The Nielsen Quartet Cycle - November 12, 2015

David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors

THE NIELSEN QUARTET CYCLE Thursday Evening, November 12, 2015 at 7:30 Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio 3,493rd Concert

DANISH STRING QUARTET FREDERIK ØLAND, violin RUNE TONSGAARD SØRENSEN, violin ASBJØRN NØRGAARD, viola FREDRIK SCHØYEN SJÖLIN, cello

2015-2016 Season

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 10th Floor New York, NY 10023 212-875-5788 www.ChamberMusicSociety.org

The Chamber Music Society expresses its deepest gratitude to Mrs. Robert Schuur for her extraordinary leadership support of String Quartet Cycles in the Rose.

Many donors support the artists of the Chamber Music Society Two program. This evening, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of William and Inger Ginsberg.

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THE NIELSEN QUARTET CYCLE Thursday Evening, November 12, 2015 at 7:30 DANISH STRING QUARTET FREDERIK ØLAND, violin RUNE TONSGAARD SØRENSEN, violin ASBJØRN NØRGAARD, viola FREDRIK SCHØYEN SJÖLIN, cello

CARL NIELSEN (1865-1931)

Quartet No. 1 in G minor for Strings, Op. 13 (1887-88) Allegro energico Andante amoroso Scherzo: Allegro molto Finale: Allegro (inquieto) ØLAND, TONSGAARD SØRENSEN, NØRGAARD, SCHØYEN SJÖLIN

NIELSEN

Quartet No. 2 in F minor for Strings, Op. 5 (1890) Allegro non troppo ma energico Un poco adagio Allegretto scherzando Finale: Allegro appassionato ØLAND, TONSGAARD SØRENSEN, NØRGAARD, SCHØYEN SJÖLIN

—Intermission— NIELSEN

Quartet No. 3 in E-flat major for Strings, Op. 14 (1897-98) Allegro con brio Andante sostenuto Allegretto pastorale—Presto Finale: Allegro coraggioso TONSGAARD SØRENSEN, ØLAND, NØRGAARD, SCHØYEN SJÖLIN

NIELSEN

Quartet No. 4 in F major for Strings, Op. 44 (1906, rev. 1919) Allegro non tanto e comodo Adagio con sentimento religioso Allegretto moderato ed innocente Finale: Molto adagio—Allegro non tanto, ma molto scherzoso ØLAND, TONSGAARD SØRENSEN, NØRGAARD, SCHØYEN SJÖLIN

notes on the

PROGRAM

People outside of Denmark know Carl Nielsen as an obscure composer of a couple of crazy symphonies and a handful of concertos. He is sometimes seen as a poor man's Sibelius, famous only as a big fish in the Danish pond.

For Danes, the story is quite different. Yes, we do like his symphonies and chamber music, and we honestly believe that he wrote the best clarinet concerto and woodwind quintet in the repertoire. But what we really know and love him for is his songs and hymns. Denmark is a country of singing. We sing in the churches, and we sing in our folk high schools that are spread all over the countryside. In our public schools we sing each morning to start the day. And Carl Nielsen gave us hundreds of songs to sing. Simple songs. Beautiful songs. Songs that are indeed very different from what we had before Carl Nielsen but still feel uncannily Danish to us.

So when we started our string quartet, we knew that we had to get our hands on the four string quartets of Carl Nielsen, and his Quartet no. 4 in F major was indeed amongst the very first quartets we learned. Later on, our first recording project was a recording of all his string quartets. Just as we grew up singing Nielsen's songs, we grew up as a string quartet playing his quartets.

In Carl Nielsen's string quartets we were happy to find some of the same traits as in his songs. Melodies that appear to be strange, illogical, and edgy, still come out as mellow as the Danish landscape (the highest altitude in Denmark is 168 m). Harmonies where you can't decide if they are simple or complicated. And progressions where each new chord is an unexpected but delightful surprise. These string quartets conjure up a world where the simple and the complex exist side by side.

We also found something else in the quartets that we as Danes related strongly to: humor, jokes, and irony. Nielsen has a Danish tendency to make a joke when things are getting a bit too pretentious. An epic climax is ended with a little trill in the viola, the cello insists on disturbing the violin melody with loud pizzicatos, and so on. As a quartet we believe it is possible to be deep and easygoing at the same time, and this is something we see mirrored in Nielsen's music.

All in all, we have lived with the string quartets by Nielsen since we started playing together in our early teens. We know them inside out. We know their strengths, and we know their flaws. We know where we have to help them a little bit, and we know where we can let the music help us. We are not perfect, they are certainly not either, but in the end, we always end up loving them, and we are happy and proud to be able to present all of them for the Chamber Music Society audience.

- Danish String Quartet

Quartet No. 1 in G minor for Strings, Op. 13 Carl NIELSEN Born June 9, 1865 in Odense, Denmark.

Died October 3, 1931 in Copenhagen.

Composed in 1887-88.

Premiered on March 26, 1889 in Copenhagen by the Private Chamber Music Society.

Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece.

Duration: 26 minutes Carl Nielsen was the seventh of twelve children born to a poor family in the small village of Sortelung on the Danish island of Funen. His father supported this ample brood by painting houses and playing cornet and violin for local social events, and young Carl started to fiddle with his father’s instruments when he was still a toddler. Enough money was squeezed from the household budget by the time the boy was six to buy him a three-quarter size violin, on which he received instruction at home and from a local schoolmaster.

Within a few years, Carl joined in his father’s musical activities, evincing a special fondness for improvising variations and counter-melodies to dance tunes; his earliest extant composition is a polka for violin. At 13, Nielsen was apprenticed to a grocer but that business soon went broke, so he auditioned for a military band in Odense and was accepted to play cornet, bugle, and trombone. In Odense, Nielsen picked up some music theory, taught himself the piano, and played violin in readings of string quartets

by Haydn, Mozart, and Onslow—his teen-age compositions, all for chamber ensembles of strings and piano, show the influence of those Classical models. By

1884, some affluent friends in Odense had recognized his talent, and they underwrote the cost of his education at the Copenhagen Conservatory, where he majored in violin and also studied theory, piano, and, with Niels Gade, history and composition. He completed the conservatory’s curriculum in 1886, but continued as a private student of his theory teacher, Orla Rosenhoff, while supporting himself as a freelance violinist in Copenhagen by performing in chamber concerts and with the orchestra at Tivoli Gardens. He began turning seriously to composition during that time by writing string quartets in 1887 in D minor and F major; a performance of the latter by the recently founded Privat Kammermusikforening (Private Chamber Music Society) on January 25, 1888 marked his public debut as a composer.

(Nielsen never published them and they are not considered among his mature quartets; the scores did not appear in print until 2003.) His first major success came with the premiere of the Little Suite for Strings by the Tivoli Orchestra on September 8, 1888. (A press release announcing the event referred to him as “a Mr. Carl Nielsen whom nobody knows.”)

The Copenhagen firm of Wilhelm Hansen confirmed Nielsen’s rise to prominence at the age of 23 by issuing the score of the Little Suite in 1889. It was his first published composition—Opus 1.

Nielsen worked on his String Quartet in G minor in 1887-88, while he was still eking out a living as a freelance violinist and teacher. The Privat Kammermusikforening performed the work on March 26, 1889 and repeated it on December 18th, three months after Nielsen had finally landed a steady job in the second violin section

of the Royal Danish Orchestra (a post he held for the next 16 years while earning his reputation as a leading figure in Danish music). He revised the G minor Quartet in 1896 and arranged for the public premiere of its definitive version on February 3, 1898 at Copenhagen’s Concert Palæ; Hansen published the score in 1900 as Nielsen’s Op. 13. (The Quartet in F minor, composed two years after the G minor, had been published in 1892 as his Op. 5, creating an anomaly between their chronology and numerical designations.)

“The String Quartet in G minor gave the greatest pleasure,” wrote a critic for the important Copenhagen daily Politiken of the concert. “It is fresher and more even [than his other works on the progam] and more often reveals the indisputable talent that we all know Carl Nielsen possesses.”

The quartet’s sonata-form opening movement takes an anxious, ascending strain as its main theme and a singing cello melody with a busy accompaniment in a brighter key as its subsidiary subject. The development section first deals with the anxious main theme before moving on to a wistful treatment of the cello’s singing

melody. The recapitulation includes a varied and extended version of the main subject and a somber setting of the lyrical second theme before the movement closes with a coda that recalls the anxious character of the opening. The tender outer portions of the second movement perfectly match its tempo marking—Andante amoroso—while the central section provides expressive contrast and formal balance with its agitated mood and dark harmonic colors. The Scherzo is indebted in style and spirit to Mendelssohn, a close friend of Nielsen’s teacher Niels Gade and his successor as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts following Mendelssohn’s sudden death in 1847. A Danish folk element is infused into the movement with the drone accompaniment and plain melody of the trio. The Finale, another sonata structure, is based on a strongly rhythmic, leaping main theme and a repeated-note secondary motive of gentler aspect. The somewhat prolix development section addresses just the first theme, which is also then properly recapitulated. The quartet closes with an energetic Résumé that recalls the principal themes of the first movement and the Scherzo as well as both motives of the Finale. 

Quartet No. 2 in F minor for Strings, Op. 5 Carl NIELSEN Composed in 1890.

Premiered on December 18, 1890 at the Königliche Hochschule für Musik in Berlin by violinists Fini Henriques and the composer, violist Frederik Schnedler-Petersen, and cellist Paul Morgan.

Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece.

Duration: 34 minutes

Early in 1890, Nielsen was awarded a generous grant from a private foundation to study Wagnerian music drama and other recent musical developments in Germany, and he managed to arrange a leave of absence from his regular job with the Royal Danish Orchestra for the 1890-91 season. The String Quartet in F minor was his principal creative focus during the first months of that sabbatical. He had completed the first movement by the time he left Copenhagen for Germany on September 3, 1890, and he

worked on the score in Dresden and Berlin, it.” Nielsen changed nothing. When the where he completed it in mid-November. Quartet in F minor was first performed in “There is nothing in the world to compare Copenhagen, on April 8, 1892, the critic with the feeling of happiness one has,” he Charles Kjærulf wrote in the city’s daily wrote to Orla Rosenhoff, his theory teacher Politiken, “Carl Nielsen is obviously a at the Copenhagen Conservatory, “when considerable talent…. [The quartet is] quite one’s work succeeds and grows day by day. a remarkable tour de force: so fertile and I have that feeling at present.” He rehearsed swelling that it truly warms one’s heart and the work during the following weeks with makes the blood course faster.” The score two Danes and an American also studying was issued as Nielsen’s Op. 5 before the end in Berlin that year: violinist Fini Henriques of the year by Wilhelm Hansen, Denmark’s (who became a member of the Royal Danish leading music publisher. It was the first of Orchestra and one of the most popular violin his string quartets to be published (the G soloists in Scandinavia), violist Frederik minor Quartet had been composed in 1887Schnedler-Petersen (later concertmaster 88 but it was not issued until 1900 as Op. and conductor of the Tivoli Orchestra), and 13) and became one of his most frequently cellist Paul Morgan (whose father founded performed chamber works. the Oberlin Conservatory); Nielsen himself The F minor Quartet is played the first violin part.

They premiered the F minor The F minor Quartet conventional in its formal Quartet at the Königliche is conventional in its plan but very much turn-ofHochschule für Musik formal plan but very the-20th-century in its style on December 18th in the much turn-of-the-20th- and harmonic language. The presence of the school’s century in its style and sonata form of the opening Allegro is based on a founder and director, harmonic language. stormy main theme of short the celebrated violinist, composer, and conductor (of the Berlin phrases and sharply dotted rhythms and a Philharmonic) Joseph Joachim, for whom songful secondary subject begun by the Brahms had written his Violin Concerto cello. The development section is largely 12 years before. Nielsen was anxious derived from motives of the second theme for (and about) the venerable musician’s before the music again takes up the sterner opinion of his new quartet—Joachim was matters of the principal subject to start the then almost 60 and had been shaping the recapitulation. The lyrical second subject Hochschule into one of Europe’s leading returns in the viola, and the movement music schools for over 20 years—and closes with an emphatic coda recalling the the 25-year-old composer confided to his stormy motive of the beginning. Expressive diary on the evening of the premiere that contrast arrives with the second movement, Joachim “thought much of it was ‘frightful’ which takes a tender, almost hymnal but praised me greatly for the places he melody as the subject of the outer sections liked.” Following a private meeting about that frame a central episode of greater the new piece a few days later, Joachim intensity. The third movement is more an suggested some changes but then went intermezzo than a scherzo, lithe in texture on to say, “Well, my dear Mr. Nielsen, and playful rather than driven in character; perhaps I am just an old Philistine. Write as the central trio, with its drone bass and you wish, as long as that is how you feel sunny, dance-like melody, provides the

quartet with its only overtly folkish passage.

The Finale mirrors the sonata form of the first movement, with a tense, dotted-rhythm main theme and a lyrical second subject (initiated by the first violin), though here the latter is given a more anxious quality by the sliding chromatic lines of the second

violin and viola. Motives from both themes are freely treated in the development. The recapitulation of the exposition’s materials leads to a forceful epilogue that uses quicktempo transformations of the main theme that maintain the quartet’s serious demeanor to its final gestures. 

Quartet No. 3 in E-flat major for Strings, Op. 14 Carl NIELSEN Composed in 1897-98.

Premiered on May 1, 1899 in Copenhagen by violinists Anton Svendsen and Ludvig Holm, violist Frederik Marke, and cellist Ejler Jensen.

Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece.

Duration: 30 minutes

In the spring of 1891, during his year’s leave of absence from the Royal Danish Orchestra, Nielsen made a swing through Paris to immerse himself in the artistic riches of that great city. Paris worked its charms on him, and so did a young Danish sculptress, Anne Marie Broderson, who was studying there that year—they were married just a month after they first met and honeymooned in Italy to indulge their shared interest in art. When they returned to Copenhagen that summer, Nielsen was inspired to compose his First Symphony, which he dedicated to his bride.

Nielsen spent the summer of 1897 helping his in-laws run their farm in Thygesminde in southern Jutland while Anne Marie stayed in Copenhagen to

work on a commission for an equestrian statue for the city’s new town hall. When he could spare time from the hay and the heifers, he began planning Saul and David, his first opera, and undertook his String Quartet in E-flat major. The opening movement of the quartet was sketched that summer and completed in Copenhagen in December, but Nielsen could not return to the work until the next year, when it was largely completed at Thygesminde. (The farm was sold the following year, ending Nielsen’s brief career in agriculture.) The quartet was performed privately in Copenhagen on May 1, 1899 at the recently established Vor Forening (Our Society) and first given publicly on October 4, 1899 at the Odd Fellows Hall on the inaugural concert of an ensemble founded by Georg Høeberg, Louis Witzansky, Anton Bloch, and Ernest Høeberg.

The E-flat Quartet opens with an expansive, exuberant main theme that arches through the violin’s highest register above a contrapuntal fabric whose richly woven texture obtains through much of the work. A complementary motive of more subdued character is worked into a transition leading to the subsidiary theme, a flowing, pastoral melody first sung by the cello that

recurs in a heroic transformation after some discussion. A restatement of the main theme (unusually, in the tonic key) begins the development section, which is based largely on that idea and the exposition’s complementary motive.

A full recapitulation of the earlier themes and a triumphant coda round out the movement.

The Andante sostenuto, the quartet’s expressive heart, is based on a hymnal theme with modal inflections presented by the violin following a pensive introduction. The mood grows more intense as the music unfolds before quieting for a recall of the hymnal melody. The central episode is an extended passage of precise counterpoint of rising intensity, after which the movement concludes with a beatific reprise of the hymnal theme by the cello wound about with delicate tracery in the first violin.

The third movement is a formal surprise—the outer sections (Allegretto pastorale) are mild-mannered and playful, perhaps Nielsen’s analog to the intermezzos Brahms was fond of using instead of a traditional muscular scherzo, but the central trio is a stormy, driving Presto that contrasts sharply with the halcyon surrounding music. The mildmannered theme returns, oblivious to what has just happened.

The sonata-form Finale takes as its thematic materials a high-spirited march tune (Allegro coraggioso [courageously]) and a lyrical subject of small melodic leaps. The development begins with an extraordinary passage that transforms the opening march tune into a pizzicato fugue before turning to more conventional treatment of both exposition themes. A full recapitulation and a supercharged imitative coda based on the march theme bring the quartet to a rousing close. 

Quartet No. 4 in F major for Strings, Op. 44 Carl NIELSEN Composed in 1906, revised in 1919.

Premiered on November 30, 1907 at the Odd Fellows Hall in Copenhagen by the Copenhagen String Quartet.

First CMS performance on February 20, 2015.

Duration: 26 minutes Nielsen’s reputation had become so fixed in Danish musical life by 1905 that the prestigious publishing firm of Wilhelm Hansen signed him to a contract that provided him with a regular income

and allowed him to quit his job with the Royal Danish Orchestra to devote himself to composition. By that time, he had already begun Maskarade, an ambitious opera based on a comedy by Ludwig Holberg that evokes the life and manners of 18th-century Danish society, which was successfully premiered at the Royal Theater in Copenhagen in November 1906. As he was completing Maskarade early in 1906, he undertook a new string quartet, a genre he had not broached for nearly a decade. The Quartet in F major mirrored the sunny mood and clear forms of Maskarade, and Nielsen labeled the opening movement Piacevolezza: Allegro piacevole ed

indolente (Pleasantly: Fast, agreeable and lazy), the title under which it was premiered on November 30, 1907 by the Copenhagen String Quartet, to whom the score is dedicated. He withheld the work from publication until 1919 and issued it in a revised version that replaced the earlier lighthearted title with the austere generic name and inflated its original numbering—Op. 19—to Op. 44.

The F major Quartet’s opening movement derives all of the motivic material for its sonata form from the waltz-like main theme and the delicate, filigreed second subject. Nielsen’s harmonic originality is apparent throughout, while his skill at imitative counterpoint receives ample display in the expansive development section. The essential expressive character of the second movement is distilled in its tempo marking—Adagio con sentimento religioso—though the music balances the chorale with which it is framed with sterner sentiments in its central passages. The third movement is built around the melancholy opening tune

and an arching strain given later, both by the first violin. Though its style is that of a leisurely intermezzo rather than a boisterous scherzo, humorous touches abound: coy harmonic slippages; teasing grace notes; furious jack-in-the box repeated notes that pop out of nowhere; a wandering passage in which nobody seems to know what to do until the violin again tries out the melancholy tune they had all liked at the start. (The last is an ingenious device for recapitulation, one that Nielsen might have learned from Joseph Haydn.) The Finale opens with a few bold chords before launching into its sonata form, which takes a vivacious, playful melody as its main theme and a broad, lyrical subject introduced by the cello as its second. The central section begins with a fugue on a winding, chromatic subject before moving on to a proper development of the exposition’s materials. A tiny violin cadenza and a pianissimo reprise of the opening chords bridge to the recapitulation and the  quartet’s bracing conclusion.

©2015 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

meet tonight’s

ARTISTS

The Danish String Quartet is in demand worldwide by concert and festival presenters alike, with its technical and interpretive talents matched by an infectious joy for music-making and “rampaging energy,” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker). Since making its debut in 2002 at the Copenhagen Festival, the group of musical friends has demonstrated a passion for Scandinavian composers, who they frequently incorporate into adventurous contemporary programs, while also proving skilled and profound performers of the classical masters. In 2012 the New York Times selected the quartet’s concert as a highlight of the year, saying the performance featured “one of the most powerful renditions of Beethoven’s Opus 132 String Quartet that I’ve heard live or on a recording.” This scope of talent secured the ensemble a three-year appointment in the Chamber Music Society Two program that began in the 2013-14 season. The quartet was also named as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist for 2013-15.

The Danish String Quartet's 2015-16 season includes a release of its debut disc on ECM Records, a first-time tour of China as well as summer performances at the Mostly Mozart Festival, Maverick Concerts, Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, Toronto Summer Music Festival, and Ottawa Chamberfest. International highlights include concerts in Berlin, Copenhagen, Glasgow, London, and a debut at the Louvre Museum in Paris. In addition to its New York performances, the quartet’s robust schedule takes it around North America this season, including two weeks of residency activities and performances at the University of California, Berkeley. The quartet will make its debut at the Savannah Music Festival in spring 2016.

Since winning the Danish Radio P2 Chamber Music Competition in 2004, the quartet has been greatly desired throughout Denmark and in October 2015 it presented the ninth annual DSQ-Festival, a four-day event held in Copenhagen that brings together musical friends the quartet has met on its travels. In 2009 the Danish String Quartet won first prize in the 11th London International String Quartet Competition; the competition is now called the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition and the Danish String Quartet has performed at the famed hall on several occasions. The quartet was awarded the 2010 NORDMETALL-Ensemble Prize at the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival in Germany and, in 2011, received the prestigious Carl Nielsen Prize.

In 2006, the Danish String Quartet was Danish Radio’s Artist-in-Residence, giving it the opportunity to record all of Carl Nielsen's string quartets in the Danish Radio Concert Hall, subsequently released to critical acclaim on the Dacapo label in 2007 and 2008. Last year the quartet launched its recording of Danish folk songs entitled Wood Works, released by the Dacapo label and distributed by Naxos, at SubCulture in New York. It was selected by NPR as one of the best classical albums of 2014 and the quartet was featured on an NPR Tiny Desk Concert performing works from the highly acclaimed album. The ensemble recorded works by Brahms and Fuchs with

award-winning clarinetist Sebastian Manz at the Bayerische Rundfunk in Munich, released by AVI-music in 2014.

Violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and violist Asbjørn Nørgaard met as children at a music summer camp where they played both football and music together, eventually making the transition into a serious string quartet in their teens and studying at Copenhagen’s Royal Academy of Music. In 2008 the three Danes were joined by Norwegian cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin. The Danish String Quartet was primarily taught and mentored by Professor Tim Frederiksen and has participated in master classes with the Tokyo and Emerson String Quartets, Alasdair Tait, Paul Katz, Hugh Maguire, Levon Chilingirian, and Gábor Takács-Nagy.

Thanks to Millbrook Vineyards & Winery, official wine sponsor of Rose Studio Concerts.

upcoming

EVENTS

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE VIOLIN

Sunday, November 15, 5:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall Experience a program that celebrates the zenith of the expressive violin style epitomized by the legendary Fritz Kreisler.

ROSE STUDIO CONCERT

Thursday, November 19, 6:30 PM • Daniel & Joanna S. Rose Studio Featuring works by Mozart and Fauré.

LATE NIGHT ROSE

Thursday, November 19, 9:00 PM • Daniel & Joanna S. Rose Studio Featuring works by Mozart and Fauré, with guest host Fred Child.

This event will also be streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/watchlive