The Kirchner String Quartet Cycle - May 19, 2016

David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors

THE KIRCHNER STRING QUARTET CYCLE Thursday Evening, May 19, 2016 at 7:30 Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio 3,589th Concert

ORION STRING QUARTET DANIEL PHILLIPS, violin TODD PHILLIPS, violin STEVEN TENENBOM, viola TIMOTHY EDDY, 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

On this final concert of String Quartet Cycles in the Rose, the Chamber Music Society extends its deepest gratitude to Mrs. Robert Schuur for her extraordinary leadership support of this series.

This concert is made possible, in part, by the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation.

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

THE KIRCHNER STRING QUARTET CYCLE Thursday Evening, May 19, 2016 at 7:30 ORION STRING QUARTET DANIEL PHILLIPS, violin TODD PHILLIPS, violin STEVEN TENENBOM, viola TIMOTHY EDDY, cello

LEON KIRCHNER

(1919-2009)

Quartet No. 1 for Strings (1949) Allegro ma non troppo Adagio Divertimento Adagio

KIRCHNER

Quartet No. 2 for Strings (1958) Moderato Adagio Allegro molto

—Intermission— KIRCHNER

Quartet No. 3 for Strings and Electronic Tape (1966)

KIRCHNER

Quartet No. 4 for Strings (2006) (CMS Co-Commission)

This evening's event is being streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive Photographing, sound recording, or videotaping this performance is prohibited.

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notes on the

PROGRAM

Leon Kirchner’s musical outlook is very much inspired by his mentor Arnold Schoenberg, who said that “music is only meaningful if it arises from the unconscious.” The experience of playing and listening to Leon’s music is intense. Every gesture is laden with deep meaning and every harmony is infused with exquisite beauty. His music often moves very quickly, so both the performer and listener are compelled to concentrate unusually keenly. What attracts us to Leon’s music, as interpreters, is the kind of deep authenticity of feeling behind every note that one finds in the music of the great composers of the past. The challenges of playing his music are the lightning fast interplay among the instruments, along with great freedom and flexibility of tempo.

All our efforts are attempts at emulating the miraculous utterance of Leon’s fingers on the keyboard when he played his own music.

—Orion String Quartet

about

LEON KIRCHNER

American composer, conductor, and pianist Leon Kirchner was born on January 24, 1919 in Brooklyn, New York into a family of Russian Jewish émigrés. When he was nine, the family moved to Los Angeles, where he studied piano with Richard Buhlig and John Crown before entering Los Angeles City College as a pre-med student. He took classes in harmony at the school and began composing, and Crown introduced him to Ernst Toch, the noted Austrian-born composer then teaching at the University of Southern California, who convinced him to abandon his medical curriculum and study with him and with Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA. Kirchner transferred to the University of California at Berkeley in 1938, and received his undergraduate degree from the school two years later. He then returned to Los Angeles for further work with Schoenberg before studying privately with Ernest Bloch in San Francisco and Roger Sessions in New York. In 1946, following three years of active military service during World War II, Kirchner settled in Berkeley to finish his master’s degree and to lecture at the university. A Guggenheim Grant in 1950 enabled him to travel to New York, where his String Quartet No. 1 gained him his first wide notice after it received the New York Music Critics Circle Award. Between 1950 and 1954, Kirchner served on the faculty of USC, and subsequently taught at Mills College in Oakland, California, and, from 1961 until his retirement in 1989, at Harvard, where he also directed the Harvard Chamber Players and Harvard Chamber Orchestra.

Kirchner held residencies at the Marlboro Music Festival (where he supervised the Rockefeller Contemporary Music Program from 1963 to 1973), American Academy in Rome, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and Tanglewood Music Center. His many distinctions included the Pulitzer Prize (for the 1966 String Quartet No. 3), Naumburg Award, Friedheim Award (1992, for Music for Cello and Orchestra), and

election to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died on September 17, 2009 in New York City.

Kirchner’s creative output includes the opera Lily (1977, based on Saul Bellow’s Henderson, the Rain King), two piano concertos, a flute concerto, a cello concerto, a concerto for violin and cello, a half-dozen independent orchestral scores, four string quartets and several other chamber pieces, three piano sonatas, and a few smaller keyboard works, and songs on texts of Whitman, Wordsworth, Dickinson, and García-Lorca. Kirchner’s professional training exposed him to some of the most potent personalities and creative theories of early-20th-century music: the serialism of Schoenberg, the Hebraic lyricism of Bloch, the impeccable craftsmanship of Sessions. He learned from those modern masters, as well as from the music of Bartók, Berg, Mahler, and others, but he did not forsake his own creative identity for any of their styles. “An artist must create a personal cosmos,” according to Kirchner, “a verdant world in continuity with tradition, further fulfilling man’s ‘awareness,’ his ‘degree of consciousness,’ and bringing new subtilization, vision, and beauty to the elements of experience. It is in this way that Idea, powered by conviction and necessity, will create its own style and the singular, momentous structure capable of realizing its intent.” 

Quartet No. 1 for Strings Leon KIRCHNER

Born January 24, 1919 in Brooklyn, New York.

Died September 17, 2009 in New York City.

Composed in 1949.

Premiered on March 26, 1950 in New York City by the Juilliard Quartet.

First CMS performance on March 7, 2007.

Duration: 19 minutes Kirchner’s String Quartet No. 1 won the New York Critics’ Circle Award as the best new chamber work of the season after the Juilliard Quartet premiered it at a League of Composers concert in New York on March 26, 1950; it was the 31-year-old composer’s first wide public recognition. Kirchner said that at the time he “was steeped in Bartók.

His quartets were in my blood,” and the evidences in the music include not just the wide variety of unusual playing styles (pizzicato, col legno [tapping the strings with the wood of the bow], glisses, harmonics, mutes, ponticello [a glassy sound produced by bowing at the bridge of the instrument]), mixed meters, and some surprisingly Slavic sounding phrases but also the thorough motivic development and the intensity and immediacy of expression. “Do you realize what you have done?” Kirchner was asked after the premiere by Joseph Szigeti, the great Hungarian violinist who was a close friend and frequent recital partner of Bartók. “You have written Bartók’s Seventh Quartet!”

Kirchner outlined the progress of the Quartet No. 1: “The first movement (Allegro ma non troppo) is divided into four sections. The first section contains two expositions of thematic

material presented in the opening measures. The second section contrasts this material harmonically, metrically, and structurally. The third section is a pre-recapitulation of the modified introductory material and the final section combines the functions of recapitulation and coda. The second movement (Adagio) is an outgrowth of a detail in the original thematic material.

It has one principal theme built from

various alterations of the interval of a third, first introduced by the cello.

The third movement is a scherzo with obligatory trio. The finale (Adagio) serves as a recapitulatory movement in which character and tempo relationships are largely modified. The final section of this movement presents the opening thematic idea in a new and closing ambience.” 

Quartet No. 2 for Strings Leon KIRCHNER Composed in 1958.

Premiered on November 23, 1959 in New York City by the Lenox String Quartet.

First CMS performance on March 7, 2007.

Duration: 16 minutes The String Quartet No. 2, composed in 1958 and premiered in New York by the Lenox String Quartet on November 23, 1959, won for Kirchner his second New York Critics’ Circle Award. As the Quartet No. 1 orbits the sound world of Bartók, so the Second Quartet evokes the music of Kirchner’s teacher Schoenberg, not in employing twelvetone technique (it doesn’t), but in the extrapolation of the music from a few cells of intervals (with the subtle but powerful formal integrity that this method provides), the meticulous working-out of each event, the freedom from conventional tonality, and the complex but crystalline counterpoint.

Richard Franko Goldman, composer, conductor, teacher at Juilliard, director

of the Peabody Conservatory, and one of his generation’s most perceptive critics of contemporary music (and still fondly remembered by some as director of the Goldman Band concerts in Central Park), wrote of Kirchner’s Quartet No. 2 in the Musical Quarterly, “The sounds unfold with convincing logic. He achieves delicate and beautiful sounds…. It is, I think, a major achievement to appear to be able to dispense with formulas, either of acceptance or avoidance, and to write a fresh kind of sound dictated by instinct alone. In any case, it shows complete independence and maturity on the part of the composer.”

The quartet’s opening movement is framed at beginning and end by a single measure of quiet, slow, suspended harmonies that introduce the smallinterval cells from which much of the music is generated. The participants muse on these cells briefly, play the opening gesture again (transposed higher), and then launch into a lengthy development of them that is by turns vigorous and thoughtful. Just before the end, the intensity subsides and the opening measure is heard once more (at

its original pitch) before the movement drifts upward to an ethereal close. The Adagio is largely meditative, at times even rhapsodic, but passes through an episode of intense expression near its mid-point. The finale reserves the expressive progression of the Adagio,

and ingeniously so, by quoting a passage from the slow movement at its center—a lyrical line arching through the high register of the first violin, preceded by rustling figures in cello, viola, and then second violin—to counter the driving, forceful music that surrounds it. 

Quartet No. 3 for Strings and Electronic Tape Leon KIRCHNER Composed in 1966.

Premiered on January 27, 1967 in New York City by the Beaux Arts String Quartet.

First CMS performance on March 7, 2007.

Duration: 17 minutes Of his Quartet No. 3 for Strings and Electronic Tape, winner of the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Music, Kirchner wrote, “Before beginning my Third String Quartet I gave considerable thought to the particular attributes of electronic music. The electronic medium is frequently spoken of as being absolutely unlimited in possibility. In general, I would say that music has gained new insights from the manipulations of electronic sounds, but the supposed lack of limitation is really quite deceptive. Theoretically, it would seem to be unlimited, and yet I think this is the area which is most problematic— and with computers, even more so. By a third, if not second, performance of even an exemplary electronic piece, one develops a certain listener’s fatigue ... it could be boredom. There is no ‘characteristic limit’ or instant accommodation to a brilliant whim or

‘accident.’ The subtle manifestations that are subject to human control in the great performer have little or no life at all in the electronic medium.

“More interesting to me are combinations of instruments with electronic sounds and filters. The instrumental qualities are then somehow reflected, extended, and enlarged. ‘Human involvement’ is, of course, essential, for the problems of composition remain the primary factors.

My Third Quartet was written with all of this in mind. I set out to produce a meaningful confrontation between ‘new’ electronic sounds and those of the traditional string quartet—a kind of dialogue-idea in which the electronics are quite integral.

“There is a great deal of talk these days about systems analysis, determination of rules, and so forth, but the act of total involvement of physical and spiritual play, seems to be forgotten.

Rules are valuable, and, with proper understanding, we can construct models from which invaluable information may be inferred. However, the adequacy of a rule is entirely dependent upon highly refined and sensitive observation, and, given an adequate rule, we must also understand that the variables (a most productive area) are difficult to ‘cover.’

When we grasp a fact by describing it, there is no reason to assume that we have understood the total phenomenon.

One of the naïve assumptions in the construction of computer music, for instance, is that if one programs the parameters (duration, density, pitch, etc., etc.) music should result. Granted competence in techniques, it is their use that is essential—and their artistic use depends on the vast and total memory bank of the human mind. In this sense, though the electronic sounds in my quartet took four days to write, the notes took 40 years.

“Music is an art, not a science. The recent, almost exclusive involvement with the ‘substantive’ and the craze for ‘verification’ or ‘causal explanation’ seems to me to fossilize that art and make it bloodless. This is what I’ve always tried to avoid. My Quartet No. 3 is not concerned with systems, rules, procedures—or that monstrosity known as ‘total control.’ I composed the work because of sheer musical urge.

It was fun, and while I composed it I was very conscious of the joy of creating music.” 

Quartet No. 4 for Strings Leon KIRCHNER CMS co-commission; composed in 2006.

Premiered on August 6, 2006 in San Diego by the Orion String Quartet.

First CMS performance on March 7, 2007.

Duration: 11 minutes Of his String Quartet No. 4, jointly commissioned for the Orion String Quartet by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, La Jolla Music Society, and Santa Fe Music Festival, Kirchner wrote, “During my student days, I had the privilege of studying theory with Arnold Schoenberg. He was one of the great masters of the structure and function of ‘the theoretical’ in music of past centuries, in its ‘process’ in the works of Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Bach, Mozart, Mahler, Bruckner, Debussy, etc., etc.—and yet he was the master of twelve-tone music,

particularly in its practice. ‘Twelve-tone what? System?’ He disliked this word intensely and substituted ‘technique’ (twelve-tone technique).

“Schoenberg’s works have not lost their communicative power nor their gestalt (the singular formal structure), and as stated by Paul Rosenfield in the early 1920s, Schoenberg ‘is ... one of the exquisites among musicians....

Since Debussy no one has written daintier, frailer, more diaphanous music. The solo cello in Serenade is beautiful as scarcely anything in the new music is beautiful.’ I remember as well Schoenberg himself in a class I attended saying, despite his profound involvement in ‘twelve tone,’ that ‘One can still write a masterpiece in C major, given the talent for composition.’

“Composition itself has grown too difficult, desperately difficult. Where work and sincerity no longer agree, how is one to work? But so it is, my

friend—the masterpiece, the structure in equilibrium, belongs to traditional art, emancipated art disavows it. The matter has its beginnings in your having no right of command whatsoever over all former combinations of tones. The diminished seventh, an impossibility; certain chromatic passing notes, an impossibility. Every better composer bears within him a canon of what is forbidden, of what forbids itself, which by now embraces the very means of tonality, and thus all traditional music.... The diminished seventh is right and eloquent at the opening of Opus 111. It corresponds to Beethoven’s general technical niveau [level], does it not?.... The principle of tonality and its dynamics lend the chord its specific weight. Which it has lost—through historical process no one can reverse.

“So once again theory and practice have gone their separate ways, guided by ‘historical process.’ In this case the Devil sells a new theory to a composer of genius, Adrian Leverkühn (presumably Arnold Schoenberg), in Thomas Mann’s great novel Dr. Faustus. This becomes a symbol of the breakdown of society and culture which occurred in the 20th century. But as usual—even in the great ones, such as Palladio, Schoenberg, et al.—their theories hardly begin to ‘cover’ their works or the misrepresentations of their works. The most recent example is the

dethroned theorist Derrida: ‘no piece of writing is exactly what it seems’ and is ‘laden with ambiguities, contradictions.’

One can speculate interestingly on the reversal in Palladio’s heavenly derangement of his theories in his actual works, not in his drawings, leaving us with the overwhelming impression that something of greatest importance is missing in his theories.

“I decided not to take the Devil’s advice.

In the Fourth Quartet, I pursued further this intricate and profound connection between past and present, and, utilizing what I have learned concerning the characteristic elements of contemporary music, I have experimented with the idea that Schoenberg tossed out: ‘One can still write a masterpiece in C.’ Whether this is possible or not, it is certainly a worthy trial, a pursuit that Schoenberg, despite his reverence for the work and changes he made in his own music, using his own technique and vast reservoir of the knowledge of the art of composition of music before he established his twelve-tone technique, revealed in pieces like the Chamber Symphony, Op. 38. Whether or not this is successful in my piece is unknown to me at present. It was a seductive idea, one that I have been pursuing of late, to possibly reveal the necessary intimacies between the past and present which keep  the art of music alive and well.”

© 2016 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

meet tonight’s

ARTISTS

Since its inception, the Orion String Quartet has been consistently praised for the extraordinary musical integrity it brings to performances, offering diverse programs that juxtapose classic works of the standard quartet literature with masterworks by 20th and 21st century composers. The quartet remains on the cutting edge of programming with wide-ranging commissions from composers Chick Corea, Brett Dean, David Del Tredici, Alexander Goehr, Thierry Lancino, John Harbison, Leon Kirchner, Marc Neikrug, Lowell Liebermann, Peter Lieberson, and Wynton Marsalis, and enjoys a creative partnership with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. The members of the Orion String Quartet—violinists Daniel Phillips and Todd Phillips (brothers who share the first violin chair equally), violist Steven Tenenbom, and cellist Timothy Eddy—have worked closely with such legendary figures as Pablo Casals, Sir András Schiff, Rudolf Serkin, Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman, Peter Serkin, members of TASHI and the Beaux Arts Trio, as well as the Budapest, Végh, Galimir and Guarneri string quartets. The Orion performs regularly with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and is quartet-in-residence at New York's Mannes College of Music.

The Orion String Quartet opened its 2015-16 season in August by joining the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival performing the Dohnányi Piano Quintet with Haochen Zheng, Beethoven’s Quartet in E-flat, Op. 127, Dvořák’s Quartet in G major, and the world premiere of the Neikrug Guitar Quintet with Lukasz Kuropaczewski. In winter 2016, the ensemble appeared with the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society featuring the Mozart Oboe Quartet in F with Richard Woodhams, and with the Pittsburgh Chamber Music Society joined by violist Catherine Cho and cellist Marcy Rosen. The quartet visited the University of Southern California as teaching artists in February 2016 and performed Haydn’s Seven Last Words during its residency. The Orion String Quartet joined CMS on Tour at the University of Georgia-Athens in November 2015, where the program included works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The quartet continued with The Chamber Music Society in February 2016 with an all-Beethoven program in Alice Tully Hall. The ensemble celebrated its 25th anniversary in the 2012-13 season with a collaboration involving the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at New York City’s Joyce Theater for a special two-week project featuring musical excerpts and arrangements of works by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Ravel, and Schubert. WQXR’s The Greene Space presented a live broadcast of the collaboration with performance and conversation by the quartet and Bill T. Jones.

Heard on National Public Radio's Performance Today, the Orion has also appeared on PBS's Live from Lincoln Center, A&E's Breakfast with the Arts, and three times on ABC-TV's Good Morning America. Additionally, the quartet was photographed with Drew Barrymore by Annie Leibovitz for the April 2005 issue of Vogue. Formed in 1987, the quartet chose its name from the Orion constellation

as a metaphor for the unique personality each musician brings to the group in its collective pursuit of the highest musical ideals.

Violinist Daniel Phillips enjoys a versatile career as an established chamber musician, solo artist, and teacher. A graduate of Juilliard, his major teachers were Ivan Galamian, Sally Thomas, Nathan Milstein, Sandor Vegh, and George Neikrug. Since winning the 1976 Young Concert Artists Auditions, he has been an emerging artist who has performed as a soloist with numerous symphonies; this season marks his concerto debut with the Yonkers Symphony. He appears regularly at the Spoleto Festival USA, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, Chesapeake Music Festival, and the International Musicians Seminar in Cornwall, England. He was a member of the renowned Bach Aria Group, and has toured and recorded in a string quartet for SONY with Gidon Kremer, Kim Kashkashian, and Yo-Yo Ma. He is a professor at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College and on the faculties of the Mannes College of Music, Bard College Conservatory, and The Juilliard School.

Todd Phillips has performed as a guest soloist with leading orchestras throughout North America, Europe, and Japan including the Pittsburgh Symphony, New York String Orchestra, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, with which he made a critically acclaimed recording of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for Deutsche Grammophon. He has appeared at the Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Santa Fe, Marlboro, and Spoleto festivals, and with Chamber Music at the 92nd Street Y and New York Philomusica. He has collaborated with such renowned artists as Rudolf Serkin, Jaime Laredo, Richard Stoltzman, Peter Serkin, and Pinchas Zukerman and has participated in 18 Musicians from Marlboro tours. He has recorded for the Arabesque, Delos, Deutsche Grammophon, Finlandia, Marlboro Recording Society, New York Philomusica, RCA Red Seal, and SONY Classical labels.

Violist Steven Tenenbom has established a distinguished career as chamber musician, soloist, recitalist, and teacher. He has worked with composer Lukas Foss and jazz artist Chick Corea, and has appeared as a guest artist with such ensembles as the Guarneri and Emerson string quartets, and the KalichsteinLaredo-Robinson trio. He has performed as a soloist with the Utah Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, and Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, and toured with the Brandenburg Ensemble throughout the United States and Japan. His festival credits include Mostly Mozart, Aspen, Ravinia, Marlboro, June Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, Music from Angel Fire, and Bravo! Vail Valley. A former member of the Galimir Quartet, he is currently a member of the piano quartet OPUS ONE. He and his wife, violinist Ida Kavafian, live in Connecticut where they breed, raise, and show champion Vizsla purebred dogs.

Cellist Timothy Eddy has earned distinction as a recitalist, orchestral soloist, chamber musician, recording artist, and teacher. He has performed with such

symphonies as Dallas, Colorado, Jacksonville, North Carolina, and Stamford, and has appeared at the Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Aspen, Marlboro, Lockenhaus, Spoleto, and Sarasota music festivals. He has won prizes in numerous national and international competitions, including the 1975 Gaspar Cassado International Violoncello Competition in Italy. Mr. Eddy was frequently a faculty member at the Isaac Stern Chamber Music Workshops at Carnegie Hall. A former member of the Galimir Quartet, the New York Philomusica, and the Bach Aria Group, he collaborates in recital with pianist Gilbert Kalish. He has recorded a wide range of repertoire from Baroque to avant-garde for the Angel, Arabesque, Columbia, CRI, Delos, Musical Heritage, New World, Nonesuch, Vanguard, Vox, and SONY Classical labels.

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Wednesday, July 6, 7:30 PM • Sunday, July 10, 5:00 PM • Wendesday, July 13, 7:30 PM

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Hear more from CMS this season

upcoming

EVENTS

STRAUSS, BRAHMS, & DVOŘÁK

Sunday, May 22, 5:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall Tuesday, May 24, 7:30 PM • Alice Tully Hall The CMS season comes to a close with the sumptuous sonority of multiple strings, the perfect vehicle for the boundless romantic expressions of Strauss, Dvořák, and Brahms.

CHAMBER MUSIC ENCOUNTERS

Saturday, June 18, 3:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall In a culminating performance of a week-long collaboration between promising young musicians and an incomparable faculty of artists, hear rising stars of the chamber music world in this free Alice Tully Hall concert.

SUMMER EVENINGS

Wednesday, July 6, 7:30 PM • Alice Tully Hall Two magisterial works—Mozart's quintet for horn and strings and Brahms' B-flat sextet—frame Mendelssohn's effervescent string quartet in D major.