Sunday, February 1, 2026
7:00 PM
On WCRB In Concert with Radius Ensemble, hear Radius perform Schubert's atmospheric, harmonically rich Octet in F major from their Spring program entitled "Bloom." After that, enjoy Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's rustic Quintet for clarinet and strings in F# minor, from Radius's "Shimmer" program.
Radius Ensemble
Jennifer Montbach, Artistic Director, oboe
Anne Howarth, horn
Sarah Bob, piano
Eran Egozy, clarinet
Sarah Brady, flute
Miriam Bolkosky, cello
Gabriela Diaz, violin
Noriko Futagami, viola
Franz SCHUBERT Octet in F major, D. 803
Samuel COLERIDGE-TAYLOR Quintet for clarinet and strings in F# minor, Op. 10
This broadcast was recorded at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge in two parts: the Schubert was recorded on May 8th, 2025, and the Coleridge-Taylor was recorded on February 29, 2024.
See the programs for this broadcast.
Learn about Radius Ensemble's 27th season.
Radius Ensemble's Artistic and Executive Director, Jennifer Montbach, spoke with WCRB's Kendall Todd about the compelling connections between two pieces by Schubert and Coleridge-Taylor, and previewed the final two concerts of the Radius season. Listen to their conversation using the audio player above, and read the transcript below.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
Kendall Todd I'm Kendall Todd from WCRB, and I'm here with the artistic and executive director of Radius Ensemble, Jennifer Montbach. Jennifer, thank you so much for your time today.
Jennifer Montbach It's my pleasure to be here.
Kendall Todd The first thing that I'd love to talk about is Schubert's Octet. And before we get into the actual music, I'm wondering if you can help set the scene a little bit. Where are we in Schubert's life and in his career when he writes this piece?
Jennifer Montbach Well, this is near the end of his career and the end of his life, 1824, four years before he died. And he's at his most mature and expressive. He actually wrote this Octet, which is scored for string quartet, plus bass, clarinet, bassoon, and horn, inspired by, modeled after Beethoven's Septet. The pieces actually have a ton in common. Key relationships, movements, tempi. And similar forces instrumentally as well. So this is him sort of making his mark on the genre. It's one of his most mature and beloved chamber works. And at almost an hour long, it's definitely a workout.
Kendall Todd I'm wondering what you hear in it that's specific to Schubert. What is distinctive to his work?
Jennifer Montbach Well, Schubert is best known as a song composer. He wrote, I don't know how many, hundreds, hundreds, thousands of songs. And some of them are echoed in this piece. And, you know, he really managed to explore the classical forms and traditions while also giving us soaring melodies, and just lovely singable tunes.
Kendall Todd This is one of his most beloved pieces, I would say.
Jennifer Montbach It is indeed, yes.
Kendall Todd Why do you think that is? What keeps us loving it?
Jennifer Montbach Well, because it's right on the cusp between Classical and Romantic, so it's got that kind of structure and tradition of the Classical repertoire, but it also has that kind of meatier, more luscious and Romantic vibe as well. So it really kind of ticks all those dopamine boxes when you're listening. And because it includes both winds and strings, it has a symphonic quality to it that I think other chamber works don't always achieve, because they're just strings or just winds. And when you combine both winds and strings, you get a richness of color and timbre that is very special.
Kendall Todd I know that the broadcast that we're presenting this piece in is sort of a mashup of a couple of concerts, but if you can think back to the concert when you actually played this piece, I'm very curious to know what it does for you as an audience member to hear music that is so beloved and well-known and traditional as Schubert in conjunction with music that's so fresh and brand new.
Jennifer Montbach Yeah, I mean, that's a big part of what we do. That's a core part of our mission, to present classical music alongside the music being written today. We think they inform one another. We have people who come to a concert because they want to hear Gubaidulina, or a piece written just for us most recently. And the older music can kind of inform the tradition that that comes from. And then conversely, we have folks who are really drawn more to the traditional classical repertoire, and find that they're surprised, hearing what contemporary living composers draw from that tradition, but also including traditions of jazz and pop and other genres of music in our more pluralistic contemporary world. So we really believe that the spectrum of old and new music together is one of the most enriching and rewarding ways to hear chamber music. So this concert closed out our 26th concert season in the spring of 2025. It also included a work by Salina Fisher, who is a young Australian composer, and that was scored for oboe, with yours truly playing, bassoon and piano, and then the winner of our composition competition, a Longy student work for flute, viola, and piano. So, you know, we really, we love presenting the old and new side by side. And I think they inform one another and give you a rich night out, you know, you're not hearing two hours of the same color and ideas. You're hearing new ideas and new thoughts, but also the traditions from which they came.
Kendall Todd When you are programming a piece like the Schubert alongside this brand new music, do you hear new things in the Schubert? Do you learn new things about that music?
Jennifer Montbach I think so. The old is new again, as they say. You know, you come at it with different ears than maybe a contemporary of Schubert's would have. Certainly, you know, as I mentioned, its relationship to the Beethoven Septet, which only predated it by a few years, folks were already hearing the Schubert with that context in mind. And then if you add the contemporary context, It brings new colors and ideas.
Kendall Todd I think we can maybe shift gears to Coleridge-Taylor now. Can you also paint me a picture of who Colerage-Taylor is? Who are we talking about?
Jennifer Montbach Sure. He was a British composer. He lived 1875 to 1912. And he was multiracial. He was the son of an English woman and a descendant of freed American slaves who had resettled in Sierra Leone. His father was a black African man. And the way that Brahms had pulled on the Hungarian tradition, and Dvorak had pulled from the Bohemian tradition, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor drew inspiration from the African tradition. So he was really interested in folk music and sort of early ethnomusicology, I guess, as he was writing. But he was studying at the Royal College of Music, he was mentored by Edward Elgar. So he clearly had the classical bona fides that were then inspired by folk traditions.
So he wrote his most famous piece, the piece that made him famous, was the "Song of Hiawatha," which was a series of three cantatas that he wrote in the 1890s. Keep in mind he was born in 1875, so he was in his 20s when he wrote this most famous peace. So famous, in fact, that he toured the United States several times. He was received at the White House by Theodore Roosevelt as a great ambassador of European culture. That was 1904. So this work is from 1895, so he was 20. It was only four years after Brahms's own Clarinet Quintet, probably the most famous piece for clarinet and strings. And I had just mentioned when we talked about the Schubert, him drawing inspiration from the Beethoven, well, Coleridge Taylor drew inspiration from the Brahms Clarinet Quintet. And it incorporates a lot of the techniques that Brahms is famous for. So he mixes major and minor harmonies, he modulates chromatically by half steps. But unlike Brahms, the piece is a little more rustic and folksy and he often uses the pentatonic scale which is a hallmark of indigenous music. So it's the soaring melodies, though, that I think really make the piece so beloved. And we had a lot of fun preparing it. This was from several years ago on our Shimmer program in the winter of 2023, I believe. So this is from the archives, but I think a really nice pairing with the Schubert.
Kendall Todd Yeah, absolutely. At 20 years old, to write this is pretty impressive.
Jennifer Montbach It's amazing. Yeah, and both Schubert and Coleridge-Taylor both died very young as well. Schubert was 31, and Coleridge-Taylor was 37. So who knows what we would have heard had they lived longer, but both had some incredible output over their short lives.
Kendall Todd In this Clarinet Quintet by Coleridge-Taylor, what are some of the standout moments in this piece that you love?
Jennifer Montbach I would say the fact that the tunes are very hummable, that you can walk away from the performance and it'll sit with you for a while. And it's just a lovely piece. And I think in this new era of diversity in programming, a lot of ensembles have looked to the past for perhaps neglected composers of color. And Coleridge-Taylor is having a moment right now, and it's very, very well deserved.
Kendall Todd Yeah, it's wonderful music. How would you characterize the feeling of it?
Jennifer Montbach It is Romantic, so it's, you know, it's got some drama, but like I said, it's singable and everything resolves beautifully and you feel a sense of completion hearing it.
Kendall Todd Yeah.
Jennifer Montbach And, and of course the blend again of winds and strings. Clarinet Quintet, incidentally, is not five clarinets. [LAUGHS]
Kendall Todd [LAUGHS] Thank you for clarifying.
Jennifer Montbach A clarinet and a string quartet. So it's a quintet notable for the clarinet. The Coleridge-Taylor and the Brahms are really the most famous examples. We don't have a lot of other well-known works for that instrumentation. I'm sure others exist, but these are the two that are in regular rotation.
Kendall Todd As we mentioned, Radius is known for very intentional programming with a lot of specific themes that programs revolve around. And your next program is Seasons on February 26th, is that correct?
Jennifer Montbach That's correct. We'll be at the Longy School of Music, Pickman Hall, just north of Harvard Square. And this is a program that is probably one of my most explicitly themed programs. We have one piece representing each season. And I'll tell you how this program came to be; it's kind of a fun story. In 2024, the arts philanthropist and Radius subscriber Suzanne Bass wanted to create tribute to her late husband, Henry. So she commissioned Boston composer Michael Gandolfi, he's a member of the faculty at NEC, to write a work in Henry's honor. And it's a sextet for winds and strings, and she hired Radius to premiere it in a private concert in 2024. So this will be its public world premiere and the piece is called "Autumn Music," and that got me thinking. So I started looking for pieces that incorporated seasons in their titles and in their themes.
I found a fantastic piece by Amy Beach. Amy Beach, of course, was the first American woman to have a symphony published and performed in 1896. And in fact, it was by the Boston Symphony. She was a well-known Bostonian aristocrat, a pianist. She's buried in the Forest Hills Cemetery. And these are six romantic pieces for piano four hands from 1901. Now it's not a piano duet. It is one piano with two musicians, four hands at the keyboard. So it covers the full 88 keys. These pieces are very romantic. They actually have poetry that goes with them. So they're very evocative of scenes from the summer that will hopefully get us thinking about the summer that seems so far away right now.
And then I found a piece by Caroline Shaw. Now, she is a violinist, singer, composer, and improviser. She won the Pulitzer Prize at the very young age of 31 while she was a graduate student in composition at Princeton. And she wrote this lovely little piece called "Winter Carol," and it's a non-denominational winter song. And I've hired Sophie Michaux, who's a member of Blue Heron and other vocal ensembles. She is equally at home with Bjork and opera, and she'll sing this gentle carol with our strings improvising the accompaniment. And we hope to get the audience singing along too. I've actually printed the music in the program because part of the carol is in a round. So we'll see if people are game for that. I'm hopeful. And then we close out with none other than Stravinsky and the "Rite of Spring." This is a knockout arrangement for wind quintet by Boston composer and friend of the ensemble, Jonathan Russell. It's slightly abridged. It comes in at about 14 minutes, but includes all the major themes. And it is stunningly able to evoke the sound of the full orchestra. I don't know how he did it. But, you know, we've got all the themes that you know from the winds, of course, starting with the incredible bassoon solo at the opening on the very high note. It's a banger. [LAUGHS] We really pound out all those exciting themes. It's going to be great. I'm really, really looking forward to it and I hope you will join us.
Kendall Todd Yeah, sounds great.
Jennifer Montbach Thank you.
Kendall Todd And you have one more concert after that.
Jennifer Montbach That's right. In April, we're closing out the season at the new Thomas Tull Concert Hall at MIT. That's their incredible new chamber music space right at the Mass Ave crossing. And we'll be playing a work by Keeril Makan, who is a member of the MIT faculty, as well as the Schumann piano quartet. And we'll also be performing pieces by Shawn Okpebholo and Gabriela Ortiz, who's a Mexican composer recently featured in the New York Times, if you wanna Google that, it's a really nice profile they did of her. That's April 30th, and that will conclude our 27th concert season.
Kendall Todd Fantastic.
Jennifer Montbach Thank you.
Kendall Todd Lots of great music.
Jennifer Montbach Thank you. Yeah, we're really excited about this season. It's been a lot of fun so far.
Kendall Todd Awesome, yeah. I imagine for the Seasons program you immediately said "No Vivaldi." [LAUGHS]
Jennifer Montbach [LAUGHS} Exactly, exactly. In fact that was part of our marketing blurb: "Take that, Vivaldi!" For the seasons it'll be interesting to see how four different composers from across time and cultures and geography and gender interpret the seasons. So we're looking forward to that.
Kendall Todd Well, Jennifer Montbach, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Jennifer Montbach Thank you for having me. I'm excited about our broadcast and really appreciate CRB's support for local ensembles. It means a lot to us.