Program: Brentano String Quartet

W I S C O N S I N U N I O N T H E AT E R

IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

BRENTANO STRING QUARTET MARK STEINBERG, VIOLIN | SERENA CANIN, VIOLIN MISHA AMORY, VIOLA | NINA LEE, CELLO

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2022 | 7:30 PM SHANNON HALL AT MEMORIAL UNION

WISCONSIN UNION THEATER

2021-2022 SEASON George Hinchliffe’s Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

Black Arts Matter Festival

Renée Fleming

Pacho Flores with UWSO

THE BRENTANO STRING QUARTET Mark Steinberg, Violin | Serena Canin, Violin Misha Amory, Viola | Nina Lee, Cello

Franz Josef Haydn (1732–1809)

String Quartet in D Major, Op. 71, No. 2 (1793) Adagio—Allegro Adagio cantabile Menuetto Finale

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) /

ContraDictions (2002)

Bruce Adolphe (b. 1955)

Johann Sebastian Bach /

’Lude (2002)

Steve Mackey (b. 1956)

INTERMISSION Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

String Quartet in G Major, Op. 161, D. 887 (1826) Allegro molto moderato Andante un poco moto Scherzo: Allegro vivace Allegro assai

THE PROGRAM Franz Josef Haydn (1732–1809) String Quartet in D Major, Op. 71, No. 2

About the Composer Although commonly known as the “father of the symphony,” Franz Josef Haydn almost single-handedly reared the string quartet into the beloved genre it is today. Composing 68 full-fledged quartets, he based his approach on his own personal and professional circumstances, satisfying his changing audiences and patrons; it was only inadvertently that he also set the course for what the string quartet would become over the next century. Haydn began his career as a court musician for nobility, first working as a freelancer before landing his major position as Kapellmeister of the Esterházy court in 1761. As compositions for court entertainment, his earliest string quartets needed to please his noble patrons by not only being enjoyable to listen to, but also providing the opportunity for the other court musicians on the payroll to show off. As such, Haydn’s early compositional style in his string quartets was less about featuring a cohesive ensemble and more about highlighting a group of individual soloists.

Over the course of Haydn’s career, the old court system of noble princes and dukes slowly gave way to modern market-based economies, establishing nascent middle classes across Europe who increasingly understood themselves as “the public.” And new musical conventions emerged to match them, including the public concert we know today. Haydn—who is better understood as a pragmatic and canny opportunist than a skillful businessman—pursued this emerging market of the music-loving public by striking deals with Prince Esterházy to travel for short trips to London and other major cities where he could perform and sell his music freely. (Technically, Esterházy owned all of the music Hadyn produced while he was a musician in his court, but he was more lenient with the composer outside of his realm.) Only after the death of the prince in 1790 was Hadyn fully free to pursue his own musical career, which brought him back to the English capital, which is where he composed his famous London symphonies, as well as his set of six string quartets Op. 71 and 74. For the public audience, Haydn developed his “public” style, which had simplified cohesive textures instead of soloistic groupings, extroverted and memorable melodies, and enough surprising and witty moments to charm a large group of people.

About the Work The first movement of the String Quartet in D Major captures Haydn’s public style with his typical slow introduction (which Beethoven, his student, would imitate) before engaging in an extroverted and exuberant sonata Allegro movement. The momentary interjections of long-held notes, as well as the abrupt ending, add to the overall fun of the movement, giving his public audience exactly what it wanted.

The Adagio cantabile movement shows a different side of Haydn’s public style by adopting conventions of the most successful musical genre of the day: the opera.

Throughout the movement, the first violin imitates a soprano voice in a solo aria with a delicate melody that the composer elaborated on in the improvisational style of opera singers of the day. With the Menuetto and Trio, Haydn offers a relaxed dance movement that places a strong emphasis on beat one. At the tail end of the second strain of the Menuetto, he subverts the lilting triple meter with a mildly disorienting shift to beat three, alerting the return of the opening phrase. The melody slows down during the Trio, becoming another aria-like moment for the first violin.

It is easy to look at the final Allegretto movement of the String Quartet in D Major as a bit of a formal oddity. It consists of a simplified sonata structure in A-B-A form, followed by a lengthy and exciting coda marked Allegro. Yet such formal analysis belies Haydn’s awareness of the new public audience and its appetite for the symphonic. The opening Allegretto establishes a light 6/8 melody that also features moments of metric disorientation to keep the audience attentive, before proceeding to the contrasting B section, which is experimental and modulating. A quick return of the A section provides the bare bones of formal closure for an audience perhaps growing weary, in response to which Haydn ends by giving the people what they want: a rousing finale that barrels to the end with virtuosity and excitement, just like in his symphonies of the day. Although considered the pinnacle of chamber music today and often associated with intimate salon settings, the string quartet in the hands of Haydn in the 1790s was anything but subdued. Instead, he transformed the genre from its insular courtly origins to become a vehicle for his most crowdpleasing public style.

Bruce Adolphe (b. 1955) ContraDictions

Steve Mackey (b. 1956) ’Lude

About the Bach Perspectives Project In 2002, the Brentano String Quartet embarked on an ambitious project: It commissioned 10 living composers to write musical commentaries of selections from Johann Sebastian Bach’s encyclopedic collection The Art of the Fugue. In this work, Bach explored a main thematic subject through 13 numbered fugues (each called “contrapunctus,” meaning counterpoint) of increasing complexity.

He then proceeded to write four strict canons, a work in which one voice follows a leading voice according to a strict rule of imitation without changing any pitches, thus making it a difficult task to compose without wrecking the harmony with uncontrolled and unresolved dissonances. The final fugue, Contrapunctus XIV (in which he also spells his name), remained unfinished. From the final decade of Bach’s life, the work stands as an artistic and intellectual accomplishment unmatched in the world of music since. Bruce Adolphe and Steve Mackey were thus given the not enviable task to write works for string quartet that could accompany selections from The Art of the Fugue. Yet each composer took his own unique approach to the historical masterpieces.

About ContraDictions Bruce Adolphe’s characteristically intellectual style and literally cerebral interests in the human mind would seem a natural fit for exploring Bach’s towering masterpiece.

And true to form, Adolphe’s approach was simultaneously exhaustive and inspired.

In his own words: “Like an actor preparing to play the part of a great historical figure, I combed carefully through “The Art of the Fugue” looking for aspects of myself, for something that might connect my world to Bach’s in a sonically tangible way. Playing through Contrapunctus No. 2, I found that certain passing dissonances, if put on ‘pause,’ so to speak, sounded like harmonies I have used as building blocks in my music.

Encouraged by this small discovery, I used the phrases of Bach as a ‘table of contents’ to open my piece, allowing the listener to hear exactly how the connections were made.”

The resulting five-minute work draws on Bach’s propulsive dotted rhythms from Contrapunctus II to move from one moment lifted from the 18th-century composer to the next. When Adolphe finds a harmony resembling his own 21st-century language, he uses it to launch into an array of textures and timbres, all while Bach’s main theme comes and goes. The expansive middle section of the work brings this

idea to its greatest clarity as the main theme is performed in one voice, while the other instruments swirl onward, or in Adolphe’s words, the main theme “flaps freely in the winds of inspiration.”

About ’Lude If Adolphe took Bach’s harmony (and specifically the dissonances) from Contrapunctus II as his launching point, Steve Mackey instead focused on Bach’s melodic lines, aiming to bring them into his own compositional world. He chose Contrapunctus XI, likely because this triple fugue (meaning there are three subjects that are each introduced individually) offered ample melodies to lift. Mackey writes: “I’ve always been interested in exploring the edges that delineate contrast and by interspersing ’Lude around and inside Contrapunctus XI had four edges to work with: As a pre-Lude, my music recedes gently and allows Contrapunctus XI to emerge. As an inter-Lude, I latched on to a particularly obsessive patch of Contrapunctus XI and extended the obsession until it reached escape velocity and found its way back to ’Lude. The most challenging transition for me was returning from ’Lude back to Bach. It is quite a drawn-out process culminating in what I hope is a gentle little bump as the tempo of ’Lude downshifts to the tempo of C.P. XI; (The two tempi stand in a 9:8 ratio). After the Bach ends, the post-Lude dances off into the distance.”

The contrasting stylistic languages of the 21st century with Bach’s 18th-century conventions create exactly the kind delineation Mackey described. The piece opens with the instruments tossing Bach’s famous motif, in which he spells his name using the German system note names (where “B” is B-flat and “H” is B-natural). Almost like an incantation, the Bach motif sets off a metrically destabilized moment that seems to transport us back in time, at which point Mackey quotes the opening subjects of Contrapunctus XI directly. The juxtaposition of the atmospheric, avantgarde 21st-century style and the tonal clarity of the 18th century continue in the piece to mark out Mackey’s formal sections. In the inter-Lude, the instruments pick out (and sometimes pluck out) motifs from the three subjects, as well as elaborations on the “Bach” motif, against a backdrop of changing timbral effects, as though the musical materials come in and out of one’s stream of consciousness, with vague and murky sounds followed by moments of cogency that explore his three-note repeating subject. Mackey leads to a final tonal cadence that would signify closure in an 18th-century work. Yet instead, he ends with a return to the introduction, the time warp theme, and the Bach motif incantation, ending on an unresolved dissonance without resolution, yet firmly set in our ambiguous 21st-century world.

Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

String Quartet in G Major, Op. 161, D. 887

About the Composer The last of his string quartets, Schubert’s String Quartet in G Major, D. 887, from 1826, places the composer securely at the center of the Romantic style that Beethoven first pioneered. Yet like Beethoven and despite his short life, Schubert too had his own journey into Romanticism and away from the formal clarity and reserve of Viennese Classicism. Like all composers of the time (and for the rest of the century, for that matter), Schubert was often compared to Beethoven and found wanting: Whereas Beethoven’s style was brash and unhindered, Schubert by and large remained more restrained and more transparent—that is, Classical—in his approach to form, and his last string quartet continues to bare these hallmarks.

What made Schubert perhaps more Romantic than even Beethoven, however, was his immaculate and subtle harmonic language. If Schubert’s clarity of form consistently provides neat and clear structures to ground the listener in the music’s unfolding plot, his use of harmonic modulations to slide between distantly related major and minor keys—a violation the logical rationalism of Classical style—shows him to be a master of creating atmosphere. For many listeners, his harmonic shifts translated to changing moods of introversion and extroversion, pensive subjectivity contrasted with logical objectivity. Indeed, if Haydn—as heard earlier on this evening’s program—put the string quartet to new public display by highlighting charm and a people-friendly manner, then Schubert intervened with a healthy dose of Romantic interiority and withdrawn emotional depth. While few composers after him could truly imitate these effects with Schubert’s skill, the everexpanding harmonic complexity that would define 19th-century Romantic music largely developed by way of later composers looking back to Schubert and trying to emulate his compelling emotionalism.

About the Work In the mighty first movement, Schubert explores two musical dualities, a harmonic one that freely mixes major and minor, and a rhythmic one that blends and contrasts duple and triple meters. The effect he achieves is a somewhat open-ended musical world where melodies and phrases slide freely between an extroversion and interiority, mystery and forthrightness. The movement opens with declarative dotted rhythms against atmospheric tremolos, reminiscent of the start of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony from only two years earlier. Yet this will give way to a second theme in E minor that is a light country dance in 6/8, simple and naïve, which becomes the source of a miniature set of variations.

The second movement contrasts a longing and tuneful first theme in E minor (introduced by the cello) with a distraught, fragmented, and torturous second theme, giving the impression of unfulfilled desire and frustration throughout the

movement. Only at the end is the music at its most hopeful, when the opening cello theme returns now in G major, providing some fleeting fulfillment and illustrating the glorious moments created through sophisticated contrasts of major and minor keys for which Schubert is known.

After the drama of the first two movements, the Scherzo (really a minuet and trio) provides a much-needed reprieve. With a quick tempo, the melody is light and nimble, and reaffirms the ideals of clarity and balance that marked Viennese Classicism in contrast to the epic Romanticism heard so far. But this is no conservative throwback; the minuet lives right on the edge of emotional reserve, with under-the-surface tumult ready to break free at any moment. The interloping trio only stifles these emotions further as the waltzing melody suggests extroverted social decorum.

The final Allegro assai picks up the pace from the Scherzo, featuring nearly continuous triplets that propel the movement forward the entire time. The music, always pushing forward with few pauses for contemplation, touches on an array of transient moods and harmonies. The arrival of the first tuneful melody, introduced by the second violin and repeated by the cello, more than halfway through proves to be nothing but a fake-out on the way—another fleeting moment rather than a longed-for expansive new theme—as the music charges forward to an abrupt and startling conclusion.

—Eric Lubarsky

BRENTANO STRING QUARTET Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim. The quartet has been called “passionate, uninhibited, and spellbinding” by the London Independent, and The New York Times extols its “luxuriously warm sound [and] yearning lyricism.”

Within a few years of its formation, the quartet garnered the first Cleveland Quartet Award and the Naumburg Chamber Music Award, and was also honored in the UK with the Royal Philharmonic Award for Most Outstanding Debut. Since then, the quartet has concertized widely, performing in the world’s most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall in New York; the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the Konzerthaus in Vienna; Suntory Hall in Tokyo; and the Sydney Opera House.

In addition to performing the entire two-century range of the standard quartet repertoire, the Brentano Quartet maintains a strong interest in contemporary music, and has commissioned many new works. Their latest project, a monodrama for quartet and voice called “Dido Reimagined,” was composed by Pulitzer-winning composer Melinda Wagner and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, and will premiere in spring 2022 with soprano Dawn Upshaw. Other recent commissions include the composers Matthew Aucoin, Lei Liang, Vijay Iyer, and James MacMillan, as well as a cello quintet by Steve Mackey (with cellist Wilhelmina Smith).

The Brentano Quartet has worked closely with other important composers of our time, among them Elliott Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Chou Wen-chung, Bruce Adolphe, and György Kurtág. The quartet has also been privileged to collaborate with such artists as soprano Jessye Norman, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, and pianists Richard Goode, Jonathan Biss, and Mitsuko Uchida. The Quartet has recorded works by Mozart and Schubert for Azica Records, and all of Beethoven’s late quartets for the Aeon label. In 2012, they provided the central music (Beethoven’s Opus 131) for the critically acclaimed independent film A Late Quartet.

Since 2014, the Brentano Quartet has served as Artists-in-Residence at the Yale School of Music. They were formerly the Ensemble-in-Residence at Princeton University, and were twice invited to be the collaborative ensemble for the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

The Quartet is named for Antonie Brentano, whom many scholars consider to be Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved,” the intended recipient of his famous love confession.

This performance is made possible by the David and Kato Perlman Chamber Music Fund.

SUPPORT FOR THE 2021–2022 CONCERT SERIES PROVIDED IN PART BY George Elder Fund for the Union Theater Dr. Linda I. Garrity Living Legends Endowment Fund Robert and Linda Graebner Jean C. Hodgin Fund Bill and Char Johnson Classical Music Series Fund Barbara and Frank Manley Cultural Arts Fund Mead Witter School of Music Stephen Morton David and Kato Perlman Chamber Music Fund Marie B. Pulvermacher Wisconsin Union Theater Fund Fan Taylor Fund Douglas and Elisabeth B. Weaver Fund for Performing Arts Wisconsin Union Theater Endowment

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COMING SOON! SPRING 2022 PACHO FLORES WITH UWSO Saturday, March 5 | 7:30 PM Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall at Hamel Music Center

BLACK ARTS MATTER FESTIVAL March 23–26 Memorial Union

GEORGE HINCHLIFFE’S UKULELE ORCHESTRA OF GREAT BRITAIN Thursday, March 31 | 7:30 PM Shannon Hall at Memorial Union

RENÉE FLEMING Music and the Mind Thursday, April 28 | 7 PM Shannon Hall at Memorial Union

Studio Class Friday, April 29 | 4 PM Collins Recital Hall at Hamel Music Center

Recital Saturday, April 30 | 7 PM Shannon Hall at Memorial Union

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