Serenade in B-Flat Major for Winds &
  Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart, op.132
both performed May 12, 2002

Max Reger owned his early musical leanings at the example and enthusiasm of his father, a schoolmaster and amateur musician, and his early training to the town organist of Weiden, Adalbert Lindner. Reger was born in 1873 at Brand in the Upper Palatinate, Bavaria. The following year the family moved to Weiden and it was here that he spent his childhood and adolescence, entering a course of teacher training, when he left school. Lindner had sent examples of Reger's early work to Riemann, who accepted him as a pupil, initially in Sondershausen and then as his assistant in Wiesbaden. Military service, which affected Reger's health and spirits, was followed by a period at home with his parents in Weiden and a continuing serious of composition, in particular for the organ, including a monumental series of chorale fantasias and other compositions.

In 1901, Reger moved to Munich, where he spent the next six years. His position in musical life was not without difficulty, since he was seen as a champion of absolute music and as hostile at this time to "program music," to the legacy of Wagner and Liszt. He was, however, successful as a pianist and was gradually able to find an audience for his music. The period in Munich saw the composition of his Sinfonietta, of chamber music and of his important Variations and Fugue on a Theme of J.S. Bach for piano, and the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Beethoven for orchestra. In 1907 he took an appointment as a professor of composition at the University of Leipzig. His music now found a still wider international audience, supported by his own distinction as a performer, with concert appearances in London, St. Petersburg, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany.

The year 1911 brought an invitation from the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen to accept the position of conductor of the court orchestra, an ensemble established by Han von Bülow and once conducted by Richard Strauss at the outset of his career. Reiger held this position until the beginning of the war, when the orchestra was disbanded, an event that coincided with his own earlier intention to resign. He spent his final years based in Jena, but continuing his activities as a composer and as a concert performer. He died in Leipzig in May 1916 on his way back from a concert tour of the Netherlands.

Reger was a prolific composer, continuing the tradition of Bach, Mozart and the great German composers of the nineteenth century, with a technical mastery and a command of harmonic and contrapuntal resources that allowed him to expand the bounds of tonality in chromatic exploration.

Probably Reger's best known work, the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart, op.132, is based on a theme from Mozart's Piano Sonata No.11, K.331. The piece was written in 1914 and first performed in Wiesbaden on January 8, 1915 by the Kurorchester, conducted by the composer. He emphasized the absolute clarity of his music, an answer, he claimed, to the current musical anarchy, stressing that his music was to be a landmark against the "unnatural, quirky, and eccentric" music of some of his contemporaries. The variations were also arranged for two pianos. Throughout, we see the creative genius of Reger in highly imaginative, often playful, and sometimes maniacal settings of Mozart's theme, giving way to a final fugue so thorough in its exploration and chromatic exploitation of the theme, it seems almost as though nothing further could possibly be done with the theme. Ironically, Mozart's treatment of the same theme in his piano sonata was also a set of variations.

Reger left an unfinished manuscript for a Serenade. The manuscript lacked articulations, dynamics, and indications for tempo and phrasing. In 1975, the Brabant Wind Ensemble was very active in retrieving and performing unknown repertoire for winds. One of their remarkable productions was the completion of Reger's Serenade, mostly under the artistic guidance of conductor Martien van Woerkum and researcher Kees Verheijen. It is this edition, published by Edition Compusic, Amsterdam, which is heard today.