N E W S O U N D S 2 0 2 4 W I T H T I P P E T T Q U A R T E T E V E N T P R O G R A M M E I n t e r n a t i o n a l C o n c e r t S e r i e s 2 0 2 3 - 2 0 2 4 M A R C H 1 1 , 2 0 2 4 R O Y A L H O L L O W A Y A C U K / M U S I C D e p a r t m e n t o f M u s i c S c h o o l o f P e r f o r m i n g & D i g i t a l A r t s
We are pleased to welcome you to our 2023-24 International Concert Series at Royal Holloway.
We, at the Department of Music, cannot wait to showcase the varied talent of our students and staff, but also bringing internationally renowned musicians to the College. For 2023-24, we are back and better than ever with more student and staff opportunities through the creation of 'The Platform', an open opportunity for the community at the Department of Music to share with you what makes us so special. Alongside our popular Midweek Music and Pocket Concert Series, we are excited to continue our special partnerships with the Young Classical Artists Trust and BBC New Generation Artists and continue our alumni recital series by bringing back the epoch ensemble. We are pleased to also bring a wealth of international artists to our series, including pianists Pina Napolitano, Mary Dullea, Sholto Kynoch, Alexander Soares, and Joseph Havlat, violinst Darragh Morgan, guitarist Laura Snowden, clarinettist Jonathan Leibovitz,
sitarist James Pusey, mezzosoprano Helen Charlston, jazz group Solstice, and the London Mozart Players. 2023 also marks the final season for our quartet-in-residence, the Tippett Quartet, as we say farewell to this stellar group with their final concert at Royal Holloway.
All in all, this season is representative of the world-class talent our community at the Department of Music has fostered as we showcase our students and the range of music performance we programme and encourage; from jazz to world music, orchestral performance to solo piano, as well as presenting performers from the international stage We look forward to welcoming you to our series this year.
Nathan James Dearden Music Performance Manager & Curator of the International Concert Series
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EVENT PROGRAMME
Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) Entr’acte
In 2013, North Carolina native Caroline Shaw became the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in recognition of her work, Partita for 8 Voices. She studied violin at Rice University and Yale, and composition at Princeton. As a vocalist, she is a member of the Grammy Award winning ensemble, Roomful of Teeth. Between 20142015, Shaw was the inaugural EarlyCareer Musician in Residence at Dumbarton Oaks, the historic estate in Washington, D.C. once owned by the diplomat Robert Woods Bliss, and his wife, arts patron Mildred Bliss. The house, which once played host to meetings between international delegates that blossomed into the United Nations, was given to Harvard University and functions as a research and cultural hub.
Shaw writes about Entr’acte:
“Entr’acte was written in 2011 after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 2 with their spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet. It is
structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further. I love the way some music (like the minuets of Op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.”
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Nathan James Dearden (b. 1992)
pixelated in quick motion
After Christopher Soto’s ‘I’ve Been Yearning for a Riot’
I’m dashing to freedom // My cheetah crop - top // Turns me into a cheetah. I’m dashing to freedom // My cheetah croptop // Turns me into a cheetah.
My legs are pixelated in quick motion // Catch me If you can!
Krzysztof Penderecki (19332020)
String Quartet No. 1 (1960)
Penderecki’s String Quartet No 1, which was premiered in Cincinnati in 1962 by the LaSalle Quartet, is one of the groups of works from 1960–62 that secured his international reputation. It is also the shortest, but it packs a punch in its seven minutes. It is formed of two panels, roughly equal in length, of which the first provides material for the second. This material consists not of melodies, harmonies or regular metres and rhythms but of a range of unconventional sounds measured against nominal one-second ‘barlines’. This sound-world became known within Poland as ‘sonorism’, an approach to composition that broke with tradition wherever possible.
The first panel opens with a challenging instruction for the players to perform tremolo without using the bow. As their lines develop into glissandi, Penderecki begins a series of slow-burning interpenetrations of ideas as various as playing between the bridge and the tailpiece, striking the strings with the palm of the hand, hitting the strings col legno (with the wooden back of the bow) and playing the highest possible note pizzicato. The music slows perceptibly through longer note values, then pauses.
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The second panel presents the ensemble in a more uniform light. Different sonoristic textures are explored in sound-blocks, sequentially rather than simultaneously. Penderecki also introduces new sounds, such as bows playing on the tailpiece of the instruments. Despite a brief return to the heterogeneous textures of the first panel, the impression is one of the isolated dispersal of its elements, rather than any attempt at conventional coherence.
Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828)
String Quartet No. 13 in A minor, D. 804, Rosamunde
There were at least eleven early string quartets by Schubert, intended for performance within the Schubert family-and-friends circle. The breakthrough, if you will, came in 1820, with the Quartet Movement in C minor, D. 703, in which the notion of comfortable domesticity is left behind once and for all, to be replaced by agitation, tension, and strife-ridden chromaticism. With this single completed movement, he felt he had reached a creative cul-de-sac in this genre, indicated by the fouryear hiatus between D. 703 and his next string quartet, the present, largescale work, D. 804, of 1824, the year in which he later wrote his intensely dark “Death and the Maiden” Quartet
There is no obvious musical point of departure toward this new emotional and stylistic world, no single “transitional” work prior to the passion that inhabits D. 703, and the still deeper emotionalism of the Aminor Quartet. There can be little doubt, however, that the composer’s bouts of ill health – with a diagnosis of syphilis in 1822 – and possibly a blighted love affair were major contributory factors.
The A-minor Quartet was first performed in July of 1824 by its dedicatees, the members of the Schuppanzigh Quartet, which had
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premiered most of Beethoven’s quartets. It would be the only one of Schubert’s chamber works published in his lifetime.
Schubert scholar Maurice Brown, writing in 1958, notes: “The Quartet in A minor is a beloved work; in some way we group it with the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony as giving us the heart of the composer. But with the quartet as with the symphony, it is doing him an injustice to let the emotional directness, the poetry, the sheer beauty of the musical sound… prevent admiration and appreciation of his technical power: power used with masterly ease in development and formal construction.”
“Rosamunde,” the nickname usually employed for the A-minor Quartet and the theme of its graciously serene second movement, has its origins in a theme from Schubert’s incidental music for a play of the same name and which is again used for one of his D. 935 Impromptus for solo piano.
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PERFORMERS
Tippett Quartet
‘The Tippett Quartet’s performances are little short of astonishing’ The Times
The Tippett Quartet perform at Wigmore Hall, BBC Proms, Kings Place, Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Bridgewater Hall and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. They have toured Europe, Canada and Mexico. Their broad and diverse repertoire highlights the Tippett Quartet’s unique versatility. They have an impressive catalogue of recordings, most recently being awarded Gramophone Record of the Month for their recording of Gorécki Quartets for Naxos: ‘I cannot recommend this recording highly
enough, and have run out of superlatives.’
The Tippett Quartet pursues a keen interest in educational work with both schools and universities. There were Ensemble in Residence at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University for 2012-13 and from 2015 they have been resident at Royal Holloway University, London.
The Tippett Quartet worked on a ground-breaking reimagining of
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Beethoven’s Op. 135 with composer/soundscape artist Matthew Herbert and have also given numerous world and UK premieres including newly discovered works by Tchaikovsky and Holst, as well as new works by John Adams, Freya Waley-Cohen, Howard Goodall and Alissa Firsova. They have also worked with Peter Maxwell-Davies for a performance of his 9th Quartet at the South Bank, with Anthony Payne on his Quartet No.1 for a live BBC broadcast from Spitalfields Festival, and Hugh Wood on his String Quartet No.3 at the Presteigne Festival. They have had the great pleasure of collaborating with inspirational soloists such as Kathryn Stott, Craig Ogden, Stephanie Gonley, Lawrence Power, Melvin Tan, Nick Van Bloss, Julian Bliss, Ashley Wass, Lynn Arnold, Emma Abbate, Mary Dullea, and James Atkinson.
They have also performed with the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden and have premiered a newly written film score for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent film classic ‘The Lodger’. In 2014 they started a collaboration with some of the UK’s finest Jazz musicians with the launch of their ‘Close To You’ project – a tribute to the album that Frank Sinatra made with the Hollywood String Quartet.
In 2011 they celebrated the anniversary of the iconic film composer Bernard Herrmann with a series of concerts and radio
broadcasts. They have worked with Damian Montagu and Hugh Bonneville for “In a South Downs Way” – a collection of poems set to music and can also be heard as featured artists on the film Knives Out & Glass Onion
The Tippett Quartet released a recording of the Penderecki Quartets for Naxos which was described as ‘life-enhancing’ by The Times and gained a 5* review in BBC Music Magazine. This was an extremely special disc having received a letter giving permission from Penderecki in January 2020 to record the 4th quartet, this recording in June 2020 was their first project after the COVID-19 lockdown.
www.tippettquartet.co.uk
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