BIG ARTS Classical Series 2025 - Jupiter & Jasper Quartets

Proudly Presents

Jupiter & Jasper Quartets Christensen Performance Hall on The Madeline Janis Courter Stage Thursday, February 13, 2025

Graciously Sponsored by BIG ARTS Classical Series Circle: Nancy Dehmlow, David Huggin & Ken Nees

J U P I T E R ST R I N G Q U A R T E T The Jupiter String Quartet is a particularly intimate group, consisting of violinists Nelson Lee and Meg Freivogel, violist Liz Freivogel (Meg’s older sister), and cellist Daniel McDonough (Meg’s husband, Liz’s brother-in-law). Founded in 2001, this tight-knit ensemble is firmly established as an important voice in the world of chamber music, and exudes an energy that is at once friendly, knowledgeable, and adventurous.

The quartet has performed across the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and the Americas in some of the world’s finest halls, including New York City’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, London’s Wigmore Hall, Boston’s Jordan Hall, Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center and Library of Congress, Austria’s Esterhazy Palace, and Seoul’s Sejong Chamber Hall.

The quartet chose its name because Jupiter was the most prominent planet in the night sky at the time of its formation and the astrological symbol for Jupiter resembles the number four.

L to R: Nelson Lee, violin; Liz Freivogel, viola; Daniel McDonough, cello; Meg Freivogel, violin

“The Jupiter String Quartet, an ensemble of eloquent intensity, has matured into one of the mainstays of the American chamber-music scene.”

– The New Yorker

J A S P E R ST R I N G Q U A R T E T Celebrated as one of the preeminent American string quartets of the twenty-first century, the prizewinning Jasper String Quartet is hailed as being “flawless in ensemble and intonation, expressively assured and beautifully balanced” (Gramophone). The Quartet is highly regarded for its “programming savvy” (ClevelandClassical.com), which strives to evocatively connect the music of underrepresented and living composers to the canonical repertoire through thoughtful programs that appeal to a wide variety of audiences.

A recipient of Chamber Music America’s prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award (2012), the Quartet’s playing has been described as “sonically delightful and expressively compelling” (The Strad). The ensemble has released eight albums, including its most recent release, Insects and Machines: Quartets of Vivian Fung (2023) which Strings Magazine praised as being “intensely dramatic throughout demonstrating both their advocacy of new music and their transcendent mastery.” The Quartet’s 2017 release, Unbound, was named by The New York Times as one of the year’s 25 Best Classical Recordings.

The Quartet’s new recordings in 2024 and 2025 include Reinaldo Moya’s Pájaros Garabatos with soprano Maria Brea in 2024, works by Tina Davidson with pianist Natalie Zhu in 2024, and Richard Festinger’s Quartet No. 5 in 2025. In celebration of its Twentieth Anniversary in 2026-27, the Quartet has commissioned new works from composers Patrick Castillo, Brittany J. Green, Reinaldo Moya and Michelle Ross.

L to R: Rachel Henderson Freivogel, cello; Andrew Gonzalez, viola; J Freivogel and Karen Kim, violins

JUPITER STRING QUARTET L to R: Nelson Lee, violin; Liz Freivogel, viola; Meg Freivogel, violin; Daniel McDonough, cello

JASPER STRING QUARTET L to R: Rachel Henderson Freivogel, cello; Andrew Gonzalez, viola; J Freivogel and Karen Kim, violins

PROGRAM The Jupiter Quartet and the Jasper Quartet collaborate to create an extraordinary musical experience. The program begins with the Jupiter Quartet performing Haydn’s brilliant last quartet in F Major, followed by the Jasper Quartet performing Grażyna Bacewicz's impassioned fourth quartet. For the second half of the program, the Jupiter Quartet and the Jasper Quartet perform the monumental Mendelssohn Octet.

JUPITER STRING QUARTET Nelson Lee and Meg Freivogel, violins; Liz Freivogel, viola; Daniel McDonough, cello String Quartet in F Major, Op. 77, No. 2, Hob.III:82 (1799) JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809) I. Allegro moderato II. Menuetto. Presto ma non troppo III. Andante IV. Finale. Vivace assai JASPER STRING QUARTET J Freivogel and Karen Kim, violins; Andrew Gonzalez, viola; Rachel Henderson Freivogel, cello String Quartet No. 4 (1951)

GRAŻYNA BACEWICZ (1909-1969)

I. Andante – Allegro molto II. Andante III. Allegro giocoso -IntermissionJASPER AND JUPITER STRING QUARTETS Octet in E-flat Major, Op. 20 (1825) I. Allegro moderato ma con fuoco II. Andante III. Scherzo. Allegro leggierisimo IV. Presto

FELIX MENDELSSOHN(1809-1847)

Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda String Quartet in F major, Op. 77, No. 2 (H. III:82) Joseph Haydn Born March 31, 1732 in Rohrau, Austria.

Died May 31, 1809 in Vienna.

Composed in 1799.

Prince Franz Joseph Maximilian Lobkowitz, born into one of Austria’s most distinguished families in 1772, was among Vienna’s preeminent patrons of music at the turn of the 19th century. Beethoven’s biographer Thayer described him as “a violinist of considerable powers and so devoted a lover of music and the drama, so profuse a squanderer of his income upon them, as in twenty years to reduce himself to bankruptcy.” In 1799, the young Prince commissioned not one but two sets of string quartets — one from the young lion Ludwig van Beethoven, who had first pounced upon the city seven years before; the other from Joseph Haydn, then Europe’s most revered composer, who was still basking in the unalloyed triumph of the premiere of The Creation in April 1798. Though Haydn had reached the not-inconsiderable age of 67, he was still vital and energetic, and readily set to work on Lobkowitz’s order for a series of six new quartets.

Haydn completed two of the pieces for Lobkowitz in 1799 (G major and F major, published by Artaria in Vienna in 1802 as Op. 77, No. 1 and No. 2, with a dedication to the Prince), but then broke off the series to take up the enormous labor on The Seasons, the successor to The Creation, which so sapped his strength that he was unable to finish any more of the quartets. The two quartets of Op. 77 were the last in the incomparable series of instrumental creations stretching over half a century with which Haydn had brought the quintessential forms of musical Classicism to their perfected states.

The Quartet in F major, Op. 77, No. 2 displays the ease and fluency of form-building through motivic development that Haydn had wrested from a half-century of instrumental composition. As the opening movement’s principal thematic material, the first violin posits a descending scale, perfectly balanced in two loud-soft phrases, which is carefully embellished with tiny decorative figures and sharply etched rhythmic cells. The lower strings underpin the second phrase with a smooth, scale-step accompaniment and punctuate the end of the eight-measure theme with a quick, repeated note motive. From this handful of ideas — a scale, a distinctive rhythm or two, a few legato notes — Haydn spun a masterful eight minutes of music: tightly integrated yet constantly inventive; attractive in every detail yet never losing sight of the movement’s overall formal scheme; simple yet complex; expressive yet cerebral; lovely yet profound. It is music-making of the highest order, significant not just as the basis for this single piece but also as the culmination of the work of many earlier generations of composers and the model (and standard) for those to follow.

The second movement is labeled “Menuet” but it is really a fully developed scherzo, a form that had gained considerable currency in fashionable Viennese musical circles following the publication of Beethoven’s Op. 1 Piano Trios in 1795. The joke inherent in the Italian word “scherzo” is amply demonstrated by the movement’s outer sections, with their toe-stubbing rhythmic tricks, surprise dynamic changes, sly harmonic side-steps, and tweaky grace-notes. Providing an emotional and stylistic foil for this exalted foolery, however, is the central trio, sedate, almost somber in mood, smoothly flowing in demeanor, and tinged with expressive chromatic harmonies.

The Andante is a set of free variations on an elegant but rather prim melody presented by the first violin above the lean accompaniment of only a walking-bass line in the cello. The other instruments enter as the theme unfolds (a wonderful effect — rather like switching from mono to stereo on the home audio system), and the second violin and then the cello take over the melody for successive variations. An elaborate passage in the first violin provides the transition to the final variation, which returns the quiet and simplicity of the opening, though here with the inner voices filling out the texture.

Feb. 13, 2025 (Jasper + Jupiter Quartets), page 2 The closing movement, Haydn’s last instrumental finale, is a dashing, monothematic sonata structure built on a theme of folk-dance vivacity, “a sublimation and fulfillment of all that had gone before,” according to Rosemary Hughes in her study of the composer’s string quartets.

String Quartet No. 4 Grażyna Bacewicz Born February 5, 1909 in Łódź, Poland.

Died January 17, 1969 in Warsaw.

Composed in 1951.

Premiered on September 21, 1951 by the Quatuor Municipal of Liège, Belgium.

Composer, violinist, pianist and writer Grażyna Bacewicz (Grah-ZHEE-nah baht-SEV-ich) was among Poland’s leading musicians during the early 20th century and the country’s first female musician to gain international prominence since Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831), who toured widely throughout Europe as a virtuoso before being engaged as pianist at the Russian court and whose compositions influenced those of Frédéric Chopin. Bacewicz was born in 1909 into a musical family in Łódź, 75 miles southwest of Warsaw, and her father gave Grażyna her first instruction in piano, violin and music theory.

She received her early professional training at the local music school before entering the Warsaw Conservatory in 1928, where her talents as violinist, composer and pianist developed in parallel. After graduating in 1932, she received a grant to study composition with Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique in Paris from Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the famed composer, pianist and Poland’s Prime Minister in 1919, who used his fortune to aid, among many other causes, the country’s most promising young musicians. Bacewicz also studied violin in Paris with the Hungarian virtuoso and teacher Carl Flesch, and gained her first notice as a soloist in 1935 at the Wieniawski International Violin Competition in Warsaw. The following year she was appointed Principal Violinist of the Polish Radio Orchestra in Warsaw and began touring as soloist in Europe, occasionally appearing with her brother Kiejstut, a concert pianist. (The University of Music in Łódź is named jointly in their honor.) Bacewicz composed and gave clandestine concerts during World War II, after which she resumed her touring career and joined the faculty of the Academy of Music in Łódź. In 1953, she retired as a violinist to devote herself to composition and teaching. For the three years before her death from a heart attack in 1969, three weeks short of her 60th birthday, Bacewicz taught composition at the Academy of Music in Warsaw. She received numerous honors throughout her career, including awards for lifetime achievement from the City of Warsaw, Polish Composers’ Union, and People’s Republic of Poland, served twice as Vice-Chair of the Polish Composers’ Union, and was an accomplished writer of short stories, novels and autobiographical anecdotes.

Bacewicz’s many compositions, rooted in early-20th-century Neo-Classicism, include ballets, a comic opera, incidental music for theater and radio, four symphonies, seven violin concertos and others for one and two pianos, viola and cello, two dozen orchestral works, seven string quartets and additional chamber scores, songs, and piano compositions. (She occasionally appeared publicly playing her Sonata No. 2 and other of her own piano works.)

For Bacewicz, as for all Poles, World War II was, at the least, a challenge. With the country occupied jointly by Germany and Russia from the first days of the war, Bacewicz’s career, like the country’s musical life, was in disarray, performances were few, informal and scattered — her Second String Quartet was first played in an artists’ café — she had to care for her wounded sister, and she and her family were displaced from their Warsaw home and sent first to a refugee camp and then to Lublin. With the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, Poland became a satellite of the Soviet Union and was subject to its artistic policies, which required that music be created “for the masses” and promote nationalism by incorporating folksongs or their facsimiles. Some of the tension between Bacewicz’s own creative impulse and the dictates of the state play out in her String Quartet No. 4, which was commissioned in 1950 by the Polish Composers Union as an entry in the International String Quartet Competition held the following year in

Feb. 13, 2025 (Jasper + Jupiter Quartets), page 3 Liège, Belgium. It was premiered on September 21, 1951 by the Quatuor Municipal de Liège and won the Competition’s First Prize; the work was introduced to Poland the following month, and awarded the Polish National Prize in 1952.

The Fourth Quartet opens with soft, somber chords of indefinite tonality that are countered by aggressive phrases from the full ensemble. A brief echo of the somber chords leads to the main theme, a melancholy, folk-like tune in the first violin that is interrupted by a stern, hammered passage, a strongly rhythmic idea that takes on an almost militaristic quality when it returns later in the movement. The formal second theme is given by the cello against a background of tremolo (violins) and pizzicato notes (viola). The development section is based largely on a motive from the second theme, which is often impelled with a rhythmic force rooted in the earlier aggressive phrases. The main and second themes are both recapitulated before the movement reaches a forceful close. There is a sense of deep sadness in the delicate, meticulously drawn lines of the Andante. Some stronger thoughts are attempted in the movement’s center, but that effort is eventually abandoned and the movement ends with the poignant austerity with which it began. The finale is a vibrant rondo whose theme resembles a jig (or perhaps a Polish oberek) that returns in modified form around intervening episodes.

Octet in E-flat major, Op. 20 Felix Mendelssohn Born February 3, 1809 in Hamburg.

Died November 4, 1847 in Leipzig.

Composed in 1825.

Premiered in October 1825 in Berlin.

It was with the Octet for Strings, composed in 1825 at the tender age of sixteen, a full year before the Overture to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that the stature of Mendelssohn’s genius was first fully revealed. He wrote the work as a birthday offering for his violin and viola teacher, Eduard Rietz, and premiered it during one of the household musicales in October of that year that the Mendelssohns organized to showcase young Felix’s budding gifts; Rietz participated in the performance and young Felix is thought to have played one of the viola parts. (Rietz and his family remained close to Mendelssohn. Eduard’s brother, Julius, succeeded Mendelssohn as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts upon the composer’s death in 1847 and edited his complete works for publication in the 1870s.)

The scoring of the Octet calls for a double string quartet, though, unlike the work written in 1823 for the same instrumentation by Louis Spohr (a friend of the Mendelssohns and a regular visitor to their family programs), which divides the eight players into two antiphonal groups, Mendelssohn treated his forces as a single integrated ensemble, a veritable miniature orchestra of strings. Even allowing that Mendelssohn, by age sixteen, was already a veteran musician with a decade of experience and a sizeable catalog of music to his credit, the Octet’s brilliance and originality are phenomenal.

The Octet is splendidly launched by a wide-ranging main theme that takes the first violin quickly through its entire tonal range; the lyrical second theme is given in sweet, close harmonies. The development section, largely concerned with the subsidiary subject, is relatively brief, and culminates in a swirling unison passage that serves as the bridge to the recapitulation of the earlier melodic materials.

The following Andante, like many slow movements in Mozart’s instrumental compositions, was created not so much as the fulfillment of some particular formal model, but as an ever-unfolding realization of its own unique melodic materials and world of sonorities. The movement is tinged with the delicious, bittersweet melancholy that represents the expressive extreme of the musical language of Mendelssohn.

The composer’s sister Fanny noted that the featherstitched Scherzo was inspired by gossamer verses from Goethe’s Faust, to which Mendelssohn’s fey music is the perfect complement:

Feb. 13, 2025 (Jasper + Jupiter Quartets), page 4 Floating cloud and trailing mist, O’er us brightening hover: The rushes shake, winds stir the brake: Soon all their pomp is over.

The closing movement, a dazzling moto perpetuo with fugal episodes, recalls Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony (No. 41, C major, K. 551) in its rhythmic vitality and contrapuntal display, simultaneously whipping together as many as three themes from the finale and a motive from the Scherzo during one climatic episode in the closing pages. ©2024 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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