Brentano String Quartet, Jan 24, 2017

Robert Blocker, Dean

oneppo chamber music series

Brentano String Quartet with

Jonathan Biss piano Hsin-Yun Huang viola

David Shifrin, Artistic Director January 24, 2017 • Tuesday at 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall

Oneppo Chamber Music Series

Brentano String Quartet

Mark Steinberg, violin • Serena Canin, violin Misha Amory, viola • Nina Lee, cello with

Jonathan Biss, piano • Hsin-Yun Huang, viola Johann Sebastian Bach 1685–1750

The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080 Contrapunctus I Contrapunctus VII Contrapunctus IV Contrapunctus XI

Edward Elgar 1857–1934

Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84 I. Moderato — Allegro II. Adagio III. Andante­— Allegro Jonathan Biss, piano intermission

Carlo Gesualdo 1566–1613

Madrigals, Book VI (1611) IX. Deh, come invan sospiro II. Beltà poi che t’assenti IV. Resta di darmi noia XXII. Già piansi nel dolore XVII. Moro, lasso, al mio duolo Hsin-Yun Huang, viola

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756–1791

String Quintet No. 6 in E-flat major, K. 614 I. Allegro di molto II. Andante III. Menuetto. Allegretto IV. Allegro Hsin-Yun Huang, viola

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.

Artist Profiles

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 Independent (London); 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.” Within a few years of its formation, the quartet garnered the first Cleveland Quartet Award and the Naumburg Chamber Music Award; and in 1996 the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center invited them to be the inaugural members of Chamber Music Society Two, a program which was to become a coveted distinction for chamber groups and individuals. The quartet embarked on its first European tour in 1997 and was honored in the United Kingdom with the Royal Philharmonic Award for Most Outstanding Debut. That debut recital was at London’s Wigmore Hall, and the quartet has continued its warm relationship with the Wigmore, appearing there regularly and serving as the hall’s quartet-in-residence during the 2000–2001 season.

In recent seasons the quartet has traveled widely, appearing all over the United States and Canada, and 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, D.C.; the Royal 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 addition to performing the entire twocentury range of the standard quartet repertoire, the Brentano String Quartet has a strong interest in both very old and very new music. It has performed many musical works that pre-date the string quartet as a medium, among them the 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 Wen-chung, Steven Mackey, Bruce Adolphe, and György Kurtág. The quartet has commissioned works from Wuorinen, Adolphe, Mackey, David Horne, and Gabriela Frank. The quartet celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2002 by commissioning ten composers to write companion pieces for selections from Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, the result of which was an electrifying and wide-ranging single concert program. The quartet has also worked with the celebrated poet Mark Strand, commissioning poetry from him to accompany works by Haydn and Webern.

The quartet has been privileged to collaborate with such artists as soprano Jessye Norman, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, pianist Richard Goode, and pianist Mitsuko Uchida. In 2015-2016, the quartet will collaborate with pianist Jonathan Biss on a project centered around late works of great composers.

Artist Profiles

The quartet has recorded the Op. 71 Quartets of Haydn and has recorded a Mozart disc for Aeon Records consisting of the K. 464 Quartet and the K. 593 Quintet, with violist Hsin-Yun Huang. In 2010–2012, the quartet recorded all of Beethoven’s late quartets, which were also released on Aeon. 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. Upcoming releases include a recording of Schubert’s Cello Quintet, recorded at Amherst with Michael Kannen.

In 1998, cellist Nina Lee joined the quartet, succeeding founding member Michael Kannen. The following season, the quartet became the first ensemble-in-residence at Princeton University, where its members taught and performed for fifteen years. In the fall of 2014, the quartet became the resident string quartet at the Yale School of Music, succeeding the Tokyo String Quartet in that position. At Yale, the Brentano String Quartet performs in concert each semester and works closely with students in chamber music contexts.

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. » brentanoquartet.com

Jonathan Biss, piano Pianist Jonathan Biss shares his talent, passion, and intellectual curiosity with classical music lovers in the concert hall and beyond. Over nearly two decades on the concert stage, he has forged relationships with the New York Philharmonic; the Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Philharmonia orchestras; the Boston, Chicago, and Swedish Radio symphony orchestras; and the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Budapest Festival, and Royal Concertgebouw orchestras, among many others.

This season Biss continues his latest Beethoven project, Beethoven/5, for which the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra has co-commissioned five composers to write new piano concertos, each inspired by one of Beethoven’s. The five-year plan began last season, with Biss premiering Timo Andres’ The Blind Banister, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music, and which Biss will perform with the New York Philharmonic in the spring of 2017. This season he premieres Sally Beamish’s concerto, paired with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, before performing it with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. In the next three years, Biss will premiere concertos by Salvatore Sciarrino, Caroline Shaw, and Brett Dean.

In 2016-2017, Biss has been examining, both in performance and academically, the concept of a composer’s “late style,” and has put together programs of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Britten, Elgar, Gesualdo, Kurtag, Mozart, Schubert, and Schumann’s later works — both for solo piano and in

Artist Profiles

collaboration with the Brentano String Quartet and Mark Padmore — which he will play at Carnegie Hall, San Francisco Performances, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, London’s Barbican Centre, and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. He will also give master classes at Carnegie Hall in connection with the idea of late style and will publish a Kindle Single on the topic in January.

Biss performs a diverse repertoire ranging from Mozart and Beethoven, through the Romantics, to Janáček and Schoenberg, as well as works by contemporary composer Gyorgy Kurtág and commissions from David Ludwig, Leon Kirchner, Lewis Spratlan, and Bernard Rands. Biss has a noted recording career, including an album of Schubert sonatas and two short Kurtág pieces that NPR Music named as one of the best albums of the year. His recent albums for EMI won Diapason d’Or de l’année and Edison awards, respectively, and in 2017 he releases the sixth volume of his nine-year, nine-disc recording cycle of Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas.

Biss studied at Indiana University and at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he joined the piano faculty in 2010. He led the first massive open online course (MOOC) offered by a classical music conservatory, Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, which has reached more than 150,000 people in 185 countries, and he will continue to add lectures until he covers all of the sonatas. His bestselling eBook, Beethoven’s Shadow, published in 2011 by RosettaBooks, was the first Kindle Single written by a classical musician. » jonathanbiss.com

Hsin-Yun Huang, viola Hsin-Yun Huang has forged a career as one of the leading violists of her generation.

She has been soloist with the Berlin Radio Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic, Zagreb Soloists, and the London Sinfonia, among many other ensembles. She performs regularly at such festivals as Marlboro, Spoleto, Rome, and Santa Fe. She was a member of the Borromeo String Quartet from 1994 to 2000.

She is active in commissioning works for solo viola and chamber ensemble. Her 2012 recording, Viola Viola, for Bridge Records, included commissions from Shih-Hui Chen and Steven Mackey, and works by Elliott Carter, Poul Ruders, and George Benjamin. Upcoming recording projects include Bach’s complete Violin Sonatas and Partitas performed on the viola, to be released in 2017.

A native of Taiwan, Ms. Huang first came to international attention as the gold medalist and youngest competitor at the 1988 Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition. She was educated at the Menuhin School in the United Kingdom prior to received degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School.

She now serves on the faculties of both schools and lives in New York City.

Notes on the Program

Johann Sebastian Bach The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080

Edward Elgar Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84

With The Art of the Fugue, a veritable Bible of fugal techniques and expression, Bach produced a monumental work. (A fugue, for the uninitiated, is a musical form in which a number of voices 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 the Fugue seems to be an exhaustive study of the possibilities of the form, a composer testing his mettle and 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 for musicological excavation.

What is clear to us is that this is a golden treasure trove of riveting musical rhetoric, elevated, intricately woven roundtable 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.

– Mark Steinberg

Edward Elgar is most often associated with his cello concerto of 1919 and the “Enigma” Variations of 1899, both of which are venerated for their lush, unforgettable melodies. One of his last works, the Piano Quintet (c. 1919), showcases these same qualities and is by far his largest chamber work. Despite the fact that audiences of the time greeted the Quintet unenthusiastically, it is now a staple of the chamber music repertoire due to its full, almost orchestral sound, and for its technical demands.

The work is set in three movements, all of which display Elgar’s captivating lyricism.

As if revealing his hand early, the first minute-and-a-half presents three different interconnected melodies that are expounded upon as the first movement progresses.

Upbeat figures ubiquitously cultivate the movement’s impetus and impulse, and one only notices their absence in the suave, Spanish-influenced second theme. Throughout the movement, Elgar deploys thematic contrasts as a supplement to his native lyricism — a low, growling piano range with staccato articulations in the strings, or a tête-à-tête interaction between deliberate, massive chords in the piano and rushing, unison triplets in the strings. The second movement features the lavish sound we know and love. Rich primary thematic material is contrasted with a magical secondary theme, upwardly floating chords in the piano answered by melancholy strings. The movement closes in exhausted fashion, struggling to complete its final iteration of the second theme. While the third and final movement begins familiarly with opening material from the first movement, it takes an unexpected turn,

Notes on the Program

transforming into a stately and joyfully exultant waltz. Thereafter elements of the previous two movements resurface — notice the pizzicati in the strings and the gray, sorrowful opening theme from the first movement — only to follow the movement’s opening gambit by dissolving into an optimistic waltz.

– Danielle Wiebe Burke Carlo Gesualdo Madrigals, Book VI (1611) Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, wrote some of the most startling, gripping, fiercely expressive music the world has ever known. His biography has lured many into curiosity about his music (he murdered his first wife and her lover, and most likely his second son ,as well, whose paternity he doubted), and there have been many discussions of his psychological profile. But in the end, the strength and unflinching audacity of his music alone is more than enough to draw us to him.

Aldous Huxley, the great thinker and writer, wrote of listening to Gesualdo’s music while under the influence of mescaline: “These voices,” I said appreciatively, “these voices—they’re a kind of bridge back to the human world.

“And a bridge they remain, even while singing the most startlingly chromatic of the mad prince’s compositions. Through the uneven phrases of the madrigals, the music pursues its course, never sticking to the same key for two bars together. In Gesualdo, that fantastic character out of a Webster melodrama, psychological disintegration had exaggerated, had pushed to the extreme limit, a tendency inherent

in modal as opposed to fully tonal music. The resulting works sounded as though they might have been written by the later Schoenberg.

“And yet,” I felt myself constrained to say, as I listened to these strange products of a CounterReformation psychosis working upon a late medieval art form, “and yet it does not matter that he’s all in bits. The whole is disorganized.

But each individual fragment is in order, is a representative of a Higher Order. The Highest Order prevails even in the disintegration. The totality is present even in the broken pieces. More clearly present, perhaps, than in a completely coherent work. At least you aren’t lulled into a sense of false security by some merely human, merely fabricated order. You have to rely on your immediate perception of the ultimate order. So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages. But of course it’s dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn’t get back, out of the chaos...” (from The Doors of Perception, 1954).

It would be hard to put it better. Gesualdo partakes of the aesthetic of the Mannerists, exaggerating color, proportion, and gesture to reveal emotional truths. Think, for example, of the strained, elongated figures of El Greco. (And although mescaline is perhaps inappropriate in a public concert setting, the music alone may inspire such reveries in those with the right combination of attention and sensitivity.)

Startling juxtapositions and contrasts, discontinuities and disruptions, had been a part of Gesualdo’s expressive arsenal from the start. But, just as we all know of people of strong character who come to be more completely themselves as they age (in fact, it seems to be a truism), so do the madrigals in the final book, Book

Notes on the Program

VI (1611), exhibit an even greater density of these characteristic moments such that they do, indeed, threaten to whirl into chaos. The amount of emotional turmoil we can precariously contain within our lives is on occasion fantastically large. At times we feel we just barely manage to cheat the forces of collapse. This is the volatile world of heightened experience these madrigals evoke, repeatedly holding us in the grip of the concentrated moment.

We present here two madrigals from this final book in an instrumental setting.

During Gesualdo’s life the madrigals were sometimes performed instrumentally, on viols, accompanying theatrical performances of a melancholy cast; historical tradition is on our side.

The first of the madrigals, “‘Io parto’ e non piu diesi,” says: “I go.” I can say no more because my grief has taken the life from my heart. In my suffering I lament “I live in pain. But may I never cease to suffer.” I was dead but now I am alive, for even the dead would be brought back to life to hear my piteous cries.

The second, “Io pur respiro in cosi gran dolore,” states: Even in agony, I still breathe, and you still live, O pitiless heart. Ah, since there is no more hope of again seeing our beloved, Death, give us aid; take this life. Torture me not, but with a single stroke end my life and woe.

– Mark Steinberg

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart String Quintet No. 6 in E-flat major, K. 614 Mozart’s E-flat Viola Quintet, K. 614, dates from the final year of his life, and was his last serious chamber work. It was written at more or less the same time as his opera The Magic Flute, which is also an E-flat-major-based work; but it is striking how this key resonates so differently in the two pieces. The opera’s timbre is rich and dark, with associations of majesty and secrecy, whereas the Quintet evokes a bright divertimento played by wind instruments in the open air. Indeed, if one were to have to guess which of Mozart’s viola quintets originated as a work for winds, one might well choose this quintet rather than the C minor work.

For performers, the E-flat Quintet is distinguished by its considerable technical demands, and by its paradox of carefree spirit crossed with substantial compositional scope. The first movement opens with a horn-like hunting call in the violas, which is answered by a graceful descending figure in the violins. The working-out of this material starts almost right away, and is contrapuntally active and convoluted; it leads directly to the movement’s other melody, which is sweeter, smoother, and more intimate. Of the two, it is the first, more extroverted material that Mozart devotes his attention to, and which sets its stamp on the movement. Essentially the mood is festive and brilliant, with virtuosic demands made on all five players, the first violinist in particular.

The slow movement is courtly and somewhat ornate. It is not one of Mozart’s lyrical,

Notes on the Program

aria-like slow movements, but evokes instead a graceful and dignified dance. The opening melody is the idée fixe of the movement, appearing many times in many guises, sometimes decorated by other voices, sometimes digressing into unexpected channels, but always recognizable by its repeated starting pitch. Perhaps it is the absence of any second melody that lends the movement its round-dance atmosphere.

The minuet is jovial, Haydnesque, and celebratory. There is clever deployment of one small instrumental group against another, of violins vying with one another, of melodies being turned upside down, and then finally, an ominous C minor halt – after which the music teasingly and quietly draws a simple conclusion. The ensuing trio is a musette-like creation, wherein a smooth, gentle tune is played out against a persistent E-flat in the bass; more than anything it evokes a celestial music box, spinning its gleaming idea out to an inevitable close.

A carefree, rather rustic melody opens the finale, full of high jinks and good humor.

The movement that unfolds continues and develops this joyful vein; in places the music recalls in its textures and figurations the final movement of Mozart’s 39th symphony, also in E-flat. In the middle section of the movement, the five voices get into a stormy argument, which takes a fugue-like form, complete with its own subject; but the episode is brief, and, as if finding itself too learned for this context, hurriedly dissipates.

The movement plays out according to the pattern of its sonata form, and closes with a joking coda: a teasing question with a boisterous rejoinder.

– Misha Amory

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ONEPPO CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES SEP 27

2016–2017

BRENTANO STRING QUARTET With Ettore Causa, viola; Argus Quartet

OCT 25

PRISM QUARTET Bach, Gershwin, Schumann, and Martin Bresnick

DEC 13

MIRÓ QUARTET With Martin Beaver, viola; David Shifrin, clarinet

JAN 24

BRENTANO STRING QUARTET With Jonathan Biss, piano; Hsin-Yun Huang, viola

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IMANI WINDS Wei-Yi Yang, piano

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AN UNLIKELY MUSE A concert drama about Brahms and the clarinetist who inspired his later works

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MAY 09

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DAVID SHIFRIN Artistic Director TUESDAYS, 7 : 30 PM Morse Recital Hall BOX OFFICE 203 432-4158 music-tickets.yale.edu

Robert Blocker, Dean

Upcoming Events Giancarlo Guerrero, guest conductor january 27

Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks february 3

Yale Philharmonia Guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero leads the Yale Philharmonia in performances of Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 Woolsey Hall | Friday | 7:30 pm Tickets start at $10 • Yale Faculty/Staff $8 • Students $5 $3 surcharge for purchases at the door

Ellington Jazz Series Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, of whom The New York Times has said, “in their hands, jazz is young again, full of ginger and pep,” perform the timeless music of the 1920s and 1930s Morse Recital Hall | Friday | 7:30 pm Tickets start at $20 • Students $10

Ettore Causa, Frank Morelli & Boris Berman january 29

New Music New Haven A program of works, including String Quartet No. 5 (“White Water”) and Second String Force, by guest composer Joan Tower, “a composer whose directness and eclecticism make her music instantly accessible,” according to The New York Times Morse Recital Hall | Thursday | 7:30 pm free admission

Faculty Artist Series Violist Ettore Causa, bassoonist Frank Morelli, and pianist Boris Berman — all members of the YSM faculty — perform on a program that features a duo for bassoon and piano, a duo for viola and bassoon, and a trio Morse Recital Hall | Sunday | 3 pm free admission

Yale Brass Trio january 31

Faculty Artist Series Pianist Mihae Lee joins the Yale Brass Trio for a program that honors Robert E. Nagel Jr. with performances of Nagel’s Brass Trio, Paul Lansky’s Pieces of Advice, Pierre Gabaye’s Récréation, and more Morse Recital Hall | Tuesday | 7:30 pm free admission

Joan Tower, guest composer february 9

Benjamin Verdery, guitar february 12

Faculty Artist Series YSM faculty guitarist Benjamin Verdery performs the world premieres of Searching for a Chorale, by Seymour Bernstein, and the dance piece Now You See, featuring music by Mr. Verdery and choreography by MICHIYAYA Dance, among other works Morse Recital Hall | Sunday | 3 pm free admission

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