Britten I: Through the Looking Glass

BRITTEN I

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS Thursday Evening, October 25, 2012 at 7:30 Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio 3,157th Concert

ESCHER STRING QUARTET

ADAM BARNETT-HART, violin

AARON BOYD, violin

PIERRE LAPOINTE, viola

DANE JOHANSEN, cello

www.ChamberMusicSociety.org

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

This concert is part of the CMS Britten Centennial series.

This concert is made possible, in part, by the Britten-Pears Foundation.

BRITTEN I: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS Thursday Evening, October 25, 2012 at 7:30 ESCHER STRING QUARTET

ADAM BARNETT-HART, violin

AARON BOYD, violin

PIERRE LAPOINTE, viola

DANE JOHANSEN, cello

HENRY PURCELL (1659-1695)

BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913-1976)

Chacony (Chaconne) in G minor for String Quartet (arr. Britten) (c. 1680, arr. 1947, rev. 1963) Quartet No. 2 in C major for Strings, Op. 36 (1945) Allegro calmo senza rigore Vivace Chacony

—INTERMISSION— DON CARLO GESUALDO

“Se la mia morte brami” from Madrigali libro sesto (arr. Lapointe) (1611)

(c. 1561-1613)

Illumina faciem tuam (arr. Lapointe) (1603) LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

Quartet in A minor for Strings, Op. 132 (1825) Assai sostenuto—Allegro Allegro ma non tanto Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart: Molto adagio— Neue Kraft fühlend: Andante Alla marcia, assai vivace Allegro appassionato

Please turn off cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices.

Photographing, sound recording, or videotaping this performance is prohibited.

This evening’s performance is being streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive

notes on the

PROGRAM

All composers are influenced by what comes before them, but few composers for string quartet have drawn inspiration from the Renaissance or Baroque eras. The motivation behind this program was to show how both Britten and Beethoven used either forms or harmonies from these early periods of classical music to conceive some of their most deeply felt and spiritually profound music. Britten’s second quartet was written in homage to Purcell, and the juxtaposition of the Chaconne movement and Purcell’s Chacony in G minor shows a clear influence. Britten’s Chaconne unfolds like an elaborate construction, evoking a wide array of emotions in its 21 variations.

The musical language throughout the piece is completely unique, and hypnotically beautiful. This originality is what first led us to discover and learn Britten’s quartets.

Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 132 is one of our favorite pieces, both to perform and to listen to. The monumental third movement, entitled “A Convalescent’s Holy Song of Thanks to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode,” creates a mood of emotional and prayerful intensity, punctuated by intervals of joyfulness. The two songs by Gesualdo, one secular madrigal and one sacred song, mimic the disparity between the extreme chromaticism and the modality found in different movements of the Beethoven. We hope that you enjoy this first concert of three on our journey through Britten’s string quartets.

–Escher Quartet

Chacony (Chaconne) in G minor for String Quartet Henry PURCELL Born in 1659 in London.

Died November 21, 1695 in Westminster.

Arranged by Benjamin Britten Composed around 1680; arranged by Britten in 1947, rev. 1963.

Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece.

Duration: 4 minutes The “chaconne” (or “chacony,” to use Purcell’s word) is a set of continuous

variations around a short, repeated melody. Purcell included a number of such pieces in the stage works written during the last half-dozen years of his life (the lament from Dido and Aeneas is the most famous example), but among his early realizations of the form is the Chacony in G minor. In the manuscript, the Chacony is scored for four viols and paired with a Pavan in the same key. The piece is built on an eight-measure theme first presented in the bass as support for the chordal accompaniment of the upper strings, and then becomes the subject for 18 variations. The mood throughout is somber, almost tragic, though it is

unlikely that the music was associated with any dramatic production, since Purcell did little composing for the stage until 1689. In 1947, Benjamin Britten, a

long-time admirer and editor of Purcell’s music, arranged the Chacony for modern strings. 

Quartet No. 2 in C major for Strings, Op. 36 Benjamin BRITTEN Born November 22, 1913 in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England.

Died December 4, 1976 in Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

Composed in 1945.

Premiered on November 21, 1945 in London by the Zorian String Quartet.

Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece.

Duration: 31 minutes In 1939, Britten followed his friend the poet W. H. Auden to the United States both to find greater artistic freedom and to escape the frustration and depression of the European political situation.

Britten was also an avowed pacifist, and he viewed the American sojourn as a time when he could sort out his feelings and decide on what his stance should be with his country headed inexorably into war. He moved into a private home in Amityville, Long Island, and composed no fewer than six major scores during the three years of his American visit, including the Violin Concerto, Les Illuminations, and Sinfonia da Requiem.

During a holiday in California in summer 1941, he chanced upon George Crabbe’s poem The Borough, which dealt with the rugged life in the fishing villages of the region in Suffolk in which the composer had grown up. Overwhelmed

by homesickness, he wrote, “I suddenly realized where I belonged and what I lacked. I had become without roots.”

Crabbe’s verses were not only the inspiration for his return to England in the spring of the following year, but also the seed from which the opera Peter Grimes grew. Shortly after arriving home, Britten appeared before the Tribunal of Conscientious Objectors and was exempted from active military service.

Instead, he performed in hospitals, shelters, and bombed-out villages while continuing to compose during those difficult years.

Peter Grimes was largely written during 1944 and premiered with great success by the Sadler’s Wells Company in London on June 7, 1945. Germany had surrendered exactly one month before, and the ghastly human toll of the concentration camps was just then coming to be fully realized. Soon after Grimes had been launched, Britten went on a short tour as accompanist for violinist Yehudi Menuhin at concerts in Belsen and other of the camps, and the works that he undertook when he returned to England — The Holy Sonnets of John Donne and the Second String Quartet — bear a seriousness of expression undoubtedly touched by the conditions that the composer had witnessed. The Quartet, however, was not intended primarily as a musical tract on the tragic aftermath

of war, but rather as a tribute to Henry Purcell, the revered English composer whose 250th death anniversary was being observed throughout the country in 1945.

The Quartet was completed on October 14th and first played by the Zorian String Quartet on November 21st, the exact date of Purcell’s death, at a commemorative concert in Wigmore Hall, London. The following day, Britten’s birthday (and, fortuitously, the feast day of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music), the composer and tenor Peter Pears premiered the Donne Sonnets, which were heavily influenced in their structure and word setting by the music of Purcell.

The opening Allegro of the Second Quartet is a modern sonata form, which achieves unity and structural cohesion from multiple thematic units through the traditional tripartite progression of presentation–elaboration–return.

The three principal subjects, each beginning with a soaring leap of a tenth (an octave plus a third), are announced in quick succession in (almost) unison. The first continues with a stepwise motive; the second with a broken chord pattern and a falling interval; and the third with further wide, leaping intervals. The themes are played again, though with considerable elaboration (a vestige of the old Classical exposition repeat): the first to a hammering accompaniment of nervously bounding notes; the second as a lyrical violin strain; the third as a broadly sustained episode in long notes.

A brief recall of the bounding notes and some tentative pizzicato tones mark the onset of the formal development section, which atomizes the themes with masterful ingenuity and skill. The

function of the recapitulation is served by the simultaneous return of all three motives above a wide-ranging, shortnote ostinato figure in the cello. The quiet coda, entered by way of the bounding notes and the tentative pizzicato tones, dissipates much of the movement’s tension.

Michael Kennedy wrote of the Vivace, “It is often described as ‘eerie,’ but this is not precisely the mood. Panic-stricken is nearer.” This haunted movement follows the traditional three-part form — scherzo–trio–scherzo — though without clear formal demarcations. The outer sections are built on a hurtling, shortbreathed theme (and its crossed-string background) into which are injected rudely jabbing points of sound. The central trio is characterized by a lessening of intensity and repeated attempts at lyricism by the first violin that are broken off by the insistent rhythms of the other instruments. The scherzo returns in the highest reaches of the violins and viola.

The powerful finale is a Chacony, a form of ground bass variations greatly favored

by Purcell. The austere nine-measure theme is announced in unison, and then becomes the subject of 21 variations in four sections divided by solo cadenzas (cello, viola, first violin). The first three groups each contain six variations, leaving three for the coda. “The sections,” according to the composer, “may be said to review the theme from (a) harmonic, (b) rhythmic, (c) melodic, and (d) formal aspects.” The Quartet is brought around full circle when the last variation is deftly made to incorporate the leaping motive that began the work. 

“Se la mia morte brami” from Madrigali libro sesto;

Illumina faciem tuam Don Carlo GESUALDO, Prince of Venosa Born ca. 1561, probably in Naples or Venosa.

Died September 8, 1613 in Gesualdo, Avellino.

Arranged by Pierre Lapointe Composed in 1611 and 1603.

Tonight is the first CMS performance of these pieces.

Duration: 8 minutes Don Carlo Gesualdo, born around 1560 into a noble Neapolitan family, was one of music’s most daring and colorful figures. His early life was notorious for having murdered his wife and her lover in 1590, and he thereafter sought solace in music and melancholia at his palazzo in the isolated Italian hinterlands far east of Naples, where he died in 1613. Gesualdo’s music — 120 madrigals, 40 sacred motets, a cycle of solemn responsories for Holy Week, a few instrumental pieces — reflects his restless spirit, taking to an unsurpassable extreme the flamboyant harmonies that characterized Italian secular vocal music at the end

of the Renaissance and transferring them fearlessly to his sacred and instrumental works.

Se la mia morte — If you desire my death, oh tyrant, I shall die happy and after death adore you alone. But if you desire that I not love you, ah, with but the thought alone grief kills me, and my soul departs — was published in Naples in 1611 in Book Six of Gesualdo’s madrigals. The text’s phrases about death and desire are wound through with unsettling chromatic melodic leadings, while the image of the soul escaping earth is reflected in the quick, skipping passages that close the madrigal.

Perhaps even more remarkable than Gesualdo’s madrigals are his sacred works, which show a comparably fearless harmonic idiom in a repertory usually characterized by sobriety and reserve. Gesualdo’s five-voice motet Illumina faciem tuam — Let thy face shine upon thy servant; save me in thy kindness — sets the traditional Communion text for Septuagesima Sunday, the beginning of the three-week period that prepares for Lent. 

Quartet in A minor for Strings, Op. 132 Ludwig van BEETHOVEN Born December 16, 1770 in Bonn.

Died March 26, 1827 in Vienna.

Composed in 1825.

Premiered on September 9, 1825 in Vienna, played by the Schuppanzigh Quartet.

First CMS performance on March 5, 1976.

Duration: 42 minutes

The A minor Quartet was the product of the difficult time Beethoven that experienced early in 1825. He had begun sketching the piece by the end of the previous year, but before he could progress very far with it he was stricken with a serious intestinal inflammation, a frequent bane of his later years. He had recovered sufficiently by May 7th to repair to the distant Viennese suburb of Baden, and remained there — with occasional visits to the city — until midOctober. It was at Baden that the A minor Quartet was largely written. Beethoven’s illness and recovery touch directly on the substance of the work, which takes as its centerpiece a magnificent Adagio titled Heiliger Dankgesang, “Holy Song of Thanks,” according to the composer, “from a Convalescent, to the Divinity; in the Lydian Mode.”

Basil Lam, in his study of Beethoven’s string quartets, summarized the structural logic of the A minor Quartet: “No other composition in all Beethoven’s works shows the unintegrated contrasts of this Quartet. Once he had become possessed by the unique vision of the Heiliger Dankgesang, no solution of the formal problem was available other than to surround it with sound images united only by their total diversity.”

The Adagio, then, is not only the central element in the five-movement structure of the Quartet, but also its expressive heart. The movement’s form alternates varied versions of a hymnal theme of otherworldly stillness based on the ancient church modes with a more rhythmically dynamic strain marked “feeling new strength.” To support a slow movement of such magnitude requires surrounding music of considerable breadth and emotional weight, and Beethoven chose to precede it with a large sonata form and a fully developed scherzo and trio.

He followed the transcendent Heiliger Dankgesang with one of his most glaring formal incongruities — a little march of four-square structure whose emotional blandness provides an almost shocking descent from the exalted realms of the Adagio. This movement lasts only a short time, however, and it is linked directly to the finale, a vast sonata-rondo that gains the hard-won, victorious luminosity of A major in its closing pages. 

©2012 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

meet tonight’s

ARTISTS

The Escher String Quartet has received acclaim for its individual sound, inspired artistic decisions, and unique cohesiveness. Championed by members of the Emerson String Quartet, the group was proud to be BBC New Generation Artists for 2011-12. Having completed the three-year Chamber Music Society Two program, the ensemble has already performed at prestigious venues and festivals around the world including Alice Tully Hall, the 92nd Street Y, Symphony Space, the Kennedy Center, the Louvre, the Ravinia Festival, the Caramoor Festival, Music@Menlo, West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Wigmore Hall, the City of London Festival, and a tour of China including Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou.

Within months of its inception in 2005, the Escher String Quartet was invited by both Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman to be the quartet-in-residence at each artist’s summer festival: The Young Artists Programme at Canada’s National Arts Centre and The Perlman Chamber Music Program on Shelter Island, NY. The Eschers have since collaborated with artists such as Andrés Díaz, Lawrence Dutton, Kurt Elling, David Finckel, Leon Fleisher, Vadim Gluzman, Benjamin Grosvenor, Wu Han, Gary Hoffman, Joseph Kalichstein, David Shifrin, Joseph Silverstein, and Pinchas Zukerman. In

August 2012 the quartet gave its BBC Proms debut, performing Hugh Wood’s Fourth String Quartet.

In 2012-13 the Escher Quartet will complete its final BBC New Generation Artists recording project in London, and return to Wigmore Hall following its successful debut there in February 2012.

The group’s tours in Europe include a date with the Agence de concerts et spectacles Cecilia in Geneva, its Austrian debut in Eisenstadt, and concerts at several UK festivals including Paxton and Gregynog.

The Escher Quartet’s 2012-13 releases include the complete Zemlinsky Quartets on Naxos; the quartet will also record the complete Mendelssohn Quartets for release by BIS. Previous recordings include ‘Stony Brook Soundings’ Vol. 1 (Bridge Records), which features the quartet in the premiere recordings of five new works. Other recordings include the Amy Beach Piano Quintet with AnneMarie McDermott for the CMS Studio Recordings label.

The Escher String Quartet takes its name from Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher and draws inspiration from the artist’s method of interplay between individual components working together to form a whole.

WATCH LIVE Enjoy a front row seat from anywhere in the world. View chamber music events streamed live to your computer or mobile device. Relax, browse the program, and experience the Chamber Music Society like never before.

11/8/12 11/27/12 1/17/13 1/31/13 2/6/13 2/13/13 2/19/13

9:00 PM 11:00 AM 9:00 PM 7:30 PM 6:30 PM 6:30 PM 11:00 AM

Late Night Rose Master Class: Jeremy Denk, piano Late Night Rose New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse Inside Chamber Music Lecture Inside Chamber Music Lecture Master Class: Jorja Fleezanis, violin

All events are free to watch. View the full streaming schedule online.

www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive

upcoming

EVENTS

MOZART/CHOPIN/SMETANA Friday, November 2, 2012, 7:30 PM • Alice Tully Hall Sunday, November 4, 2012, 5:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall Featuring Smetana’s Trio in G minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 15 ROSE STUDIO CONCERT Thursday, November 8, 2012, 6:30 PM • Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio Works by Haydn, Copland, and Bartók LATE NIGHT ROSE Thursday, November 8, 2012, 9:00 PM • Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio Works by Haydn, Copland, and Bartók, hosted by Patrick Castillo This event will also be streamed live at www.chambermusicsociety.org/watchlive MEET THE MUSIC! LEAPING LEOPOLD! Sunday, November 11, 2012, 2:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall Concerts for families with kids ages 6 and up