Brentano String Quartet, September 19, 2017

Robert Blocker, Dean

oneppo chamber music series

Brentano String Quartet

David Shifrin, Artistic Director September 19, 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 Franz Joseph Haydn 1732–1809

String Quartet in B minor, Op. 64, No. 2, Hob. III:68 I. Allegro spiritoso II. Adagio ma non troppo III. Minuet — Trio IV. Finale. Presto Webern Bagatelles Interspersed with Schubert Minuets

Anton Webern 1883–1945 Franz Schubert 1797–1828 Webern

Mässig, Op. 9, No. 1

Schubert

Minuet II

Webern

Ziemlich Fliessend, Op. 9, No. 3

Schubert

Minuet III

Webern

Sehr Langsam, Op. 9, No. 4

Schubert

Minuet IV

Webern

Äusserst Langsam, Op. 9, No. 5

Schubert

Minuet V

Webern

Fliessend, Op. 9, No. 6

Minuet I Leicht Bewegt, Op. 9, No. 2

intermission

Yale School of Music

Johannes Brahms 1833–1897

String Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 51, No. 1 I. Allegro II. Romanze. Poco adagio III. Allegretto molto moderato e comodo IV. Allegro

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 Profile

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 collaborated with pianist Jonathan Biss on a project centered around late works of great composers.

Artist profile & Notes on the Program

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

franz joseph haydn String Quartet in B minor, Op. 64, No. 2 The Op. 64 Quartets occupy a special place in Joseph Haydn’s composerly development. The year was 1790; at 58, he had already written many masterpieces for the string quartet, establishing it as an important genre and inspiring his young acquaintance Mozart to do the same. However, the years in London, and international stardom, were yet to come. This was Haydn’s final year serving at the court of Esterházy, the place where, for thirty years, he had come into his own as a creative artist, inventing and experimenting to his heart’s content. Accordingly, in these quartets, we still sense the intimacy of the small court, and the exploratory curiosity of the writing, so different from the more public brilliance of the later quartets; at the same time, the ease and authority of the writing is unmistakable, a mature Haydn strolling in the garden that he created.

Op. 64, No. 2 is one of Haydn’s dozen or so quartets in a minor key. Like his other, earlier quartet in B minor (Op. 33, No. 1), he opens by playing a trick on the listener: the first violin’s melody, unsupported by any harmonic structure, seems to be in D major, and only after a few bars is the true minor key revealed. From here he unfolds a movement that is quite reliable and regular in its form, but constantly surprising as to its content. The music moves from one fixation to another, first a slithering set of chromatic descents, then a fascination with trills, followed by an unexpected and stormy visit to operatic D minor; this in turn dissolves into a rootless unison which goes back up the chromatic ladder to a final resting place, where Haydn closes

Notes on the Program

the section by merrily punctuating his tunes with plucked open strings. After a very busy development section, which focuses especially on the chromatic obsessions (both downwards and upwards) from the earlier music, the opening ambivalent melody returns. One astonishing moment late in the movement comes when the music very nearly gives up: the cello meanders to a standstill, then the first violin barely has the energy to continue, making a couple of abortive attempts before finding its way forward.

the major key, and is all sweetness and light, as if to soothe us and apologize for all the antics of the main section.

In the Minuet, we are treated to a master class in Haydn’s love for irregular phrase length, one of his favorite tools for teasing the listener. Instead of “normal” phrases of four bars or eight bars, reassuring in their balance and predictability, he treats us to phrases of five, six, and nine bars, always stopping early or going on for too long. By the time he relents and closes the section with two eight-bar phrases, we are so befuddled that even they don’t sound like regular periods. On top of that, the music itself is funny, feisty, and full of clucking, repeated eighth-note commentary.

The middle trio section, by contrast, is in

In 1932, Anton Webern conducted and recorded his arrangements of six German dances by Schubert. The recordings are full of vibrant detail and freedom, and of evident love for and kinship with the music.

Schubert, and perhaps particularly the visceral sweep, swoop, and sway of the dance music, occupies a sizable branch of Webern’s genealogical tree. For the Second Viennese School composers (Schubert being part of the so-called First Viennese School), dance, meaning primarily the waltz and thus, reaching backward, its precursor, the minuet, represents the life force, the external, socially viable manifestation of

The Finale is brilliant and pugnacious, again strongly recalling the last movement to Haydn’s earlier quartet in the same key.

With its gypsy flavor, it features brilliant fiddling, insistent rhythm, and a fiery temperament. At one point the first violin is asked to play an entire phrase on his lowest string, which evokes an earthy virtuosity.

Also in abundant evidence is the composer’s fondness for stopping the music dead in The slow movement moves to the parallel its tracks, and resuming after a silence as major key, a radiant tonality which each it tries to figure out where to go next. Late of the remaining movements will visit in the movement, in a moment of euphoria, substantially. After the brilliant and argu- the music shifts to B major, and it seems as mentative first movement, this music is if we will end with a big party; but, ever an oasis for quiet reflection. It consists of devious, Haydn lets the violins dance a main melody in two repeated sections, away, ever softer up the stairs, finally, at upon which the composer then builds three pianissimo, closing the bedroom door. variations. Here, there is no dramatic tra—Misha Amory jectory, no surprise lying in wait; instead we contemplate a celestial object, turning it over in our hands, each facet revealing a more Webern’s Bagatelles for String Quartet ornate and lovely aspect than the last.

Interspersed with Minuets by Schubert

Notes on the Program

archetypal impulses of the psyche. Webern’s Vienna, home of Sigmund Freud, was leading the way down a new path in the understanding of the self. Poised between a veneer of accommodation and conventionality and the nascent flowering of investigation into the emotional mind, with its attendant associations and desires, a space for interior questioning was being pried open.

As the Schubert dances, written when the composer was just sixteen, fit and work their magic within a solid, architectural framework, the Webern pieces of Op. 9 create their form as a vapor spreads its smoky tendrils. They are catalogues of breaths, sighs, and gasps; charged, compressed conversations of intimate gestural wisps.

The alternation of Schubert and Webern is an oscillation between generations, between public and private expression, between the shapes of the body and the shapes of thoughts. It is also a new composite structure within which gestures slip across the boundaries of time, mirroring each other, reflecting back and forth in unstill waters, betraying their common ancestry in a collective soul. The great violinist Felix Galimir used always to encourage young artists to search for and bring out in performance the element of dance in the music of the Second Viennese School. Clearly this was a concern for Webern himself, and in these intertwined works we can begin to feel the resonance in our somatic memories permeating it all.

—Mark Steinberg

johannes brahms String Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 51, No. 1 Of all the great composers of Western music, Johannes Brahms was arguably the most painstaking and self-critical. He not only withheld music he deemed unworthy of publication, but destroyed it whenever possible; one famous story has him revisiting a house he had lived in years earlier, and, to the astonishment of the tenants, ripping into a wall to extract sheets of music he had used to plug up a leak. Like many composers of his generation and after, he held Beethoven in awe, claiming to hear “the footsteps of a giant” behind him. It is in part owing to his consciousness of Beethoven’s achievement that he was forty before he published a single symphony or string quartet. In the case of the quartets, Brahms had written any number of earlier attempts — as many as twenty – before writing the two Op. 51 Quartets in the summer of 1873, and the Op. 67 Quartet two years later.

Two hallmarks of Brahms’ style as a composer – extreme rigor in the treatment of his material, and a proclivity for full, rich textures – are on display in all three of his string quartets, and perhaps most especially in his first one, the C minor Quartet. Brahms was thinking symphonically, in no uncertain terms, when he wrote this work. C minor had strong symphonic connotations for him, being the key of Beethoven’s most illustrious symphony, as well as that of Brahms’ own First Symphony, which was starting to take form in his mind.

Moreover, he makes huge sonic demands of the string quartet in this work, so that it helps his cause to choose a key whose

Notes on the Program

home pitch is C-natural (the cello’s lowest string). Particularly in the outer movements there is a sense that the composer wished to achieve orchestral sonorities within a quartet’s smaller, more intimate soundcontext, and this is one of the work’s most difficult aspects in performance.

mode, and recall slightly the restlessness of the first movement; the rhythms are unstable and gasping, while the harmonies search restlessly from key to key. Particularly beautiful is the way this movement ends, when somehow the restless element is grappled with, calmed, subsumed into the quieter and more lyrical element.

The prevalent character of the quartet as a whole is restless and intense. The first The third movement is ambivalent on many movement has an underlying rapid eighth- levels. It straddles the thin line between note motion that persists almost without C minor and F minor, managing to give pause, sometimes appearing as a drumthe impression of being in the former key like repeated pitch, sometimes in a leaping for most of the movement before subsiding octave motif, sometimes shared between into the latter. It opens with a “double two instruments in an overlapping rhythm. melody,” with the first violin and viola This rhythm contributes to the questing, each offering something that is not quite somewhat driven quality of the movement; a melody in itself but rather coexists uneasily the main themes, too, seem to gasp as if with the other. Thirdly, this movement is out of breath. Even when the narrative neither fast nor slow; it is a kind of dark arrives at the relatively consoling key of intermezzo that will not consent either to E-flat major, the first violin line is unable sing completely or dance completely. The to articulate any very reassuring idea, being mood is melancholy, characterized by swept away instead into the surrounding persistently descending lines; there is a eighth-note activity before finally coming feeling that the music is always on its way to an uneasy cadence. Even in the coda of down to a darker psychic level. And the the movement, where the meter is comperpetual motion of the first movement is pressed and the music attains real ferocity, back, albeit in a more somber environment: one senses that no lasting resolution has from the opening violin melody to a pulbeen attained as the dust settles on the sated bass line and uneasy syncopated final C major chord. accompaniment, there is almost unceasing motion here, which combines with the dark The slow second movement is the only place mood to evoke a restless, painful cogitation. where true repose is hinted at, and even here There is a trio, a middle section, which not uninterrupted. The outer sections of offers a sunny contrast, but that is shortthis movement are in the rich, dark key lived and passes like a dream. of A-flat major and are characterized by harmonic concord and rhythmic unity, The finale is fiery and impetuous. The the four parts moving perfectly together opening gesture ties the movement firmly much of the time. Intervals which evoke to the first movement, being a compressed horn calls appear again and again, adding version of that movement’s opening motif; to the bucolic mood. By contrast, the middle there is a feeling that we have returned to section (and the coda) are in the minor answer some lingering questions, this

Notes on the Program

time with vigor. Although this is a resoundingly minor-key movement, it has a positive quality that was absent in the previous movements. The activity is highly polyphonic much of the time, with the four voices playing off one another athletically – the composer is having his own virtuoso turn. The contrasting theme, which appears first rather briefly in E-flat, and later at greater length in C major, soaring beautifully into higher registers, adds to the sense of upwardness that the movement offers. In contrast to its freedom-seeking psyche, the movement is cast in a very strict form and caps itself with an intense coda, in which an accelerando rockets the music to its conclusion. —Misha Amory

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Upcoming Events Tuba Studio Recital september 25 YSM Ensembles Students from Carol Jantsch’s tuba studio perform.

Sudler Hall | Monday | 4:30 pm free admission A Potted History of Festivals and Festival Making september 26 Talks and Master Classes Sir Jonathan Mills, Trumbull Fellow, will present the first of four public lectures that will address issues related to “Culture, Creativity, and Community.”

Sudler Hall | Monday | 4:30 pm free admission Boris Berman, piano september 27 Horowitz Piano Series School of Music faculty pianist and Horowitz Piano Series Artistic Director Boris Berman performs an all-Brahms program featuring the composer’s late piano works, Opp. 116-119. Pre-concert talk by Associate Professor of Music History Paul Berry at 6:30 pm.

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Aaron Jay Kernis & Chris Theofanidis, composition september 28 New Music New Haven A program of music by YSM faculty composers Aaron Jay Kernis and Chris Theofanidis.

Morse Recital Hall | Thursday | 7:30 pm free admission James Taylor, tenor september 30 Faculty Artist Series Faculty tenor James Taylor is joined by lutenist Jakob Lindberg for a program of lute song.

Marquand Chapel | Saturday | 7:30 pm free admission Hannah Lash, composition october 1 Faculty Artist Series A recital by harpist and faculty composer Hannah Lash.

Morse Recital Hall | Sunday | 3 pm free admission Ransom Wilson, Ole Akahoshi & Peter Frankl october 2 Faculty Artist Series Faculty artists Ransom Wilson, flute, Ole Akahoshi, cello, and Peter Frankl, piano, perform a program of works by Haydn, Mendelssohn, Poulenc, and Schubert.

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Robert Blocker, Dean