oneppo chamber music series David Shifrin, artistic director
Brentano String Quartet Mark Steinberg, violin • Serena Canin, violin Misha Amory, viola • Nina Lee, cello
Tuesday, January 28, 2020 | 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
Robert Blocker, Dean
Program Johann Sebastian Bach 1685–1750 arr. Mark Steinberg
Prelude in F minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, BWV 881
Ludwig van Beethoven 1770–1827
String Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 95, “Serioso” I. Allegro con brio II. Allegretto ma non troppo III. Allegro assai vivace ma serioso – Trio IV. Larghetto espressivo – Allegretto agitato
Bruce Adolphe b. 1955
Coiled (2017)
intermission
Dmitri Shostakovich 1906–1975
String Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 22 I. Introduction. Andantino II. Scherzo. Allegretto III. Recitative. Adagio IV. Etude. Allegro V. Humoresque. Allegro VI. Elegy. Adagio VII. Finale. Moderato — Meno mosso — Moderato
Felix Mendelssohn 1809–1847
String Quartet No. 6 in F minor, Op. 80 I. Allegro vivace assai II. Allegro assai III. Allegro IV. Finale. Allegro molto
As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.
Artist Profile Brentano String Quartet Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim. Within a few years of its formation, the quartet garnered the inaugural Cleveland Quartet Award and the Naumburg Chamber Music Award. In recent seasons the quartet has appeared in the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, and Australia. The Brentano String Quartet has performed many musical works that pre-date the string quartet as a medium, including the madrigals of Gesualdo, fantasias of Purcell, and secular vocal works of Josquin. The quartet has also worked closely with some of the most important composers of our time, including Elliott Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Chou Wen-chung, Steven Mackey, Bruce Adolphe, and György Kurtág, and has commissioned works from Wuorinen, Adolphe, Mackey, David Horne, and Gabriela Frank. The quartet has been privileged to collaborate with such artists as Jessye Norman, Joyce DiDonato, Richard Goode, Jonathan Biss, and Mitsuko Uchida. In fall 2014, the quartet became the quartetin-residence at the Yale School of Music, succeeding the Tokyo String Quartet in that position. » brentanoquartet.com
Program Notes The Dark, Coiled Intensity of F minor Mark Steinberg The program starts with a Bach Prelude that introduces F minor as a key that admits little light, closed in and dense. In his Op. 95 (“Serioso”), Beethoven wrote a work that is compact and brutal. When the Brentano Quartet approached Bruce Adolphe to write a work inspired by the Beethoven he answered immediately: “Opus 95: so many nuggets of genius: the unhinged rhythmic knots, the scales off the cliff’s edge, the muttering, the gnashing of molars!” The result is his new work, Coiled, written for this program. That coiled intensity also informs Shostakovich’s Eleventh Quartet in F minor (Beethoven’s F minor is also his eleventh), that compressed, eloquent masterpiece. And it is no coincidence that Mendelssohn’s final quartet, written in the anguished aftermath of his beloved sister’s death, refers in key and affect directly to this seminal Beethoven work.
String Quartet No. 11 in F minor Beethoven Mark Steinberg The music from Beethoven’s middle period of creativity, sometimes known as the “heroic” period, is justly beloved. A keen observer and portrayer of our pains and foibles, our struggles and desires, Beethoven in this period displays our capacity for strength and dignity. He depicts our power to restore order and justice in the face of chaos and tyranny, to assert the potent human will, to triumph. He speaks to us of the importance of our place in the grand scheme of things, of a privileged point of reference. He tells us that we matter, that we can enjoy responsibility for the world in which we find ourselves. For Beethoven in this period our inner states are reflected in the truth of the outer world. The middle period works are works of Ego, works that make us feel vibrantly alive and embodied. Although it is most often classified as one of the middle period quartets, the Quartet in F minor, Op. 95, is philosophically cut from another cloth, a prescient gateway to the late style. This is the only one of his quartets with a nickname given by the composer: the “Serioso.” Indeed it wrestles with serious issues; for most of its compressed length it is a rather tortured piece. But Beethoven is not one to represent suffering without catharsis. Here that catharsis seems born of eternal, omnipresent freedom recognized, rather than freedom hard-won. Many have been puzzled by the ending of this work. Not dissimilarly many have been perplexed by Chekhov’s description
of his four great plays as comedies, with their vivid depiction of heartbreak and difficulty, of souls estranged and asphyxiated. Perhaps Chekhov saw them thus through recognition of a greater peace and purpose in the unfurling progression of historical time, that which renders all human concerns miniature and illusory. Beethoven’s F minor quartet concerns itself predominantly with a sense of oppression; often the music is immured, airless. Visions of escape, resistance, and control over Fate present themselves, but in the end understanding comes from elsewhere. The material of the piece is tightly coiled, often as if trapped in a cage: figures dart upwards only to collapse down on themselves, test foundations by digging downwards only to claw their way back up. The opening gesture of the first movement does both, then stops dead in its tracks as if to assess the situation. The phrase that answers throws itself against the bars of its cage, desperate to escape, to no avail. When there are intimations of escape in the movement the music is as if wrested from its foundations by an outside hand into the vulnerable realm of untethered vision, the far realm of hope and dreams. These moments of being artificially lifted out of the plane of earthly existence all revert to brutal actuality, and by its end the first movement exhausts itself railing against inevitability, evaporating. Throughout the work the most basic functions of melodic direction upward and downward become powerful archetypes, reaching, plummeting. The second movement introduces itself with a hesitant echo
of the first movement’s opening, tentatively feeling its way downwards with a short upward turn which, instead of closing the loop as in the initial statement in the first movement, leaves the door ajar. The Stygian opacity of the first movement has given way to shadow, and through the shadow some moonbeam coolly penetrates, softly radiant, the phrase drifting upwards. This music in D major replicates the same key relationship in Beethoven’s predominantly F minor music for Egmont. In that work the D major material represents Liberty appearing as a vision to the imprisoned Egmont. (I am indebted to an essay by Seow-Chin Ong for this insight.) This is followed by a rather extraordinary singlenote exchange between the inner voices, each calling out across a chasm, the other perpetually beyond reach. These notes are pulled from the opening cello gesture, now stripped of its will to explore further. It is reminiscent of a Beckett scene, characters suffering doubts in parallel, unable to connect. This ushers in a fugal section whose subject, after an initial leap up, spirals inevitably downward. The voices again do not so much empathize and discuss as experience their loneliness side by side. The movement ends with the calls across the chasm, again leaving the door ajar. What enters is a wrathful form of the downward spiral of the fugue subject from the second movement: jagged, galloping downhill, inexorable. Jovian thunderbolts fly. But as in the first movement, some outside force comes to lift the music away, again a prisoner’s vision, this music ever floating upwards. The two ideas alternate, but the energy of the movement’s ending is that of the guillotine.
Program Notes, cont. This leads to the darkest moment of the piece, the opening of the last movement. It would not be out of place to assign this wrenching music to one of the Seven Last Words on the Cross: “Father, father, why hast thou forsaken me?” And the first two such questions confront silence. Bleakness gives way to anxiety and broken sighs throughout the main section of the movement, and again figures reach up with no stability only to fall back on themselves. And then, when the music has all but vanished, there is the coda. In his book A Journey in Ladakh: Encounters with Buddhism, Andrew Harvey writes: “Buddhism is, in fact, essentially ‘comic,’ in the highest, philosophical sense… [its] vision is in the deepest sense comic because it denies any final significance to individual striving or tragic awareness, any ultimate importance to the agonies and vicissitudes of the Ego.” So Beethoven seems to feel here. The music flutters, ascends, evinces a sort of liberated joy. Some commentators have seen this as a reflection of the ideas of political liberation which were much in the air and certainly much in Beethoven’s consciousness at that time. Perhaps. But my own reaction to this extraordinary peroration is that it may be something different from the exultation of victory; it is instead a leave-taking from the Ego’s tribulations. Here is awareness of some greater space, a space that holds and allows the suffering without succumbing to it. The relationship of this coda to the rest of the piece is that of the resurrection to the crucifixion. All is let go and rises.
Coiled adolphe Bruce Adolphe When the Brentano String Quartet asked me to compose a reaction to Beethoven’s Opus 95, I immediately had a profusion of ideas because I had studied the work in depth at various points in my life and given several very different kinds of presentations on it over the past 28 years for my lecture series at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Most recently, I included the first movement in an article about Beethoven’s struggles with tinnitus and deafness. Opus 95 is a work of unprecedented intensity and compression. Musical ideas explode and motivic particles are scattered throughout the piece. One can hear in it a confrontation of rage and reason, power and defiance, health and illness. For Coiled, I used several motifs from the first movement of Opus 95, from the obvious opening gesture to more subtle, internal phrases and also a few exact quotes of phrase fragments that perhaps only string quartet players would recognize. Using this collection of Beethoven particles, I built my own musical explosives. At one point in the composing process, it was necessary to stop thinking about Opus 95 (which was not easy!) and to let the phrases, fragments, and particles coalesce to form a narrative structure related to my own experiences. I think I did that. As always, I must thank the musicians of the Brentano Quartet for once again handing me a great idea and for playing it brilliantly.
String Quartet No. 11 in F minor shostakovich Misha Amory The Beethoven Quartet was formed in 1923 by four young graduates of the Moscow Conservatory, and continued without a change of personnel for more than forty years. The Quartet had the privilege of knowing and working with Dmitri Shostakovich for decades, and the four premiered almost all of his string quartets; one might say they served collectively as his muse for chamber music. In 1965, the Quartet’s second violinist, Vasily Shirinsky, passed away. Shostakovich’s Eleventh String Quartet is dedicated to his memory. Not surprisingly, the music is heavily stamped with a sense of loss: reflective, brooding, austere. For many stretches of the piece, only one or two instruments are playing, a sparse use of texture that the composer will explore increasingly in his late quartets; and even when all four instruments are playing together, he overwhelmingly favors the opposition of one lone instrument against the other three in concert, almost as if to emphasize the idea of one colleague who has passed on, while three remain behind. The work is divided into seven movements, which are played without pause, one flowing into another. In a way, they even share DNA of a sort, as important motifs in each movement are based on the same narrow intervals. It is as if the same thinker is proceeding from movement to movement, inhabiting each changing mood. The Introduction pits two themes against one
another: an open, wending melody in the first violin and a denser, more closed response in the cello. The cello theme eventually morphs into a chant or choral idea that shuffles along in the lower three instruments as they respond to the first violin’s lonely calls. The mood is eloquent and clear, but expressively restrained. After several exchanges, the first violin turns a subtle corner and we find ourselves in the Scherzo, which is not as playful as the title might suggest. In a faster, lighter tempo, a fugal idea is passed numbly around the group. The texture is punctuated by incongruous slides up to glittering harmonics, clever but strangely wooden gestures. This is a scherzo of shadows, of the underworld, devoid of brightness or hope. After the scherzo dissolves into a single viola line, which eventually settles on a long open string, the central three movements are presented in quick succession. First, the terrifying Recitative, where the bottom three instruments slash their way down to a giant dissonant chord, and the first violin intones a brutal, mechanistic three-note idea overhead. A recitative in opera can be an outpouring of eloquence and communication: here Shostakovich uses the form to depict something quite opposite to that, an inarticulate bellowing, monolithic and forbidding. Following in exactly the same tempo, the Etude features a rapid spinning idea against a mournful chorale; but no sooner is the mood established than an enraged fortissimo response engulfs the texture. Very quickly this movement plays itself out, and gives way to the Humoreske, yet again in exactly the same
Program Notes, cont. tempo; in this tableau, the second violin has the role of crazed firebell, which jangles insistently while the other instruments exchange terse statements. This movement swiftly reaches a fever pitch, at which point the second violin retreats innocently and almost impersonally into the wings, alone. We now find ourselves at the crux of the matter, in the Elegy. Here the composer seems to address the departed one directly. Weighty dotted rhythms in the lower strings establish a funereal atmosphere in C-sharp minor; the second violin responds no less seriously, but in a quieter and more personal vein. After two such exchanges, the air seems suddenly to clear, and in the quietest tones yet, the first violin sings a wan melody, fragmentary and bereft. Later in the movement, this melody will become much stronger, reaching an anguished climax against the held bass note, which remains hushed, alien, unresponsive. Spent, the omnipresent C-sharp of the Elegy sinks down a half-step to a C-natural, and we are in the Finale, where at first it seems as if there is barely enough energy to continue; the music flows at a kind of minimum subsistence level. This is a movement of retrospection. Melodies from the Introduction and Scherzo are revisited, mulled over; distracted, the music turns from one tempo to a slightly different one; we are inside a mind which is taken up with remembering. Ultimately the first violin is cast up on a high, rocky ground, and proceeds to ascend ever higher, as the lower voices resign themselves to a benumbed F minor fate. There is no solace here, only a desolate truth, harsh, simple, and dimly lit.
String Quartet No. 6 in F minor mendelssohn Mark Steinberg “It would be difficult to cite any piece of music which so completely impresses the listener with a sensation of gloomy foreboding, of anguish of mind, and of the most poetic melancholy, as does this masterly and eloquent composition.” Thus Julius Benedict, who had known Felix Mendelssohn since they were both boys, described his friend’s last major composition, the F minor string quartet, Op. 80. Composed during the final months of the composer’s life, during the period in which Mendelssohn described his mood to a visitor as “gray on gray,” the creative impetus for this most dark and barren of works was the death of Mendelssohn’s deeply beloved sister, Fanny. She had died during a rehearsal of her brother’s Erste Walpurgisnacht; upon learning of her death two days after the fact, Mendelssohn shrieked and collapsed to the ground. The loss was to saturate the short remainder of the composer’s life with grief. To Fanny’s husband Felix wrote “if the sight of my handwriting checks your tears, put the letter away for we have nothing left now but to weep from our inmost hearts.” Having been convinced to travel to Switzerland for a rest, Mendelssohn spent his time painting watercolors, often featuring the famed covered bridge of Lucerne, the roof of which housed scenes of the Totentanz, the dance of death. It is also during this stay that the F minor quartet was composed. It was to be followed only by a few songs, the last of which closes
with the lines “only I suffer pain, I will suffer without end, since, most beloved, you must part from me and I from you.” It is surely no accident that the Op. 80 quartet is set in the key of Beethoven’s “Serioso” Quartet, Op. 95. It shares with that work an atmosphere of anguish and foreboding, although the enigmatic majorkey ending of Beethoven’s quartet finds no analogous music here, Mendelssohn’s work tenaciously clinging to the minor mode through its final chords, with no hint of catharsis to be had. Mendelssohn had always been a master of the agitato mood (for example the opening of the E minor quartet, Op. 44, No.2, or of either piano trio) but here it finds a new, more abstract quality, often divorced from melodic inspiration. The piece opens with a tremulous sense of portent, pure anxiety and unease. It is an inner storm, and the themes which follow wrestle with despair. The defiance of denial in the face of death is felt, as well as the suffering that reality brings. The first movement is unremittingly driven, unstable even in more lyrical moments. Mendelssohn is well known for his inimitable brand of scherzo, epitomized by the scherzo from the incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, evoking magical fairy dust and the dancing of sprites. The scherzo of the F minor quartet betrays no hint of such lightness; it is full of almost brutal syncopations and jarring stabs. Here it again brings to mind Beethoven’s Op. 95 scherzo, with its comparable vicious sense of terror. The texture of the trio section is spare and desolate,
with the lower instruments playing in octaves an almost passacaglia-like line while the violins play a ghostly tune above. If there is dancing of spirits here it is the dance of chthonic demons, gruesome and dark. The deeply felt slow movement may have been modeled after the monumental slow movement of Beethoven’s quartet Op. 59, No. 1, sharing its breadth and spacious sense of sadness. It is interesting to ponder whether Mendelssohn knew of the words Beethoven had written over the sketch for this movement, “a weeping willow or acacia tree on my brother’s grave.” It opens with a sinking bass line answered by a shivering sigh which begins the melodic material in the first violin. Melancholic acceptance and tender memory permeate the movement, with prevalent dotted rhythms resonating as the heartbeat of forsaken love. Rarely is any solidity to be found in the finale of this quartet, with menacingly rumbling figures underscoring the darting melodic lines. In fact the rumbling takes over the movement entirely at several points, an abstract trembling of the soul. This is distilled psychological disquiet, bereft of any human voice. Eventually a wild triplet rhythm appears in the first violin, a final desperate attempt to break free of the bleakness. The quartet ends, however, with anger and fist-shaking, raw and untransformed.
Oneppo Chamber Music Series 2019–2020 Season feb Zukerman Trio 18 Violinist Pinchas Zukerman, cellist Amanda Forsyth, and pianist Angela Cheng perform Beethoven’s “Kakadu” Variations; Arensky’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor; and Brahms’ Piano Trio No. 2 in C major.
About the Oneppo Chamber Music Series Chamber music is an integral part of the Yale School of Music, and this concert series presents many of the world’s leading concert artists on the stage of Morse Recital Hall.
Ever since Sprague Memorial Hall was built in 1917, it has been home to chamber mar Pamela Frank and Emanuel Ax music performances. The origins of this 31 Two of the most admired instrumentalists series can be traced to concerts organized on the international chamber music scene by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, widely perform Mozart’s Sonatas in G major, considered the godmother of chamber K. 379, and B-flat major, K. 454, and music in America. Beethoven’s Sonata No. 10, Op. 96. may Competition Winners 5 Performances by the winners of the School’s annual Chamber Music Competition.
Samplers
Free Student Tickets
Samplers are still available. Save up to 15% off single-ticket prices when you purchase a Pick 3 package.
For the Oneppo Chamber Music Series, Horowitz Piano Series, and Ellington Jazz Series, free student rush tickets will be offered at the box office for students with a valid ID. When available, tickets will be distributed starting thirty minutes before each concert. One ticket per ID, subject to availability.
Thank you for your support! Become a Yale School of Music patron and support our performance programs. Earn benefits ranging from preferred seating to invitations to special events. » music.yale.edu/patron-program
charles ives circle $600 & above Henry & Joan Binder Marc & Margaret Mann Clifford Slayman paul hindemith circle $250–$599 Laura & Victor Altshul Mr . & Mrs. Douglas Crowley Victoria Keator DePalma Patricia & Robert Jaeger Attys. Barbara & Ivan Katz Lisa Kugelman & Roy Wiseman Barbara & Bill Nordhaus Ray Fair & Sharon Oster Patty & Tom Pollard Josephine P. Shepard Lorraine D. Siggins Abby N. Wells horatio parker circle $125–$249 Anonymous Nina Adams & Moreson Kaplan David & Carolyn Belt Carolyn Gould Irene K. Miller Dr . Leonard E. Munstermann Kathryn & Peter Patrikis Dr. E. Anthony Petrelli Mary Jane & Steve Pincus Jules Prown Maryanne & Dean Rupp Joan A. Steitz David & Lisa Totman
List as of January 27, 2020
samuel simons sanford circle $50–$124 Anonymous (2) Susan S. Addiss Henry E. Auer Stephen August Irma & Bob Bachman Bill & Donna Batsford Richard & Nancy Beals Victor & Susan Bers Eric & Lou Ann Bohman Linda Burt Walter Cahn Judith Colton & Wayne Meeks Steven D. Fraade & Ellen D. Cohen Deborah Fried & Kalman Watsky Howard & Sylvia Garland Dr. Lauretta E. Grau Elizabeth Haas Robert & Noël Heimer In Memory of Jon T. Hirschoff Jay & Marjorie Hirshfield Alan & Joan Kliger Tom & Karen Kmetzo Judith & Karl-Otto Liebmann Ann Marlowe Janet Selzer Cis & Jim Serling Marcia & Richard Witten Werner & Elizabeth Wolf Dr . & Mrs. B. Zuckerman gustave j. stoeckel circle $25–$49 Kathryn Feidelson Eduardo Groisman Paul Guida & Pat LaCamera Karen & Mel Selsky Barbara & Michael Susman Priscilla Waters Norton
Upcoming Events feb 2
feb 12
Inspired by Song Collection of Musical Instruments Stefan Temmingh, recorders Dorothee Mields, soprano Michael Ducker, lute Domen Marincic, viola da gamba Wiebke Weidanz, harpsichord 7:00 pm | Morse Recital Hall Tickets $30, Museum Associates & Seniors & Yale Faculty/Staff $25, Students $15 Hung-Kuan Chen Horowitz Piano Series Faculty pianist Hung-Kuan Chen pays tribute to Beethoven with a performance of the composer’s last six sonatas. 7:00 pm | Morse Recital Hall Tickets start at $15, students $7
feb 14 Florencia en el Amazonas feb 15 Yale Opera feb 16 Christopher Franklin conducts the Yale Philharmonia and Candace Evans directs the cast in a new production of Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas. fri & sat 8 pm | sun 2 pm Shubert Theatre Tickets start at $19 • shubert.com
feb 15
Guitar Extravaganza A daylong immersion in the classical guitar, including concerts, workshops, demos, and more. Headline performance by David Russell. All-Day passes and 3-Concert passes available now. music.yale.edu/guitar-extravaganza
Sprague Concert Yale Philharmonia YSM conducting student Ryan Tani leads the Yale Philharmonia, with percussionist Ji Su Jung, in works by Kevin Puts, Prokofiev, and Beethoven. 7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall Tickets start at $12, Yale faculty/ staff $8, students free $3 surcharge at the door feb 28
mar 4
Lucille Chung and Alessio Bax Horowitz Piano Series A performance of the piano fourhands arrangement of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (arr. Ravel), and music by Lutoslawski and Poulenc. 7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall Tickets start at $23, students $11
yale school of music box office Sprague Memorial Hall | 470 College Street New Haven, CT 06511 203 432–4158 | music-tickets@yale.edu | Mon–Fri 11 am–2 pm wshu 91.1 fm is the media sponsor of the Yale School of Music facebook.com/yalemusic
@yalemusic
YaleSchoolofMusicOfficial
If you do not intend to save your program, please recycle it in the baskets at the exit doors.