paris. As a follower of Franck, d’Indy came to admire what he considered the standards of German symphonism. He later played a central role in the development of the symphony in late 19th century France.

Few of d’Indy’s works are performed regularly today. His best known pieces are probably the Symphonie Cévenole or Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (Symphony on a French Mountain Air) for piano and orchestra (1886), and Istar (1896), a symphonic poem in the form of a set of variations.

Among d’Indy’s other works are other orchestral music, chamber music, piano music, songs and a number of operas, including Fervaal (1897) and L’Etranger (1902). His Lied for cello and orchestra was recorded by Julian Lloyd Webber and the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Yan Pascal Tortelier in 1991. As well as Franck, d’Indy’s works show the influence of Berlioz and especially of Wagner (he attended the premiere of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibel­ungen at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876). D’Indy died where he was born, in Paris, in 1931.

His Fantaisie on Popular French Themes for Oboe, Op. 31 was composed in 1888 following in the footsteps of his Sympho­ny on a French Mountain Air for piano and orchestra which had been composed two years earlier in 1886.

Ravel (1875-1937), Mother Goose Suite

Daniel-Lesur (1908-2002),

Nocturne for Oboe  and Strings

Brahms’ Third was written in the summer of 1883. The composer was spending that summer in Wiesbaden. Brahms set to revising some pieces he had originally written as music for Goethe’s Faust. Gradually, they evolved into the central movements of a four-movement Symphony #3 in F major which had its premiere December 2, 1883 with Hans Richter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.

Beginning with that first appearance, the piece was highly acclaimed. The symphony quickly reached the stages of Berlin, Leipzig, Meiningen, and Wiesbaden. Its popularity was such that, before long, the composer took to calling his Third Symphony “the unfortunately over-famous sympho­ny.”

Brahms did not finish his first symphony until he was forty-three. By the late 1800s, Beethoven had come to represent the epitome of symphonic composers, the standard against whom everyone would be compared. Brahms delayed writing symphonies because he knew he would face that comparison, and he was right. When his First Symphony appeared, it was hailed as “Beethoven’s Tenth,” an acknowl­edgement that Brahms’ works share the mastery and genius of Beethoven’s.

Mozart (1756-1771), Overture to Cosi Fan Tutte

Brahms (1833-1897),

Symphony #3 in F Major. Op. 90

Inaugural Concert