Program Book - CSO All-Access Chamber Music: Lincoln String Quartet at Beverly Arts Center

ONE HUNDRED THIRT Y-FIRST SE ASON Sunday June 5, 2022, at 3:00 Beverly Arts Center

All-Access Chamber Music Series LINCOLN STRING QUARTET Qing Hou Violin Matous Michal Violin Lawrence Neuman Viola Daniel Katz Cello mozart

String Quartet No. 22 in B-flat Major, K. 589

Allegro Larghetto Menuetto: Moderato Allegro assai

matous michal qing hou l awrence neuman daniel k at z intermission

dvořák

String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96 (American)

Allegro ma non troppo Lento Molto vivace Finale: Vivace ma non troppo qing hou matous michal l awrence neuman daniel k at z

The All-Access Chamber Music series is generously underwritten by an anonymous donor, who attended similar concerts forty-five years ago.

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comments by richard e. rodda wolfgang mozart

Born January 27, 1756; Salzburg, Austria Died December 5, 1791; Vienna, Austria

String Quartet No. 22 in B-flat Major, K. 589 composed 1790

Given the steady deterioration in Mozart’s health, finances, and prospects in Vienna at the beginning of 1789, it is not surprising that he eagerly accepted the invitation of a fellow Mason and former student, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, to assess the career possibilities in Berlin. Lichnowsky, an officer in the Prussian army, regularly visited the court at Berlin and suggested that he could arrange an audience with King Frederick William II, nephew and successor of the immensely cultured Frederick the Great and an avid music lover and a cellist of more than modest accomplishment. Mozart left Vienna with Lichnowsky on April 8. After stops in Prague, Dresden, and Leipzig, the prince and composer arrived in Berlin on April 25, but he had to wait until May 26 before being granted an audience with the king, which went well enough for Frederick William to commission a set of six string quartets for himself and a halfdozen piano sonatinas for his eldest daughter, Fredericka. Mozart set to work immediately on the commission after arriving home in Vienna on June 4, but he managed to finish only three of the quartets (K. 575, 589, 590) and one of the piano sonatas (K. 576) over the next year.

As would be expected in a composition made to order for a cello-playing king, that instrumental part is given a featured prominence throughout the Prussian quartets, a technique that causes the viola and second violin to be thoroughly drawn into the music’s unfolding

argument in order to achieve tonal balance and textural homogeneity. This conversational characteristic is heard in the opening page of the B-flat quartet (K. 589), in which the first violin begins the principal theme, shares it in duet with the viola in the second measure, and passes it on to the cello five bars later. The music is led through a transition that introduces a motive of arching shape and a glistening triplet figuration before it arrives at the formal subsidiary subject, a suave melody entrusted to the cello. The development section is largely concerned with the main theme and the triplet motive from the transition. The recapitulation of the earlier themes brings formal balance and harmonic closure to the movement.

The Larghetto is begun by a melody floated in the silvery high register of the cello. The first violin appropriates this lovely theme and leads to the passage of rippling scales that serves as the second subject. These two thematic inspirations return to form the second half of the movement.

The menuetto heard to open and close the third movement, which allows the first violin a concertante importance, proceeds largely according to expectations. The central trio, however, comprises a remarkable anthology of unusual compositional techniques: elaborate accompaniments in mechanistic ticking rhythms, featherstitched melodic decorations, amazing dynamic and chordal surprises, harmonic slips that are almost eerie in their restlessness, even a dramatic silence that stops the music dead in its tracks. Such remarkable and potentially iconoclastic music making spurs thoughts about the direction that Mozart’s creativity might have taken had he lived into the encroaching age of romanticism.

a b o v e : Wolfgang Mozart, silverpoint drawing by Dora Stock (1760–1832), made when Mozart visited Dresden in April 1789

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COMMENTS

The rondo-form finale, though generally light and vivacious in style, is touched, particularly in its middle regions, with the sophistication of

harmony and thematic development that invest the works of Mozart’s maturity with their subtlety and range of expression.

antonín dvořák

Born September 8, 1841; Nelahozeves, Bohemia Died May 1, 1904; Prague, Bohemia

String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96 (American) composed 1893

On June 3, 1893, Antonín Dvořák left his apartment at 327 East Seventeenth Street in New York City and journeyed via Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago to Calmar, Iowa. An hour after the composer arrived at Calmar, a carriage deposited him, his wife, their six children, a maid, and the composer’s secretary at the doorstep of a sturdy, two-story brick house in Spillville, a settlement of a few hundred souls founded some forty years before by a “Bavarian-German” named Spielmann. It was not the Germans, however, who followed Spielmann to the open spaces of Iowa, but the Czechs and Bohemians, Dvořák’s countrymen, among whom were members of his secretary’s family, the clan Kovařík. Though Dvořák was certainly not uncomfortable in his position as director of the National Conservatory in New York (he boasted in a letter to

one friend about his $15,000 salary, an enormous sum in the 1890s), he missed Prague, and hearing Czech spoken in the streets, and his pigeons, and the traditional songs. So he was easily persuaded

by Papa Kovařík, Spillville’s teacher and choirmaster, to spend the summer of 1893 in that little slice of his homeland that had dropped onto the Midwestern prairie.

On June 8, just three days after he arrived in Spillville, Dvořák began his F major string quartet; he finished the sketches in an astonishing seventy-two hours. So eager was he to hear this new creation that he commandeered a violin for himself and enlisted three members of the talented Kovařík family for an immediate run-through of the piece. Still bubbling with inspiration, the next day he began the Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello (op. 97), which was completed on August 1, just before he left for a week to participate in a Czech Day at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Both the quintet and the quartet were publicly unveiled by the Kneisel Quartet on New Year’s Day, 1894, in Boston; the

f r o m t o p : Dvořák, pastel portrait, 1891, by Ludwig Michalek (1859–1942). Prague Conservatory of Music The Dvořák family, New York City, 1893

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COMMENTS

performance was repeated twelve days later at Carnegie Hall in New York.

A shimmering halo of string sound opens the quartet and serves as the cushion for the viola’s presentation of the folk-like main subject. A shadow of darker emotion draws briefly across the music for the presentation of the complementary subject, but the mood brightens again for the closing theme, a delightful melody, as sweet as a lullaby, entrusted to the first violin. The development concerns itself first with permutations of the main subject and then with an imitative treatment of a motive derived from the dark-hued complementary theme. The recapitulation brings balance, formal closure, and complete fulfillment to this most satisfying movement.

In the Lento, the beautiful main theme is first sung by the violin above a sadly undulating

accompaniment. The song soars higher and the mood becomes brighter as the movement progresses, but the plaintive tone of the opening again settles upon the music as it reaches its closing measures. The vivacious third movement is built from two contrasting strains of music.

One (in F major) is lively and dance-like, the other (F minor) is more lyrical and mysterious, and their juxtaposition yields the movement’s structural organization: A–B–A–B–A. The finale is a rondo built on a dashing folk-dance melody announced by the violin.

Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.

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profiles Qing Hou Violin

Matous Michal Violin

Qing Hou has been a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1997. A native of China, she attended the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing before coming to the United States in 1988 to continue her studies. She holds degrees from the Peabody Institute and the New England Conservatory. Before joining the CSO, Hou was a member of the San Francisco Symphony. An avid chamber musician, she has performed for the Andover Chamber Music Society and at festivals in Madison, Napa, El Paso, and Sun Valley. Hou has been heard on NPR’s Performance Today and regularly appears in the Chicagoland area with various ensembles.

She founded the Lincoln Quartet in 1997 with her sister Lei Hou and Lawrence Neuman (now Qing’s husband).

As a soloist, Hou has appeared with orchestras in the cities of Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago, as well as in China. In the fall of 2003, she made her first appearance with the CSO as soloist, performing Mozart’s Violin Concerto in G major conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

Matous Michal was appointed to the second violin section of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by Music Director Riccardo Muti in February 2016, and joined the first violin section this season. Previously, he was a member of the Grant Park Orchestra and has received praise from the New York Times for his appearance as concertmaster of the Manhattan School of Music Symphony Orchestra in Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben.

A native of the Czech Republic, Michal began his violin studies at the age of four under his father Ladislav Michal. At the age of fourteen, he made his solo debut performing Paganini’s Violin Concerto no. 1 with the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory symphony orchestra as winner of the Dubai International Competition for Young Virtuosos. Since then, he has won numerous other awards.

Also at fourteen, Michal began studies at the Prague Conservatory as a student of Jaroslav Foltýn. After graduating, he joined the studio of Glenn Dicterow at the Juilliard School, where he completed his bachelor’s degree. He earned a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music in the orchestral performance program under Dicterow and Lisa Kim in 2016, four months after joining the CSO. Michal has served as concertmaster of the Verbier Festival Orchestra, Juilliard Orchestra, Music Academy of the West Festival Orchestra, and Manhattan School of Music Symphony Orchestra. He has studied with coaches Sylvia Rosenberg, Joseph Kalichstein, and Earl Carlyss, and teachers Charles Avsharian and Kathleen Winkler.

Michal joined the CSO alongside his brother, fellow violinist Simon Michal.

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PHOTOS BY TODD ROS EN BERG

PROFILES

Lawrence Neuman Viola

Daniel Katz Cello

Lawrence Neuman has been a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1991. Before coming to Chicago he was violist with the Miami String Quartet.

He is frequently heard throughout the Chicagoland area as a chamber musician and has performed across the United States and in Europe. Neuman has appeared at festivals and chamber music series in Boston, Marlboro, La Jolla, Madison, Napa, Portland, and Davenport.

Chamber music collaborators include such artists as Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman, Yefim Bronfman, Lydia Artymiw, Gil Shaham, and Aaron Rosand.

During the 1998–99 season, Neuman took a leave of absence from the CSO to serve as principal viola of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

He has taught viola and chamber music for several years at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts.

A native of Saint Louis, Missouri, Neuman attended the Eastman School of Music, the University of Southern California, and the Cleveland Institute of Music, and was a student of Heidi Castleman, Donald McInnes, and Robert Vernon.

A Chicago native, Daniel Katz was appointed to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2011 by Zell Music Director Riccardo Muti. Prior to joining the Orchestra, he was a regular substitute with the CSO and the Cleveland Orchestra and also was a member of the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra. He received a doctor of musical arts degree with honors from Northwestern University under the tutelage of Hans Jørgen Jensen, a master’s degree from New England Conservatory studying with Laurence Lesser, and a bachelor’s degree from Northern Illinois University under the guidance of teacher Marc Johnson. Other teachers include Paul Katz, Richard Hirschl, and Gilda Barston. Katz serves on the faculty at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts and maintains a private studio. Previously, he was an adjunct assistant professor and artist-in-residence at the University of Notre Dame. Katz has participated in a number of major music festivals, including Tanglewood, Verbier, Sarasota, and Norfolk. He also has performed for live solo and chamber music broadcasts on WFMT-FM Chicago.

Recently, Katz recorded an album of works by Victoria Bond (Naxos) and a disc of James Stephenson’s works (Liquid Melancholy: Clarinet Music of James M. Stephenson, Cedille), both with the ensemble Chicago Pro Musica.

P H OTOS BY TO DD RO S E NB E RG

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