Program: Cuarteto Quiroga

CUARTETO QUIROGA

at UC San Diego Friday, November 13, 2015, at 8 pm

Department of Music’s Conrad Prebys Concert Hall

Cuarteto Quiroga thanks the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Education for its generous support of its U.S. Tour.

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ArtPower presents

CUARTETO QUIROGA

Friday, November 13, 2015, at 8 pm Department of Music’s Conrad Prebys Concert Hall Aitor Hevia, violin Cibrán Sierra, violin Josep Puchades, viola Helena Poggio, cello

PROGRAM String Quartet No. 3 in G Minor, Op. 20, H 3:33 (1772)

Allegro con spirito

Minuet: Allegretto

Poco Adagio

Finale: Allegro di molto

La oración del torero, Op. 34 (1926, arr. 1926)

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)

Joaquín Turina (1882–1949)

INTERMISSION String Quartet No. 1 in F Major, Op. 18, No. 1 (1798–1800)

Allegro con brio

Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

Scherzo: Allegro molto

Allegro

Running time for this performance is approximately one hour and 30 minutes, including one intermission.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM String Quartet in G Minor, Opus 20, No. 3 Franz Joseph Haydn Born March 31, 1732, Rohrau Died May 31, 1809, Vienna

In 1772 Haydn composed the six quartets that he would publish as his Opus 20, but listeners should not for an instant be fooled by that low opus number–these quartets are the work of an experienced composer. When he wrote them, Haydn was 40 years old, he had been kapellmeister to the Esterhazy court for over a decade, and he had composed nearly fifty symphonies. The string quartet had begun as an entertainment form, usually as a multimovement work of light character intended as background music at social occasions. The original title of this form—divertimento—made clear that this music was intended as a diversion. Haydn in fact published the six quartets of his Opus 20 under the title Divertimenti, but he had already transformed the string quartet. No longer was it entertainment music content to remain in the background—Haydn made it a concise form, capable of an unusual range of expression. He reduced the number of movements to four, liberated all four voices (particularly the cello), and built the music around taut motivic development.

The evolution of the form, though, was not simply a matter of newly-refined technique—it was also a matter of new depth of expression. Haydn brought to his Opus 20 all his recent growth as a composer (some have heard the influence of his symphonic thinking in this music), and these quartets demonstrate a level of dramatic tension far removed from the form’s original entertainment function. The String Quartet in G Minor is a very serious piece of music: its minor tonality is one indication of this, as is the fact that three of its four movements are in sonata form. Throughout this music runs an unusual level of tension, an atmosphere heightened by the fact that all four movements end quietly.

Haydn marks the opening movement Allegro con spirito, and spirited it certainly is, with the animated line leaping between the four voices at the opening—this interplay of four voices will mark the entire quartet. The development is terse—Haydn compresses his ideas into motivic fragments and their development feels lean rather than melodic; after all this energy, the quiet ending is particularly effective. The minuet stays in G minor, and a level of tension informs this dance. The trio, in E-flat major, feels like a ray of sunshine cutting through the chill mists of the minuet, and Haydn makes a characteristic decision here— the melodic interest is in the three lower voices, while the first violin weaves an amiable texture of steady eighth-notes above them. The Poco Adagio is the one movement not in G minor (it is in G major), and it is an unusually long movement—even if the repeat is not taken, it is still the longest movement in the quartet. Textures are somewhat fuller here, and while the music turns dark in the course of the development, this remains a melodic and attractive movement. There are many nice little touches along the way, including an extended brilliant passage for cello (its liberation from the old accompaniment role is clear) and some nice attention to sound when Haydn contrasts the quite different sonorities of open and closed D’s in the second violin part. The finale, marked Allegro molto, returns to the mood and manner (and key) of the opening movement, with taut contrapuntal textures and spirited interplay between the four voices. After all this virtuosity, the ending is terrific: the dynamic grows quiet, and it is the (fully-liberated) cello that draws this quartet to its close on murmured bits of the movement’s opening theme.

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Program

La oración del torero, Opus 34 Joaquín Turina Born December 9, 1882, Seville Died January 14, 1949, Madrid

In 1925, Spanish composer Joaquín Turina was asked by the Aguilar family—a family of lutenists—to write a work for a quartet of lutes, and he responded with a brief work called La oración del torero: “The Bullfighter’s Prayer.” The Aguilars successfully took the new work on tours throughout Europe and the Americas, and Turina quickly arranged the music for string quartet and for string orchestra; this last version was first performed on January 7, 1927. This attractive music has subsequently appeared in many other forms, including an arrangement for violin and piano by Jascha Heifetz.

Turina outlined the situation his music describes: it is the afternoon of a bullfight in Madrid, and a bullfighter ducks through a small door into a tiny chapel, where he offers a quiet prayer before entering the noisy bullring to confront death. But rather than trying to offer a literal depiction of these events, Turina instead writes a brief mood-piece that evokes that intense atmosphere. The music falls into a number of short sections: the muted beginning gives way to an expressive, almost sultry opening theme. There follow a number of brief episodes (Turina has noted that one of these is based on the pasodoble, an old Spanish dance in duple time); the music rises to a climax, then the themes are recalled as this evocative music makes its way to the delicate (and peaceful) close.

String Quartet in F Major, Opus 18, No. 1 Ludwig Van Beethoven Born December 16, 1770, Bonn Died March 26, 1827, Vienna

Some composers have an instinctive sense of form. Some do not. Mozart seems to have been born with a grasp of sonata form, but it took Beethoven a difficult decade of lessons, trial and error, and practice to achieve that same command. The string quartet, with its complex interplay of four equal and flexible voices, gave Beethoven particular trouble. The quartets of Mozart and Haydn (who was still writing quartets even as Beethoven began to explore the form) must have seemed a daunting challenge for the young composer, and Beethoven worked for several years on the six quartets that make up his Opus 18 before publishing them in 1801.

In the case of the Quartet in F Major, Beethoven’s struggles with the form can be followed in some detail. The young composer had become close friends in Vienna with the violinist Karl Amenda, and when the latter left Vienna in June 1799, Beethoven gave him a manuscript copy of this quartet with the inscription: “Take this quartet as a small memorial of our friendship, and whenever you play it recall the days we passed together and the sincere affection felt for you then . . .” But when it came time to publish the set of six quartets in 1801, Beethoven realized that the Quartet in F Major had become quite a different piece of music from the earlier version given to Amenda, and now he did not want a superseded version floating around. He quickly wrote to his friend: “Do not lend your Quartet to anybody, because I have greatly changed it, having just learned how to write quartets properly.”

Amenda’s version survived (and has been recorded), so we can watch Beethoven develop as he “learned to write quartets properly.”

The Quartet in F Major remains the most popular of his Opus 18, largely because of its impressive first two movements. The Allegro con brio is an early example of Beethoven’s Chamber Music

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fascination with building large structures out of simple motives: this movement grows out of the simple turn-figure heard in its first instant. This figure will saturate the movement— as theme, as accompaniment, as rhythm, as the basis for complex counterpoint. The movement actually has a relaxed second subject that flows easily on syncopated accents, but so overwhelming is the presence of the motif-figure that one seems to hear it even when it is not physically present. In fact, one of the effects of Beethoven’s revisions was to diminish the number of appearances of this turn-figure, by one scholar’s count, Beethoven reduced the number of its appearances from 130 in the first version to 104 in the published edition.

The second movement, which has the complex marking Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato, switches to dark D minor. Over a pulsing 9/8 accompaniment, the first violin sings the long, grieving melody that forms the basis of this movement. Everyone feels the expressive power of this movement, and when Amenda told the composer that it reminded him of the parting of lovers, Beethoven replied: “I thought of the scene in the burial vault in Romeo and Juliet.”

Listeners will do well not to look for any literal depiction of Shakespeare here, but rather to take the music on its own merits: it has more genial secondary material, and across its long span the music rises to several impassioned climaxes.

After two such movements, the final two can seem a little anti-climactic. In fact, their combined length is shorter than the Adagio. With its propulsive rising main theme, the Scherzo has reminded many of the third movement of Beethoven’s First Symphony, composed as the composer was seeing these quartets to press; the trio, with its grace notes and octave leaps, sends the first violin sailing along an athletic part before it swoops gracefully back into the opening strain. The concluding Allegro is in sonata-rondo form. Its showers of triplets at first mask the true meter (2/4), and some of the fun of this movement lies in Beethoven’s contrast of triple and duple stresses. Beethoven revised this movement extensively as well, and his changes clarified the voicing and focused the climaxes much more effectively than before he “learned to write quartets properly.”

—Eric Bromberger

ABOUT THE ARTISTS Cuarteto Quiroga, quartet-in-residence in charge of the Royal Collection of decorated Stradivarius instruments at Madrid’s Royal Palace, has established itself as one of the most dynamic and unique quartets of its generation. The quartet won international acclaim from critics and audiences alike for its distinctive style as well as its bold and original approach to the quartet repertoire.

Prizewinners of major international competitions (Bordeaux, Borciani, Genève, Beijing, Fnapec-Paris, Palau Barcelona), the ensemble regularly appears at major European halls and festivals: Wigmore Hall; The Berliner Philharmonie; Les Invalides, Paris; The Royal Concertgebouw, Amsterdam; De Doelen, Rotterdam; Auditorio Nacional de Música, Madrid; Heidelberger Fruehling; Davos; L’Auditori, Barcelona; Palau de la Musica Catalana; Stockholm’s Nybrokajen, the Orlando Festival in Holland; in the Americas: the Frick Collection, the National Gallery, Teatro Solis Montevideo, and Buenos Aires, among others. The quartet has been recorded and broadcast by major European radio stations. In 2007, Cuarteto Quiroga was awarded the Spanish National Radio Culture Prize (Premio Ojo Critico).

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Program

The ensemble is quartet-in-residence at the Fundacion Museo Cerralbo in Madrid and at the Miguel Delibes Auditorium in Valladolid. In addition, its four members teach at the International Summer Academy of Uanes (Asturias, Spain) and hold the string quartet chair at the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Aragón (Zaragoza, Spain). As a result of its commitment to music education, Cuarteto Quiroga is often invited to give master classes and teach courses at major Spanish conservatories and the Spanish National Youth Orchestra (JONDE).

During the 2013–14 season, the quartet returned to The Royal Concertgebouw and Wigmore Hall, toured in Colombia and the U.S., and performed in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Poland. In June of 2014, it completed a 6-concert residency at Madrid’s Auditorio Nacional performing the entire Opus 20 by Haydn, the six Mozart “Haydn Quartets,” the complete works for quartet by György Kurtág, and a premiere of a new work commissioned for this concert cycle. 2015–16 season highlights include its debut at New York’s Lincoln Center, performances in Paris, London, Geneva, Amsterdam, Madrid, Barcelona, Munich, and many more.

It’s CD Statements—recorded by Dutch label COBRA and dedicated to the music of Haydn, Webern, and Sollima—was awarded the prize for Best Classical Music Album in 2012 by the Spanish Independent Producers Union. The recording (R)evolutions—which includes early works of the Second Viennese school—is being widely praised and has won distinctions such as the “Exceptional” label of Scherzo, Spain’s leading classical music magazine. Its recording of the Brahms String Quartets Opus 51 was released on COBRA in June 2015. The quartet will release piano quintets of Turina and Granados with pianist Javier Perianes on the Harmonia Mundi label in the 2015–16 season.

The quartet frequently collaborates with musicians such as Vladimir Mendelssohn, Valentin Erben, Alain Meunier, Richard Lester, Javier Perianes, Jeremy Menuhin, Tobias Carron, David Kadouch, Dario Mariño, Chen Halevy, choreographer Hideto Heshiki, theater director Peter Ries, and actor José Luis Gômez.

Cuarteto Quiroga has studied with Rainer Schmidt at the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía in Madrid; the ProQuartet-CEMC, Walter Levin at Musikakademie Basel, and Hatto Beyerle at the European Chamber Music Academy. The quartet has also been influenced by András Keller, György Kurtág, Johannes Meissl, Eberhard Feltz, and Ferenc Rados.

The group takes its name from the Galician violinist Manuel Quiroga, one of the outstanding string players in Spanish music history.

Cibrán Sierra, with the other members of the quartet, want to thank the Paola Modiano’s heirs for the generous opportunity to play, in her memory, the 1682 Nicolô Amati violin “Arnold Rosé.”

Chamber Music

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USA

CALDER QUARTET

Saturday, January 23, 2016, at 8 pm The Calder Quartet, called “outstanding” and “superb” by the New York Times, performs at an exceptional level, always striving to channel and fulfill the composer’s vision. Program: Andrew Norman: Sabina; Leoš Janáček: String Quartet No. 2 “Intimate Letters;” Daníel Bjarnason: Stillshot; Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet No. 12, Op. 127

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