Performed by Toledo Symphony Chamber Musicians on April 12, 2026

Flute Sonata 
Mel Bonis (1858-1937) 

Mélanie-Hélène Bonis published under the name “Mel” to get around the gender bias she  encountered. Composing was not a career path open to women in the decades leading up to World War I. Bonis studied piano at the Paris Conservatory with Franck and Debussy and also took composition classes. At the end of her studies she published some piano pieces before marrying and finding herself required to balance her composition work with her new family responsibilities. She continued composing, but did not publish anything else.  

With the outbreak of the War, Bonis turned her attention primarily to sacred music for organ and voice, though she also composed orchestral and chamber music. Being a pianist herself, she included the piano in most of her chamber music.  

Bonis composed her four-movement Flute Sonata in 1904. Stylistically, it helps to fill the space between Romanticism and Impressionism. The piano writing is reminiscent of Franck, and the overall work is very lyrical and poetic.  

Bonis’ Flute Sonata is dedicated to flutist Louis Fleury and has become a staple of the flute repertoire. Bonis did not publish any of the music she wrote after the War started, so a lot of what she wrote is only being heard now, thanks to her great-niece Christiane Geliot, who has been cataloging Bonis’ work and having it performed and recorded. 

Mishra Pilu 
Aruna Narayan (b. 1954) 

The daughter of master sarangi player Pandit Ram Narayan, Aruna Narayan also specializes in the sarangi, a bowed instrument from North India that is notoriously difficult to learn. Narayan’s music and performances have been featured in Hollywood films, she has recorded with several labels, and she appears on TV India.  

Narayan was one of the composers selected and commissioned for the Kronos Quartet’s “50 For The Future” project in 2020. Her Mishra Pilu was then arranged for string quartet by Reena Esmail, a wonderful composer in her own right. Mishra Pilu is in two sections, the Aalap and the Bandish. The Aalap is traditionally unmetered and is intended to feel improvisatory. The melody is passed between members of the quartet throughout, with occasional supportive echoes moving in and out of the texture (usually in the first violin). These echoes function to imitate the sound of the sarangi’s sympathetic strings resonating.  

The Bandish is metered and features continuous rhythmic accompaniment from the cello, which imitates the tabla (a small, pitched drum). The taal (rhythmic pattern) is in sixteen beats doubled to fit into eight beats grouped in two bars of four. Narayan also includes a backing track to be played throughout.  

In her artist’s statement, Narayan writes, “This piece is based on Raag Mishra Pilu. Mishra means a mixture of a few different raags that are woven into a central theme. Raag Pilu has a textbook ascending and descending structure. However, because it allows for the inclusion of all twelve notes, it is generally conducive to a wider range of improvisation than the traditional discipline of a raag. 

“Since the Kronos Quartet is known for its many successful collaborations with different genres of music, I felt that Mishra Pilu would be a perfect representation of an Indian classical music bouquet! I have maintained the usual format – the ‘Aalap,’ which is the first slow movement, followed by a ‘bandish,’ a composition set to a 16-beat rhythm cycle called Teental. Several of these cycles are devoted to a few different raags, returning to the principal line in Pilu.” 
 

Sonata for Clarinet and Bassoon 
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) 

French composer and pianist Francis Poulenc was a member of Les Six, a group of six composers living and working in Montparnasse, France, and named loosely after Balakirev’s The Five (or Mighty Handful) in Russia. Les Six represented a stylistic opposition to both Impressionism and the musical ideals of Wagner. Author Josiah Fisk writes, “Among his colleagues in Les Six, Poulenc was the most classical in outlook and the most urbane in manner. As a young composer he was drawn to the simple means and vernacular immediacy of Satie. He later allowed himself greater richness of texture; after World War II he adopted a more serious cast of mind, but never abandoned the crisp, essentially tonal style that had become his hallmark.”  

Poulenc worked in several genres, including sacred music, opera, ballet, orchestral, choral, chamber, and solo piano music. His chamber music for woodwinds is light and witty, with sharp contrasts and distinct characters. In 1922, Poulenc composed his Sonata for Clarinet and Bassoon in three movements. He was especially fond of the clarinet and had already written his Sonata for Two Clarinets.  

Poulenc wrote, “Concerning my first three wind sonatas, their existence is due, without a doubt, exclusively to my instinct. Clearly, they are youthful works, and calling them sonatas might surprise certain people because of their restrained dimensions, but we must not forget that Debussy had just revived the tradition of the eighteenth-century French sonata, as a reaching against the post-Franckian sonata. Well-written for winds, these sonatas maintain a certain youthful vitality that links them to Dufy’s early canvasses.”  

Poulenc’s Sonata for Clarinet and Bassoon was premiered in 1923 on a concert that also featured the music of Satie. It is dedicated to Poulenc’s friend, Madame Audrey Parr.  

String Quartet No. 1 in D minor 
Juan Crisostomo Arriaga (1806-1826) 

Sometimes called “the Spanish Mozart,” Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga was a violinist and composer of unusual brightness and talent. He composed his first piece at eleven and completed his first opera at fourteen. Stylistically, his work is most related to that of Haydn and Mozart, with elements of Schubert thrown in. His work also bears some similarities to Mendelssohn’s and shows imagination and control.  

Following the successful premiere of his opera Los éscavos felices (“The Happy Slaves”) in 1820, Arriaga moved to Paris to study at the Conservatory. There, Arriaga’s compositional skills developed rapidly. Arriaga published his three string quartets in 1824. They are finely crafted and among his best work, with gorgeous melodies and an impressive technical precision. These would sadly be his only publications as he contracted tuberculosis shortly after and died before his twentieth birthday. After his death, Arriaga’s music was largely forgotten until the end of the nineteenth century.  

There were not many Basque or Spanish voices represented in Western art music at the time, no doubt partly due to Spain’s decline as a world power in the eighteenth century. Writer James Michener explains, “Arriaga came when Spanish music badly needed a native genius to set it on its new path into a new century, [and his] early death was a tragedy that had far-ranging if indefinable effects.”  

Arriaga’s String Quartet No. 1 features creative use of Spanish folk idioms throughout its four movements. The first movement opens with a stormy theme played in unison, leading into the second theme in the first violin. The second movement is very expressive and is followed by a Minuet, the trio section of which features pizzicato reminiscent of a guitar. The finale begins with a slow introduction that moves into a Siciliana-like dance featuring the violin.  

Annotator Willard Hertz writes, “In musical terms, Arriaga’s three teenage quartets were transitional works between the classicism of Mozart and the romantic music of ... Schubert or Mendelssohn. On the one hand, there is its unforced flow of melody, innovative handling of accompaniment, interest in chromaticism, and third-movement use of a minuet instead of a scherzo. On the other, there are the bold harmonic structures, the unconventional rhythms, and the music’s heightened expressive range.”