brentano string quartet oneppo chamber music series David Shifrin, Artistic Director September 29, 2015 • Morse Recital Hall
Robert Blocker, Dean
Oneppo Chamber Music Series
brentano string quartet Tuesday, September 29, 2015 • 7:30 pm • Morse Recital Hall David Shifrin, Artistic Director mark steinberg, violin • serena canin, violin misha amory, viola • nina lee, cello Johann Sebastian Bach 1685–1750
Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080 Contrapunctus I Contrapunctus V Contrapunctus III Contrapuntus IX
Benjamin Britten 1913–1976
String Quartet No. 3, Op. 94 I. Duets: With Moderate Movement II. Ostinato: Very Fast III. Solo: Very Calm IV. Burlesque: Fast — con fuoco V. Recitative and Passacaglia (La serenissima) intermission
Bach
Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080 Contrapunctus IV Contrapunctus VI Contrapunctus XI
Felix Mendelssohn 1809–1847
String Quartet No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 12 I. Adagio non troppo — Allegro non tardante II. Canzonetta: Allegretto III. Andante espressivo IV. Molto allegro e vivace
As a courtesy to the performers and audience, silence electronic devices. Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.
Brentano String Quartet
Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim. “Passionate, uninhibited and spellbinding,” raves the London Independent; the New York Times extols its “luxuriously warm sound [and] yearning lyricism”; the Philadelphia Inquirer praises its “seemingly infallible instincts for finding the center of gravity in every phrase and musical gesture”; and the Times (London) opines, “the Brentanos are a magnificent string quartet… This was wonderful, selfless music-making.” Beginning in July, 2014, the Brentano Quartet succeeds the Tokyo Quartet as Artists in Residence at Yale University, departing from their 14-year residency at Princeton University. The quartet also currently serves as the collaborative ensemble for the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. In recent seasons, the Quartet has traveled widely, appearing all over the United States and Canada, in Europe, Japan, and Australia. It has performed in the world’s most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York; the Library of Congress in Washington; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the Konzerthaus in Vienna; Suntory Hall in Tokyo; and the Sydney Opera House. The Quartet has participated in summer festivals such as Aspen, the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, the Edinburgh Festival, the Kuhmo Festival in Finland, the Taos School of Music, and the Caramoor Festival. In 2012, the Brentano String Quartet provided the central music (Beethoven Opus 131) for the critically-acclaimed independent film A Late Quartet. The feature film, directed by Yaron Zilberman and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Christopher Walken and Mark Ivanir, was screened in major cities throughout North America, including Toronto, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. In addition to performing the entire two-century range of the standard quartet repertoire, the Brentano Quartet has a strong interest in both very old and very new music. It has performed many musical works pre-dating the string quartet as a medium, among them madrigals of Gesualdo, fantasias of Purcell, and secular vocal works of Josquin. Also, the quartet has worked closely with some of the most important composers of our time, among them Elliott Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Chou Wenchung, Steven Mackey, Bruce Adolphe, and György Kurtág. The Quartet has commissioned works from Wuorinen, Adolphe, Mackey, David Horne, and Gabriela Frank.
Brentano String Quartet
Among the Quartet’s latest collaborations with contemporary composers is a new work by Steven Mackey, One Red Rose, which was commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Yellow Barn, and the Nasher Center to commemorate the 50 th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Other recent commissions include a piano quintet by Vijay Iyer (a graduate of Yale College), a work by Eric Moe which had its premiere in September 2012 (with Christine Brandes, soprano), and a new viola quintet by Felipe Lara (performed with violist Hsin-Yun Huang). The quartet has been privileged to collaborate with such artists as soprano Jessye Norman, pianist Richard Goode, and pianist Mitsuko Uchida. The Quartet enjoys an especially close relationship with Ms. Uchida, appearing with her on stages in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In spring 2013, the second of three recordings featuring the late Beethoven Quartets was released on Aeon Records. Previous recordings include a disc of Mozart (also on Aeon), and the Opus 71 quartets of Haydn. In the area of newer music, the quartet has released a disc of the music of Steven Mackey on Albany Records, and has also recorded the music of Bruce Adolphe, Chou Wen-chung and Charles Wuorinen. Within a few years of its formation, the quartet garnered the first Cleveland Quartet Award and the Naumburg Chamber Music Award. In 1998, cellist Nina Lee joined the quartet, succeeding founding member Michael Kannen. 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. » www.brentanoquartet.com The Brentano String Quartet records for aeon (distributed by Allegro Media Group).
Notes on the Program
johann sebastian bach Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080 With the Art of Fugue, a veritable Bible of fugal techniques and expression, Bach produced a monumental edifice. (The idea of fugue is that of a musical form which deals with a number of voices all discoursing on shared thematic material, a “subject,” in much the same way debates focus on a subject.) A compilation of fugues based on a single subject (and its variations), the Art of Fugue seems to be an exhaustive study of the possibilities of the form, a composer testing his mettle, expanding his horizons. It has long been debated whether the work is in fact a study, theoretical or conceptual, never meant to be performed. Were it meant to be performed there is much speculation on what instrumentation was intended; is it a keyboard work, a work for a consort of like instruments, for a broken consort, a vocal group? The piece is written in “open score” — on four staves, one per part, with no other indications. There is much room for discussion, for scholarly musings and musicological excavation. What is clear to us is that this is a golden treasure trove of riveting musical rhetoric, elevated, intricately woven round-table discussions which make for an engaging concert experience. It is music for which we have a deep love and which we feel we can bring to life effectively through the medium of the string quartet. The Art of Fugue as a whole forms a sort of treatise comprising a set of discussions related to a common theme. Imagine hosting a series of fascinating evenings devoted to discoursing on politics, or a specific political problem, dealing with one main insight on each such evening. In much the
same way as such a series of evening sessions would, we find that this set of fugues exhibits a certain shared “aboutness,” rooted in descent from a common fugue subject. Sometimes other, secondary subjects are brought in to comment on and shed light on the first (such as in Contrapunctus XI, which has two additional subjects), or a theme is turned upside down to be viewed from a new angle (Contrapuncti IV, VI and XI), or it is stated rather more slowly or quickly in order to lend it a different weight (Contrapunctus VII). Parts support or challenge one another. All these are familiar concepts to anyone who has been engaged in fruitful debate, and make for stimulating repartee. – Mark Steinberg benjamin britten String Quartet No. 3, Op. 94 Benjamin Britten’s Third String Quartet, written in autumn 1975, is among the very last works he completed. Decades had passed since his first two quartets, written in the early 1940s, just before the opera Peter Grimes catapulted him to international fame. After that event, Britten was first and foremost a composer of vocal works, especially opera and large-scale choral pieces; in fact, after Grimes nearly every purely instrumental composition he wrote was at the urging of one performer or another (for example, the five cello works written in the 1960s, for which we have Mstislav Rostropovich to thank). In the case of the Third Quartet, it was the Amadeus Quartet who approached the composer, being well acquainted with him from
Notes on the Program
his festival in Aldeburgh. String quartet writing could not be further from the operatic genre for which Britten is best known; one wonders how he felt as he re-engaged with this tightly-wrapped, economical medium, which he had not used for thirty years. The resulting work is ephemeral, fantastical, delicate, and characterful, a five-movement piece that the composer briefly considered entitling Divertimento for its many colors and contrasts.
used to drive the music onward. Disconcertingly, total silences interrupt this forward momentum from time to time. In the middle of the movement, a more lyrical section intervenes (with the ostinato still chugging quietly behind the scenes), ultimately winding up in a blissed-out B major world. The more robust music from the opening returns for a short time, reaches a furious climax, and then ultimately fizzles; the final bars are a kind of musical shrug.
The first movement, “Duets,” is in a way the most abstract of the five. As the title suggests, it is an exploration of how two voices can be paired. At the opening we hear not so much a duet as a double helix; the two voices are closely twinned, murmuring, nudging each other into gentle, dancelike gestures. Later the idea of a duet becomes more adversarial, with a shift from the easy, triple rhythms of the opening to a rougher, battering duple rhythm. This ultimately melts away to a return of the opening idea, followed yet later by a coda section of great intimacy, marked “very quiet,” where the opening twinned idea is now played between strummed and bowed chords. The movement evaporates with an ethereal chord which is intoned a few times between fragments of the opening idea — a duet of materials, so to speak — with the ethereal chord coming last and softest.
The third movement features the first violin as its “Solo.” The writing here is spare, and we feel as if we are in a very high place, with thin air and a stark landscape. The lone violin line, moving trancelike through wide intervals, is accompanied mostly by only one other voice at a time, ascending slowly up an alpine slope. In the middle, this suspended texture gives way abruptly to a sudden outburst of bright, hard birdsong, ringed around with major-key triads; it is as if the composer is refracting his French contemporary Olivier Messiaen and refracting him through a Brittenesque prism.
The second movement, “Ostinato,” evokes a feeling of helpless mania. Writing in a kind of C major, Britten uses the Lydian mode, where one of the scale degrees is raised a half step, with a slightly giddy effect. The idea of an ostinato, where a musical pattern is repeated over and over in the background, here takes the shape of a rising, jagged, quarter-note figure, that is
With the fourth movement, a brief “Burlesque,” we are rudely shoved back into the world of parodic entertainment, a violenttextured scene of buffoonery. The main section is full of off-balance, rhythmic jokes, but the atmosphere is rough and almost hostile. This melts away to a middle section of stilted delicacy, a music box on the verge of breaking. After a frozen moment, the main section re-erupts, this time larger than life, muscled and euphoric to the end. The fifth movement is entitled “La Serenissima,” a reference to Venice. The movement’s ties to this city are twofold. First, the opening section of the movement,
Notes on the Program
a disembodied, swaying texture punctuated by free solos for each instrument, quotes liberally from Britten’s own last opera, Death in Venice. Secondly, Britten was actually staying in Venice when he wrote this movement, and the walking bassline that underpins the main passacaglia section is based on chiming bells that Britten could hear from his hotel room. The effect of this main section is mesmerizing: a slow, stepwise melody, played in syncopation against the patient walking bass, evokes a state of deep meditation and sadness. At the same time, the key of E major seems to bestow a radiance on this sunken state. Gradually, as the theme passes to each of the four instruments, the texture diversifies, awakens, and reaches a swirling, arpeggiated climax. As the music subsides into a quieter texture, the first violin introduces a second theme which is distinguished by an upward sweep to a glowing harmonic; this is passed to the inner voices for a time, and finally the old theme reappears one more time. This time around, it seems not to have the strength to complete even one full cycle, coming to rest on a sustained note while gentle plucked notes ascend into the ether; the passacaglia is breaking down. Finally the bassline makes one last attempt, and the music freezes on an unresolved, forte chord, which Britten called “a question.” If this movement depicts an old man confronting death, there is beauty and resignation, but also uncertainty: a life does not close neatly like a book in its two hard covers. – Misha Amory
felix mendelssohn String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 12 Felix Mendelssohn wrote his earliest chamber music as a teenager — three piano quartets, the string octet, the first viola quintet, and his first two string quartets — and it is the greatest teenaged chamber music ever written. His Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 12, is his first published quartet, and is extraordinary for its dramatic scope. This is the work of a composer with staged, even operatic spectacle on his mind, rather than instrumental concert music. It is customary to view Mendelssohn as the “classicist” of his generation, the one who observed the forms and structures and wrote exquisite, inspired music within those bounds. However, in this quartet (and its companion, Opus 13), there is a sense of pushing the envelope in regard to form and expression. One hears this most obviously in the frequent bursts of recitative in the first violin part — in the first, third, and fourth movements — where it steps outside the steady pulse of the proceedings and makes a more personal, solitary utterance. Dramatic in a different way, but just as affecting, is the sighing gesture that opens the piece, a clear paraphrase of the opening to Beethoven’s “Harp” Quartet. Beethoven had died only a year or two before, and one can hear in Mendelssohn’s music a valediction, a farewell, to the older composer. Further echoes of Beethoven’s quartet can be heard throughout this first movement, but it does not share the strong, brilliant sensibility of the “Harp”; in Mendelssohn’s music, a gentle yet ardent muse is at work, sometimes fiery but never muscular.
Notes on the Program
Later in the first movement, a brooding, dark melody appears in the second violin. Mendelssohn expressly delays the introduction of this idea until the development section, a later-than-customary point to introduce new material, subverting again our expectations of how a concert piece should progress: the opera is before us once more, and an ominous character has appeared out of the blue onstage. This character will continue to stalk the music, appearing near the end of the first movement and again in the finale, a shadow hovering at the edge of consciousness. Possibly the most famous work in the young composer’s output is his Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an enraptured response to the Shakespeare comedy which Mendelssohn had read in Schlegel’s translation. The second movement of this quartet could well have been written under the spell of the same play: hushed throughout, it has a tiptoeing, charmed quality replete with short quick bowstrokes and plucked strings. The elfin, poised feeling of the minor-key main section contrasts with the quicksilver flutter of the major-key Trio section, the prancing fairies versus the winged ones. With the third movement we are back in the operatic realm, where the first violin sings an intimate and fervent aria. Despite its strict formal underpinnings, this movement unfolds almost as a stream of consciousness; despite its brevity, it covers an enormous emotional range. There is the hushed but deeply felt opening; the second phrase, more florid and leading to a state of much greater agitation; a brief recitative that brings us momentarily back to the state of
the opening; and then the same cycle, played out on a larger, more intense scale. After the second, more intense recitative, there is a tender, brief coda and a momentary, cadential calm. Barely have we exhaled when the calm is shattered by the two opening chords of the Finale. This final movement is perhaps the most arresting example of how Mendelssohn departs from the received formats for an instrumental chamber work. First of all, it opens not in the home key of E-flat major but rather in C minor. This lends an enormous dramatic charge to the music, and is a significant innovation; although Beethoven and Schubert had tried it on as a brief introductory gesture, Mendelssohn in this quartet chooses to extend the foreign key center through almost the entire movement, before relenting and returning to E-flat at last in the coda. The mood, as if in reaction, is turbulent, unsettled, even anguished at times. About midway through the movement, old melodies from the first movement start to be heard, and in the coda, they take over completely, so that we seem to have returned, nostalgically, to that earlier, gentler world. In doing this, Mendelssohn is treating us to an early example of a cyclical form, an ultra-Romantic conceit that anticipates Wagner and his imitators, but which here evokes the simple, beautiful feeling of being welcomed back into a loving childhood home. – Misha Amory
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