Brentano String Quartet, Jan 26

brentano string quartet oneppo chamber music series David Shifrin, Artistic Director January 26, 2016 • Morse Recital Hall

Robert Blocker, Dean

Oneppo Chamber Music Series

brentano string quartet Tuesday, January 26, 2016 • 7:30 pm • Morse Recital Hall David Shifrin, Artistic Director mark steinberg, violin • serena canin, violin misha amory, viola • nina lee, cello Joseph Haydn 1732–1809

String Quartet in F-sharp minor, Op. 50, No. 4 I. Spiritoso II. Andante III. Menuetto: Poco allegretto IV. Finale: Fuga, allegro molto

Dmitri Shostakovich 1906–1975

String Quartet No. 14 in F-sharp major, Op. 142 I. Allegretto II. Adagio III. Allegretto intermission

Antonín Dvořák 1841–1904

String Quartet No. 11 in C major, Op. 61 I. Allegro II. Poco adagio e molto cantabile III. Scherzo — Allegro vivo IV. Finale — 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,

Brentano String Quartet

Chou Wenchung, Steven Mackey, Bruce Adolphe, and György Kurtág.

The Quartet has commissioned works from Wuorinen, Adolphe, Mackey, David Horne, and Gabriela Frank.

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

Notes on the Program

joseph haydn String Quartet in F-sharp minor, Op. 50, No. 4 Joseph Haydn composed his Opus 50 string quartets in 1787. Hoping for royal acknowledgement, and perhaps emolument, he dedicated the set to King Frederick of Prussia. Although the monarch’s response may have been disappointingly parsimonious — a gold ring and a thank-you — Haydn fared quite well in the end, selling the quartets to two different publishers without either of them knowing, and pocketing his fee twice.

The F-sharp minor Quartet, Opus 50, No. 4, is the only minor-key quartet of the six. F-sharp minor is altogether an unusual key, as it is difficult for string players and does not take much advantage of the natural resonance of the instruments; but Haydn used it for his “Farewell” Symphony and for one of his late piano trios as well, so he clearly responded to its severe, somewhat astringent tonal flavor. The first movement of this quartet, designated unusually “Spiritoso,” features a bold, sometimes symphonic palette with a quite wide range of register. It opens with a bold, rhythmic unison statement from the whole quartet, to which the first violin responds with a lonely, tentative figure. However, it is the strength of the opening gesture, rather than the pathos of the reply, which stamps the movement as a whole, a depiction of restless, celebratory Jovian energy. Only at the end of each major section does the music find a quieter place where it can repose briefly.

The second movement showcases a particular genius of Haydn’s, the expression

of great beauty through simple means.

Here we have a patient Andante setting wherein a melody walks up and down the scale, harmonized glowingly, measured out in the plainest of musical periods. In the course of the movement, major-key sections alternate strophically with minorkey ones, returning in a different variation each time, a favorite slow-movement form for the composer. The major-key music is radiant, unassuming, reflective; the minorkey darker, more troubled, more sophisticated. The final return of the major-key section sets the cello part in its high, bel canto register (a star turn for the celloplaying King Frederick?), where it plays a close duet with the second violin before concluding the movement with emphatic chords.

The third movement is on the one hand a typical, genial Haydn minuet; on the other, it is a subtly unifying force for the other movements of the quartet. Like the first movement, it features some “large” writing — grand arpeggios, unison writing to provide emphasis, a wide register. From the second movement, it inherits a preoccupation with the tension between major and minor; although the movement as a whole is in a major key, the main section of the minuet has minor-key “coloring”, and the entire Trio is in minor, a grave, contrapuntal examination. It is this Trio section which prefigures the Finale, in its rather learned interplay of voices, its evocation of elevated discourse.

The final movement is a fugue, a form where the voices enter one at a time, each in its turn stating the “subject” — the topic that is to be discussed, so to speak. Haydn, in his Opus 20 quartets, had undergone a

Notes on the Program

period of fascination with fugal finales. This one, with its severe intervallic outline and light rhythmic character, recalls the finale of Opus 20, No. 6, which itself can perhaps claim a lineage back to Bach’s Musical Offering. With the present fugue, however, there is no claim to a great polyphonic edifice such as that one; here we have a movement less than three minutes long, wherein all is lightness, grace, and wit.

Many an erudite fugal trick is employed, but the listener is equally likely to be struck by the movement’s dramatic gestures: sudden silences, sustained suspenseful pedal points, unexpected harmonic shifts, massive unisons, and not least, the abrupt strength of the emphatic closing cadence.

— Misha Amory dmitri shostakovich String Quartet No. 14 in F-sharp major, Op. 142 Beginning in stark bleakness with the eleventh quartet, Shostakovich’s tetralogy of quartets, dedicated to each of the members of the Beethoven Quartet in turn, finds its peroration with the fourteenth, open to the fragile possibility of light. The Beethoven Quartet premiered each of Shostakovich’s quartets starting from the second and thus served as the mouthpiece for some of the composer’s most vulnerable and intimate utterances. The eleventh had been dedicated to Vasily Shirinsky, the second violinist of the quartet, who had passed away. The Beethoven Quartet considered disbanding at the time, and it was in part at Shostakovich’s urging that they continued. The dedicatee of the fourteenth is Sergei Shirinsky, brother of Vasily and the cellist of the quartet, still playing when the fourteenth quartet was

written (1972–73). A genial and enthusiastic man, he had known Shostakovich for nearly fifty years at the time. So this grouping of four quartets begins in absence and finds its way toward a sense of presence, continuity, and the perpetuation of a musical voice.

Shostakovich has always seemed to me to have a sort of spiritual link with Schubert in his depiction of forces that are fateful and inhuman, his lyrical gift, and in his recognition of states of radiance that are clearly seen from without, at a distance. Some of this is in evidence at the start of the F-sharp major quartet. A group of three repeated notes is an often-used Shostakovich motif: a series of knocks, a brutal insistence, a rupture in time. Here are six intoned notes, the idea doubled, a set-up for a serious reckoning with the forces that be. However, as it recedes it reveals an innocent, insouciant theme, good-natured and scarcely recognizable as the Shostakovich of the previous quartets. As it progresses we are thrown a few cheeky notes as if the composer peeks out from behind to assure us it is still him. What is going on here?

In Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin writes, “Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know, but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or; it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly

Notes on the Program

divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”

Shostakovich was often criticized for what many considered to be a cowardly stance in the nearly impossible political climate of the mid-twentieth century USSR. His truer nature, that of an artist, however, evinced heroism in his ability to live as a witness in his world without extinguishing an ember of hope, belief and goodness.

And here in the fourteenth quartet we find some writing that is utterly guileless, as if Shostakovich is holding on to some part of himself protected as one would protect a child from the harshnesses of the outer world. It is an uneasy amalgam of Edenic purity and the depiction of struggle, toggling between them and bringing them into confrontation without resolution. (Again, a Schubertian state of affairs.)

This quartet marks the end of a nearly year-long fallow period that caused the composer much anxiety. His compositional voice was his truth; lack of access to that voice left him bereft. At the same time as he was writing the quartet, Shostakovich was planning a one-act opera based on Chekhov’s short story “The Black Monk,” a project that was ultimately to go unrealized.

But themes in this story may illuminate some of the characteristics of the fourteenth quartet. In the story a glorious, fertile garden, a sort of Eden, plays a large role, and there is much concern about the garden becoming barren and unkempt.

Chekhov describes as well an apparition, the eponymous Black Monk, who appears to the protagonist to tell him that he is a genius writer, that he is divinely chosen to be the bearer of eternal truth, the rational and the beautiful, in service of eternal life, the object of which, he claims,

is enjoyment. Kovrin, the writer, frets that he is mad, that the monk is not real, to which the apparition replies, “I exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, so I exist in nature.”

Later in the tale, Kovrin’s wife espies him talking to what seems to be an empty chair (speaking of joy as the normal state of man) and declares him mad. Doctors are called in to “cure” him of his madness.

Parted from his hallucination, he grows weary, heavy, ordinary and unhappy. The garden is in ruins. His marriage is in ruins. At his deathbed, the Black Monk appears to him one last time and says to him “Why did you not believe me? If you had believed me then, that you were a genius, you would not have spent these two years so gloomily and so wretchedly.”

Upon his death, Kovrin is found in a puddle of blood with a “blissful smile” on his face.

Analogies with Shostakovich’s own fraught life and the radiance of his gift are easily made. The tale speaks of joy that is perpetually available, even when it looks to all the wretched world to be madness. And it may be that Shostakovich wanted to make a connection between this story and the fourteenth quartet. There is a reference to Braga’s “Angel’s Serenade” in the story, sung by Kovrin’s wife with the accompaniment of a violin, about “a maiden... who heard one night in her garden mysterious sounds, so strange and lovely that she was obliged to recognize them as a holy harmony which is unintelligible to us mortals, and so flies back to heaven.”

Shostakovich arranged the Serenade in the same year that he wrote this quartet (surely in preparation for the opera), and the climax of the second movement of this quartet may very well refer to it (an idea

Notes on the Program

put forward by Laurel Fay). Shostakovich called this his “Italian bit,” and it gave him much pleasure. The second movement begins with a first violin line that is a pre-echo of the confessional song of the cello, the main protagonist of this work, to follow. It is a sort of empathy offered before the fact, and when the climax is reached with the cello singing up high with parallel support from the first violin (the two remaining original players of the Beethoven Quartet) there is a sense of a partnership that enables a reaching beyond.

There is a possibility that Shostakovich at one point contemplated suicide and intended the eighth quartet to be his final work in 1960. In that work, the motif of three repeated notes is used often to chilling and disturbing effect. Here the last movement of the fourteenth quartet starts with the same repeated notes (used already at the start of the piece); here, however, cautiously impish, and Shostakovich uses them to spell out in musical notes cellist Sergei Shirinsky’s nickname, Seryozha. There is a powerful sort of alchemy here, a return to a childlike state of play, an ability to see without being overtaken. (César Aira: “Children have a very special attachment to the incomprehensible; there’s so much they don’t understand at that age, they have no choice but to love it, blindly, like an enigma, but also like a world. It teaches them what love is.”) The movement deals in memory and the holding of memories, some intense and painful, without being consumed. The music wanders and drifts and finally vanishes, despite everything, with a blissful smile on its face.

– Mark Steinberg

antonín dvorák String Quartet No. 11 in C major, Op. 61 Antonin Dvořák was a great admirer of Franz Schubert. We are not accustomed to thinking of Dvořák as following in the footsteps of his great Viennese and German precursors, preferring to associate him with the “nationalist” movement of his generation of composers. And it is true that like his contemporaries Smetana, Mussorgsky, Grieg, and others, he was dedicated to defining, glorifying and spreading abroad a musical character for his homeland.

However, it is equally true that he could not have become the composer he was without meditating and absorbing the music of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Wagner. He was especially enthusiastic in praise of Schubert, whose genius, he wrote, “was like a spring which nothing but exhaustion could stop from flowing.” He ranked Schubert as Mozart’s equal in many respects, declaring that “in both we find the same delicate sense of instrumental coloring, the same spontaneous and irrepressible flow of melody, the same instinctive command of the means of expression, and the same versatility in all the branches of their art.” He wrote further, about Schubert’s chamber works in particular, that they “must be ranked among the very best of their kind in all musical literature... Schubert does not try to give his chamber music an orchestral character, yet he attains a marvelous variety of beautiful tonal effects.”

It should not come as a surprise, then, that when the celebrated Hellmesberger Quartet of Vienna commissioned a new work from Dvořák in 1881, his thoughts flew to

Notes on the Program

the great chamber music tradition of that city, and to Schubert in particular. The result of this commission was the Opus 61 Quartet, and its first movement is an unapologetic homage to the first movement of Schubert’s Cello Quintet. Like that movement, Dvořák’s movement is grand in scope and length. The opening of Dvořák’s work recalls strongly the opening progression of the Schubert, with its stillness and its powerful mixture of radiance and pain. Dvořák extolled Schubert’s “quaint alternation of major and minor within the same period,” which interestingly he called a “Slavic trait”(!), and here he does not hesitate to follow his example. In the second theme, too, Dvořák follows Schubert to E-flat major, and his theme hovers around the same pitches as Schubert’s famous cello duet. Various other similarities in the form and trajectory of the two movements exist; but it would be a strain to try to map Dvořák’s work onto Schubert’s, and in fact the younger composer was too wise not to recur to his own genius in the main substance of what he wrote here. It is a big movement, with big, even occasionally symphonic gestures in it; but it does not attain to the Olympian quality of the Schubert Quintet, ultimately inhabiting a sweeter, more human sphere.

With the second movement, we might be saying farewell to Schubert and paying a visit to Beethoven, at least in certain superficial respects.

The movement’s marking, “Poco adagio e molto cantabile,” might have been pulled right from the older composer’s stylebook, and the dotted-rhythm gravitas that dominates the landscape seems to hearken back to the slow movement of Beethoven’s first Rasumovsky Quartet. But the mood here is light years away from the heartbreak of the Rasumovsky movement; Dvořák depicts a love duet between the two violins, borne forth on triplet

zephyrs in the lower strings. A second melody, dark and lovely in D-flat major, provides a quieter, more reflective mood as it passes from second violin to cello and finally to first violin. After the return of the main section, recapitulated over fluttering viola sextuplets and a plucked cello bassline, there is a surprise: the music loses momentum, comes almost to an absolute halt, and we find ourselves cast up on a barren shore, wandering amongst various foreign minor keys. Only gradually is the music able to grope its way back home, to a warmer, more reassuring conclusion.

The third movement reveals Dvořák in selfquotation. Here we have a melody from his own Polonaise for Cello and Piano, which he had composed a few years earlier; however, he has altered it from from its original identity — a proud, upright personality in a major key — and sped it up to become a whirling, clever, minor-key dance. Rather than a Polonaise, we hear something more akin to a Czech Furiant, with its quicksilver motion and its fierce alternations between two-beat and three-beat patterns. The contrasting middle section presents a blither face, an innocent, sunny country tune which the composer puts through its paces, festooning it all the while with his inimitable richness of detail: skirling triplets, glittering pizzicati, bariolage and harmonics.

The Finale is exuberant, sunny, and full of bravura fiddling. The nimble opening phrase again features a motion from major to minor — in the first three chords, no less — but this time the effect is lighthearted, coy and flirtatious, a simple, stepwise melody in the first violin accompanied by a viola line in broken octaves.

The broken-octave motif will go through

Notes on the Program

several transformations of its own, taking on a melodic role and ultimately becoming an obsession played by the whole quartet in unison. Dvořák makes one more apparent nod to Vienna, with a quotation from Brahms’ Sextet in G major as his second, more lyrical theme, which provides a rare break in the movement’s bustling action.

Ultimately the music climaxes triumphantly, and subsides to a quiet coda, wherein the first violin traces a wandering, almost improvisatory eighth-note line against shifting harmonies, a tired and happy reveler recalling the night’s festivities. He is not allowed to muse for long though, as a final burst of brilliance brings the movement to its emphatic close.

— Misha Amory

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Argus Quartet

january 29 Yale Philharmonia Woolsey Hall | Thursday | 7:30 pm Berg: Violin Concerto, with soloist Mélanie Clapiès; Mahler: Symphony No. 1 Tickets start at $10 • Students $5 $3 surcharge for purchases at the door

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