ARTISTIC DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE

Following our memorable 10th anniversary season in 2022, filled with fantastic AHE projects, I am pleased to open our next decade with this beautiful program of music for string quartet by three titans of the 18th and 19th centuries. Each has a fascination for fugue: Haydn, J.S. Bach and Mendelssohn.

The fugue form is of course characteristic of the baroque and a musical form that Bach championed. His colossal work, The Art of Fugue, is both a celebration and a masterclass. Written in open scoring (on four staves) for an unspecified instrument, this music lends itself well to the string quartet genre. The entire work is made up of fourteen fugues and four canons of which we perform a selection: Contrapunctus I-IV.

Each individual movement explores a treatment of Bach’s single fugal idea and illustrates how this idea can be interpreted differently or at greater depth. The first autograph dates from 1740, and with Haydn’s early works being penned just 20 year later, this illustrates how rapidly styles were developing and changing at the time.

Haydn’s Op. 20 quartets, written in the 1770’s - known as his Sun Quartets - are often pinpointed as the moment when Haydn reached a pinnacle in development of the string quartet genre. Like the sun, they are at the very centre of the quartet universe and provided a model that has guided musicians and audiences for generations, each one finding something new and wonderful to experience and value. These works were written at a time in Haydn’s life when he was well entrenched in the Esterhàzy world, somewhat physically isolated, and seemingly far away from the excitement of Vienna and other great centres. In fact, these circumstances did not prevent Haydn from becoming famous nor from absorbing many of the new philosophical ideas that were rapidly taking hold across Europe.

Haydn was by this time actively moving against the lighter ‘Galant’ musical compositional style that had become the latest fashion. He gives more equality to the roles of the four parts, experiments with folk idioms, adds detailed and specific performance directions to the players and returns to elements of the baroque such as the use of fugue.

Three of the Op. 20 quartets finish with fugues, a form that had been abandoned as overly academic. Of these, we perform the last of the group - No. 6 in A major. Haydn includes a stunning aria-like middle movement for the first violin alongside a minuet where he instructs all four players to play the entire movement on one string. The work ends with the beautiful and subdued fugue that Haydn indicates to always be performed at a pianissimo dynamic - provoking a calm, cathartic and reflective end to this ravishing work.

The program finishes with a work at the opposite end of the spectrum of passion - with Mendelssohn’s first ever string quartet, bursting with epic drama, melancholy and love. It’s a remarkable piece - one that seems to embody an emotional depth, awareness and maturity far beyond the tender years of a then seventeenyear-old. It is a pleasure to present this incredible quartet to you on period instruments, possibly for the first time in Australia.

I am thrilled to be welcoming you to our 2023 season and I hope you enjoy the concert.

Skye McIntosh Artistic Director