Dover String Quartet, Nov 17

Dover String Quartet oneppo chamber music series David Shifrin, Artistic Director November 17, 2015 • Morse Recital Hall

Robert Blocker, Dean

Oneppo Chamber Music Series

Dover String Quartet Tuesday, November 17, 2015 • 7:30 pm • Morse Recital Hall David Shifrin, Artistic Director

joel link, violin • bryan lee, violin milena pajaro-van de stadt, viola camden shaw, cello Antonín Dvořák 1841–1904

String Quartet No. 12 in F major, Op. 96, “American” I. Allegro ma non troppo II. Lento III. Molto vivace IV. Finale: vivace ma non troppo

Alban Berg 1885–1935

String Quartet, Op. 3 I. Langsam II. Mäßige viertel intermission

Franz Schubert 1797–1828

String Quintet in C major, Op. 163 I. Allegro ma non troppo II. Adagio III. Scherzo – Trio IV. Molto allegro e vivace Peter Wiley, cello

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.

Dover String Quartet

The Dover Quartet catapulted to international stardom following a stunning sweep of the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition, becoming one of the most in-demand ensembles in the world.

The Philadelphia Inquirer lauded the Quartet’s “sound so distinctive as to be identified within mere minutes,” and the Washington Post raved that the quartet “should be on must-hear lists… a triumph.”

The 2015–16 season features more than 100 concerts around the world, including the Dover Quartet’s debuts at Carnegie Hall, the Lucerne Festival, and Yale University, and on Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series. Beginning in 2015–16, the Dover becomes the Faculty Quartet-in-Residence at Northwestern University, and will perform four concerts at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., two of them featuring a new work written for the quartet by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw (a graduate of the Yale School of Music). They will undertake three tours of Europe and their debut tour of Israel, and will perform for many of the most important sponsors in the United States.

During the 2014–15 season, the Dover Quartet performed a similarly rigorous schedule, with concerts at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C, Schneider Concerts in New York City, and the Wigmore Hall in London, and were re-engaged for return appearances throughout the United States, Canada, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Great Britain.

During the 2015–16 season and subsequent summer, the quartet will participate in week-long residencies for Chamber Music Northwest, the Phoenix Chamber Music Festival, the Santa Fe Chamber Music

Festival, and Artosphere. The quartet’s collaborations include those with the pianists Anne-Marie McDermott, MarcAndré Hamelin, and Jon Kimura Parker; the violists Roberto Díaz, Michael Tree, and Cynthia Phelps; the bassist Avi Avital; and the Pacifica Quartet.

The Dover Quartet won not only the Grand Prize but all three Special Prizes at the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition, and also won top prizes at the Fischoff Competition and the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition.

The Dover has taken part in festivals such as Chamber Music Northwest, Music at Menlo, Artosphere, La Jolla SummerFest, and Bravo! Vail. During the 2013–14 season, the Quartet was named the Ernst Stiefel String Quartet-in-Residence at the Caramoor Festival. Additionally, members of the Quartet have appeared as soloists with some of the world’s finest orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Tokyo Philharmonic.

The Dover Quartet draws from the musical lineage of the Cleveland, Vermeer, and Guarneri Quartets, having studied at the Curtis Institute and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, where they were in residence from 2011 to 2013. In the 2013–14 season, the Quartet became the first-ever Quartet-in-Residence for the Curtis Institute of Music, and has been mentored extensively by Shmuel Ashkenasi, James Dunham, Norman Fischer, Kenneth Goldsmith, Joseph Silverstein, Arnold Steinhardt, Michael Tree, and Peter Wiley.

The quartet is dedicated to sharing its music with underserved communities and is an active member of Music for Food, an initiative to help musicians fight hunger in their home communities.

Artist Profile

Peter Wiley, cello Celebrated for his “accurate intonation and warmth of tone” (New York Times), Grammynominated cellist Peter Wiley attended the Curtis Institute at just 13 years of age, under the tutelage of David Soyer. He continued his precocious accomplishments with his appointment as principal cellist of the Cincinnati Symphony at age 20, after one year in the Pittsburgh Symphony. He made his concerto debut at Carnegie Hall in 1986 with the New York String Orchestra conducted by Alexander Schneider. As a recitalist he has appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall.

A member of the Beaux Arts Trio from 1987 to 1998, Mr. Wiley succeeded his teacher, David Soyer, as cellist of the Guarneri String Quartet from 2001 to 2009. He is also a member of the piano quartet Opus One, with Ida Kavafian, Steven Tenenbom and AnneMarie McDermott. Mr. Wiley has enjoyed a long-term association with the Marlboro Music Festival and is currently on the faculties of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, the University of Maryland, and the Curtis Institute of Music.

Notes on the Program

antonín dvoŘák String Quartet No. 12 in F major, Op. 96, “American” Historians have often classified Dvořák as a “nationalist composer,” drawing inspiration from and espousing the folk tradition of his native Bohemia (the modern-day Czech Republic). But the so-called “American” Quartet shows a composer whose interest in national music is unbound by personal affiliation. Dvořák wrote the String Quartet in F major in the summer of 1883 while vacationing in Iowa, just months after completing and hearing the New York Philharmonic premier his Ninth Symphony, “From the New World.” From 1882 to 1885, Dvořák had taken residence in New York as director of the new National Conservatory, a short-lived project by philanthropist Jeannette Meyer Thurber to create an institutional home for a “national musical spirit.” Dvořák immersed himself in this project, publishing a series of articles on the state of American music, and advocating for an American musical identity built on the traditions of Native and African American song. His promotion of these distinctly American styles found a diluted but significant place in his music, with pentatonic tunes and ostinati resembling Native American rhythmic structures.

In the F major quartet, Dvořák (thankfully) does not attempt an ethnomusicological catalogue of “American” themes, but rather, takes liberal inspiration from the melodic and rhythmic qualities of this music to craft a refreshing textural and melodic sound world. Throughout the three movements of this approximately 25-minute composition, harmonic beds of trills, tremolos, and pulsations support an ever-present sense

of melodic flow. This music is rooted in the polyphonic tradition of classic music, to be sure, but is equally imbued with the gentle tunefulness of a monophonic folk song. alban berg String Quartet, Op. 3 Alban Berg wrote the Op. 3 String Quartet in 1910, two years after Schoenberg wrote his freely atonal Second String Quartet.

Berg began studying composition with Schoenberg in 1904, and adopted many of his aesthetic and formal preferences during those years. One of these was the concept of “developing variation”—the notion that the unity of a composition comes from a single basic idea tied to all parameters of a piece. This is the structural principle underlying Berg’s String Quartet, in which an initial theme stated by the first violin catalyzes and shapes all the material that follows.

While the tonal language of Berg’s String Quartet may seem idiosyncratic, the architecture of the two-movement composition fits comfortably within the norms of the classical style. The first movement is a quasi-sonata form. It begins with a theme characterized by an agitated head followed by a chromatic, wandering tail that sighs with a dotted rhythm. The two components of this theme converse and intertwine with one another the way Bach might episodically treat the subject of a fugue. The dotted rhythm that first appears as a decorative element quickly gains status as a critical motive for the entire movement, from which seemingly new melodies and textures spin out.

Notes on the Program

The second movement is a dense, thematically close-knit rondo, distinguished by several critical returns to a vigorous rhythmic ostinato. The movement begins with a virtuosic explosion in the first violin and ends with the same upheaval, this time in all the instruments. Berg’s music might acoustically be perceived the way one visually perceives an expressionist painting: when experiencing a work by Kandinsky, for example, one is less interested in the physical reality of the images presented than in the subjective, visceral response to such striking and beautiful shapes. franz schubert String Quintet in C major, Op. 163 Violist Kryzysztof Chorzelski recently remarked that the String Quintet in C major “embraces every side of Schubert: exquisite lyricism, Viennese Gemütlichkeit [warmth, intimacy], intense pathos, and, in parts of the first movement and finale, a titanic sense of struggle.” Written just two months before Schubert’s death, in October 1828, the so-called cello quartet seems to be not just the culmination of the multiple dimensions of Schubert’s abundant creativity, but also the apex of a emotionally rich (albeit short) life. The Quintet was not premiered until 1850, and was published three years later. While the work’s late reception is unfortunate, it is not untimely: the Quintet endures as a musical portrait of the most profound and cherished sentiments of the human experience.

Schubert covers monumental harmonic and melodic ground within the traditional formal framework of the four-movement string quartet: the first movement is in

sonata-allegro form, but the typical relationship between tonic (C major) and dominant (G major) is undermined by a series of tertiary-related keys: the dominant secondary key of the exposition, for example, is revealed only after the secondary theme appears in the key of E-flat major. The Adagio is in ternary form, and features an even more perplexing harmonic dialogue between E major and F minor. The duality of these opposing key areas reflects the affectual duality of the material in this movement: a tranquil and sublime theme is juxtaposed with a turbulent, almost violent response. But the return of the initial tranquil material is infused with the angst of the secondary material, suggesting synthesis rather than opposition.

A more stark juxtaposition is in the third movement: a somber, introspective Trio is inserted between the repetitions of a robust, joyful Scherzo. The influence of Hungarian folk dance is immediately evident in the rondo-sonata Allegretto.

But the finale is not all lively dance: the movement ends with unison motion from D-flat to C. This unresolved chromaticism seems to leave Schubert’s dramatic musical odyssey suspended in purgatory.

— Katherine Balch

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