23|24: Balourdet Quartet - Performance Program

presents

BALOURDET QUARTET

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2023 | 2 P.M. Squitieri Studio Theatre

BALOURDET QUARTET Angela Bae, Violin Justin DeFilippis, Violin Benjamin Zannoni, Viola Russell Houston, Cello

Program Italian Serenade (1887)

Hugo Wolf

String Quartet No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 44, No. 2 (1837)

Felix Mendelssohn

I. Allegro assai appassionato (1809–1847) II. Scherzo. Allegro di molto III. Andante IV. Presto agitato

INTERMISSION String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat Major, Op. 130 with Grosse Fuge, Op. 133 (1825-26)* I. Adagio ma non troppo II. Presto III. Andante con moto ma non troppo IV. Alla danza tedesca. Allegro assai V. Cavatina. Adagio molto espressivo VI. Grosse Fuge, Op. 133 *Last movement of Op. 130 is replaced with Op. 133

———————————

Young Concert Artists, Inc. 1776 Broadway, Suite 1500 New York, New York 10019 212.307.6655 yca.org

Ludwig van Beethoven

PROGRAM NOTES Italian Serenade Hugo Wolf Born March 13, 1860, in Windischgraz, (now Slovenia); died February 22, 1903, in Vienna Posterity rightly treasures Hugo Wolf as a great master of German song. He composed approximately 300 Lieder in which music and poetry are more intimately joined than they had been in the work of any composer since Schubert. Wolf adored Wagner, detested Brahms, and was a close friend of his Conservatory classmate, Mahler. Among his works are an opera, some other music for the theater, a few choral compositions, and a handful of instrumental pieces, of which the frequently performed and recorded Italian Serenade is his finest.

Wolf worked briefly as a conductor but found the labor uncongenial. For a few years, he was an influential and strongly partisan critic, but he consumed himself with composition in a concentrated effort that produced, in a short time, settings of 50 Goethe poems and 53 by Mörike. In 1897, in one of his spasmodic outbursts of emotional energy, which until then had resulted in a fury of musical creation, he broke down completely and entered a mental hospital. Except during a brief remission in his condition in 1898, he remained hospitalized for the rest of his life.

In three days of May 1887, Wolf composed the work now known as his Italian Serenade for string quartet, a brilliant, sparkling movement that is really a fragment of a larger composition that was never completed, an extended, developed instrumental work that refused to take shape as spontaneously as a song. He worked on it over a period of years and re-scored it in 1892 for small orchestras with a prominent part for solo viola, but he could never get very far on the three movements he originally wanted to add to it. Wolf had intended for this serenade to be the beginning of an orchestral suite, but he only completed fragments of two other movements because he suffered increasingly frequently occurring periods of mental instability. Both the original quartet version and the arrangement edited by the composer Max Reger were published posthumously in 1903. The work was premiered in 1904 when both the original string quartet version and the orchestral version were performed.

Italian Serenade, a name by which Wolf began to refer to the piece a few years after composing it, is a supple, episodic, intricately written work, and it is very demanding to play. Many commentators attest that it is an elegant evocation of guitars and of sad and glad songs and stories that finally fade into softness.

The music is distantly related to that of one of his song settings of a Joseph Eichendorff poem. Eichendorff also wrote a short work of fiction, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Ne’er-Do-Well), in which an Italian serenade played by a small orchestra is an important element of the plot; it, too, might have influenced Wolf. The opening pizzicatos have been likened to the sound of a guitar being tuned, and the cello’s part to the voice of a young lover.

The Italian Serenade, in rondo form, proceeds quickly without, however, losing its overall languorous feel.

Wolf scored the work for a small orchestra of pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and strings.

String Quartet No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 44, No. 2 Felix Mendelssohn Born February 3, 1809, in Hamburg; died November 4, 1847, in Leipzig Felix Mendelssohn was a musical prodigy, a little boy who wrote very mature compositions. By the measure of the greatest works of his own maturity, his early works are perhaps not quite up to the level of invention of the best music of his later works, but they are usually more refined in conception and surer in execution than most of the music by the prominent adult composers of the time.

The young composer’s grandfather was Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment who was immortalized as Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, and his father was a wealthy banker. When his family learned that the boy was a genius, they spared nothing to nurture his artistic maturity. Musicales were held on alternate Sunday mornings in the Mendelssohn house in Berlin and were often attended by prominent touring performers who were visiting the Prussian capital. There was always chamber music, sometimes an orchestra, occasionally even an opera. The guests frequently performed, and, almost every time, young Felix had composed a work to be included.

In 1837 and 1838, Mendelssohn composed three string quartets that were published in 1839 as a set, Op. 44, dedicated to His Royal Highness the Crown Prince of Sweden. By this time, Mendelssohn was, of course, no longer a child prodigy but a mature artist of great distinction, admired throughout Europe for his gifts as a composer, conductor, and pianist. In March 1837, he married, and a month later, at the start of an extended honeymoon many months long, he began to work on the quartets. These quartets have been termed “neoclassical” because they show no experimental or particularly unconventional features.

This one, issued as the third of them, was begun in April, and on June 18th it became the first of the three to reach completion. It was performed in public for the first time on November 19, 1839, in Leipzig (and was repeated three weeks later) by Ferdinand David’s quartet. Mendelssohn wrote his Violin Concerto some years later for David and a group of his colleagues from the Gewandhaus (“Drapers’ Hall”) Orchestra.

The quartet is a gracious work, with especially lovely themes, organized in structures patterned after the classical models left by the great composers of a generation or two earlier: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

The first movement, Allegro assai appassionato, is a feverishly hot-blooded treatment of two fluent melodies. The extension and development of the musical ideas and the full-textured writing for the few instruments define the style as what Mendelssohn called “symphonic,” even in his chamber music.

Mendelssohn immediately states the main theme, a theme Arthur Cohn identifies as being Classicist because of its outlining the components of the home key’s tonic triad, a practice much used by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

The music is turbulent, agitated, and concentrated.

Next comes a scherzo, Allegro di molto, one of Mendelssohn’s archetypal colorful, light-footed, elfin dances. The contrasting Andante that follows could be described as a not-so-slow slow movement in which the first violin sings a long, lyrical melody, much like a song without words. The finale, Presto agitato, is a tumultuous, passionate drama in much the same spirit as the first movement. Full of energy and vitality, it includes the use of counterpoint.

String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat Major, Op. 130 Ludwig van Beethoven Born December 16, 1770, in Bonn; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna Beethoven wrote Quartet Op. 130 in 1825 and 1826 as the third in the group of three quartets (published as Opp. 127, 132, and 130, with Op. 130 published second) all dedicated to his faithful supporter, Prince Nikolaus Galitzin.

The six-movement form of this quartet has sometimes been compared to that of the old divertimento of a generation earlier, but the resemblance is purely fortuitous. No divertimento could have had a finale like the one Beethoven originally wrote for this quartet and, at the suggestion of his publisher and friends, replaced during the following year. The original is now known as the Grosse Fuge (“Great Fugue”), Op. 133, one of the most forceful movements in all of his work. In this quartet, Beethoven does follow the slow-fast alternation of movements usual in classical music, but this quartet has two extra movements (rather than the traditional four), an extra scherzo, and then an extra slow Cavatina, placed before the Allegro finale.

The spacious first movement of Op. 130 is a complex structure in which fragmentary materials from the slow introductory Adagio, ma non troppo and the quick Allegro are intimately intermingled. One of its most startling features, however, is the key Beethoven chose for the second theme, a subject that appears in one key in the exposition and another in the recapitulation; both are very remote from the home key. This choice gave an indication of how far afield Beethoven might venture in later movements.

The second movement is a short scherzo, Presto; it has a contrasting Trio. This very condensed movement with its short phrases is the antithesis of the one that precedes it. Barry Cooper explains that the well-delineated sketches Beethoven left indicate that he did not have a good idea of what would follow, except that the third movement would be slow. Not even the number of movements was settled initially. Cooper says, “The quartet was thus being created as a kind of narrative, rather than a canvas where the overall outline is clear from the start. The later movements could be molded to suit the earlier ones, but the earlier ones were in no way fashioned as preparation for what follows.”

The third, a miniature sonata movement at a calm tempo, Andante con moto ma non troppo, to which Beethoven added the indication poco scherzoso (“somewhat playful”), begins with a quote of the first two notes of the first movement, before the viola presents the main theme. The movement seems light, yet the themes are decorated with complex and elaborate accompaniments.

The fourth movement, Alla danza tedesca, Allegro assai, is a kind of German minuet or waltz. It was originally intended for the Quartet Op. 132, where the great Song of Thanksgiving replaced it. Its dance rhythms make a strong contrast to the music of the preceding movement although it, too, is a light movement, much like the dances of the divertimento.

The following Cavatina, Adagio molto espressivo, is one of the most moving slow movements in the quartet literature. The title, Cavatina, refers to a kind of slow, expressive, operatic aria. Here, the first violin is the soloist throughout, while the other instruments have an unobtrusive accompaniment to the solo line. Beethoven once said, referring perhaps to the middle section, which he described as beklemmt (“anguished” or “oppressed”), “My own music has never before made such an impression on me. Just thinking about it brings tears to my eyes.” Cooper commented, “The melody, though seemingly simple, was so skillfully created and thoroughly sketched that it is actually highly original and almost entirely unpredictable, with subtle irregularities of phrase structure that neatly contrast with the rigidity of the preceding dance rhythms. Its broad, carefully arched lines seem filled with intense longing … .”

For his original finale, Beethoven took up the thematic idea he had originally conceived for his Op. 127, transposing it and shortening it. It developed into the Grosse Fuge, perhaps conceived as a tribute to the work of Bach. After the first performance of the work, when the first five movements were successfully received, the massive finale was found to be problematic. Some rejected it as the confused ramblings of a deranged man, and others sensed that it was a masterpiece but thought it one not fitting as the final movement to this quartet.

Even though it took up and resolved ideas from earlier movements in the quartet, Beethoven became uneasy about it, and his publisher, Artaria, agreed it did not fit in scale or style. Its great weight so unbalanced the preceding movements as to threaten to spoil their success, even though two of those movements were encored. Some of the composer’s friends thought that although the public found the Fugue too difficult at first, it would come to appreciate it on repeated hearings. Others suggested that Beethoven immediately write a new closing movement for the Quartet, which he did when his publisher added to the weight of their arguments an offer to issue the Fugue as a separate composition. When it was published, it came to be called Grosse Fuge.

The new Finale, the very last music that Beethoven completed, takes up ideas from earlier movements, but it is lighter, smaller, and more optimistic than the Grosse Fuge. A bustling Allegro movement, it combines characteristics of the rondo and sonata forms. As Cooper says, “It seems at times to recall the 18th century, leading back to normality after the extraordinary profundity of the Cavatina. Yet it is of considerable size and contains many subtleties typical of Beethoven’s finales.” Its principal subject is very much in the character of a Russian dance, perhaps in honor of Galitzin.

The Viennese Schuppanzigh Quartet premiered the quartet on March 21, 1826, and introduced the new finale in December 1826. They also played the first performance of the newly revised quartet on April 22, 1827, almost a month after Beethoven died.

Grosse Fuge (“Grand Fugue”) in B-flat, Op. 133 Ludwig van Beethoven The Grosse Fuge is an extraordinary double fugue, one that was initially completely baffling to its listeners and dismissed by its contemporary critics. In fact, one reviewer writing for the newspaper Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung condemned it as “incomprehensible, like Chinese” and “a confusion of Babel,” but it had its debut in 1826, when the Schuppanzigh Quartet performed it as the finale of the B-flat quartet.

Critics and performers alike even today cannot agree on ways to describe this work, although many if not most agree that it represents a struggle. Arnold Steinhardt, who for many years was a member of the famed Guarneri quartet, called it “Armageddon ... the chaos out of which life itself evolved.” Just about everyone does concede that this gigantic and fiendishly difficult movement is also one of quartet music’s most fiercely powerful pieces, and one of the most forceful expressions in all of Beethoven’s music. This masterpiece is a magnificent exploration of fugal writing: the particularly complex form in which Beethoven cast this music is not something external, selected, and imposed upon the material. Its structure is an important part of the weighty emotional charge of the music, not just its vehicle; it is what makes the Grosse Fuge so extraordinary and so important among the incomparable masterpieces of Beethoven’s last years.

The Grosse Fuge’s intricacy and its greatness are such that the listener can hear it in several very different ways. It is an introduction followed by a long fugue, or by a series of fugues. It is a fugal theme with variations, each of which is, in turn, built as a series of variations. It is also a large-scale sonata-form movement, in which each of the principal components is a fugue. It is even a cyclical work of four movements condensed into one: introduction, Allegro, slow movement, and Finale, with each part except the first a fugue. Each of these descriptions is correct. Every listener must make of this work what he will. The following is a guide to the principal sections of the work.

To begin, there is a 30-measure Overture that introduces the main theme and some of the transformations in which it will be used later. The fugue proper starts off with its vigorous and rhythmic counter-subject in the first violin, to which the viola, playing the principal subject, seems at first to be only an accompaniment. The music slows to Meno mosso e moderato for a second fugue, and then speeds up again for the big third fugue, Allegro molto e con brio. The long closing coda begins with all the instruments playing the principal subject in octaves and in long, sustained notes.

This work is customarily called by its German name in English-speaking countries, but for no good reason. In January 1827, the ailing composer and his Viennese publisher went over the plans for it very carefully, and in May, it was issued with a title in French, as was customary at the time, Grande Fugue. Much later, other publishers rendered this name into the German Grosse Fuge. In Beethoven’s earlier years, in fact, the designation “grand,” in whatever language, generally meant little if anything more than that the work stood alone, instead

of being part of a set of three or six, gathered under a single opus number. This usage seems to have fallen out of favor for a while, but it reappeared toward the end of Beethoven’s career with the Grand Sonata, Op. 106, published in 1819, and the Grand Quartets, Op. 127 and Op. 131, published in the 1820s, as well as this Fugue.

— Program notes © Susan Halpern, 2023

BALDOURET QUARTET The Balourdet Quartet, based in Boston, Mass., is currently in residence at the New England Conservatory’s Professional String Quartet Program. The quartet received the Grand Prize at the 2021 Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition, as well as prizes at the Banff, Premio Paolo Borciani, and Carl Nielsen international competitions. They were also awarded the Gold Medal at the 2020 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and the 2021 Chamber Music in Yellow Springs Competition.

Highlights of the Balourdet’s 2022-23 season include appearances at Chamber Music Detroit; the Grand Piano Series in Naples, Fla.; New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall; Merkin Hall; and Wigmore Hall. Summer 2022 also saw the Balourdet performing at festivals including Bravo! Vail, Music Mountain, and Strings Music Festival. Additionally this season, the quartet is thrilled to premiere a new commissioned work by celebrated composer Karim Al-Zand, made possible through Chamber Music America’s Classical Commissioning Grant.

The Balourdet has performed at festivals and series including the Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, La Jolla Music Society Summerfest, the Dame Myra Hess Concerts, Montgomery Chamber Music, Santa Fe Pro Musica, and the Schneider Concert Series. Committed to sharing their musical values with the next generation, the quartet has given master classes and coachings at the New England Conservatory Preparatory Department, Fischoff Chamber Music Academy, Upper Valley Chamber Music, Wright State University, as well as a residency teaching and performing at the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival.

The Balourdet Quartet was formed in 2018 at Rice University in Houston, Texas, under the tutelage of James Dunham, Norman Fischer, and Cho-Liang Lin. It currently works primarily with Paul Katz at the New England Conservatory, as well as Miriam Fried and members of the Cleveland and Borromeo Quartets. The quartet takes its name from Antoine Balourdet, chef extraordinaire at the Hotel St. Bernard and beloved member of the Taos School of Music community.