Britten II

David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors

BRITTEN II

‘Hearts at peace, under an English heaven’ –Rupert Brooke

Thursday Evening, February 28, 2013 at 7:30 Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio 3,192nd Concert

ESCHER STRING QUARTET

ADAM BARNETT-HART, violin

AARON BOYD, violin

PIERRE LAPOINTE, viola

DANE JOHANSEN, cello

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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 II Thursday Evening, February 28, 2013 at 7:30 ESCHER STRING QUARTET

ADAM BARNETT-HART, violin

AARON BOYD, violin

PIERRE LAPOINTE, viola

DANE JOHANSEN, cello

FRANK BRIDGE (1879-1941)

Novelletten for String Quartet (1904) Andante moderato Presto—Allegretto Allegro vivo

BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913-1976)

Quartet No. 3 for Strings, Op. 94 (1975) Duets: With moderate movement Ostinato: Very fast Solo: Very calm Burlesque: Fast; con fuoco Recitative and Passacaglia (La Serenissima): Slow—Slowly moving

—INTERMISSION— HARRISON BIRTWISTLE (b. 1934)

Selections from Nine Movements for String Quartet (1991-96) Fantasia 1 Frieze 2 Fantasia 4

EDWARD ELGAR (1857-1934)

Quartet in E minor for Strings, Op. 83 (1918) Allegro moderato Piacevole (poco andante) Finale: Allegro molto

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notes on the

PROGRAM

Our quartet has been privileged to perform extensively throughout England as members of the BBC New Generation Artists program. In this context, we have been excited to discover a wealth of relatively unknown works by British composers for string quartet. Tonight we will present a diverse range of these compositions, including Britten’s dramatic and striking Third Quartet.

The Third Quartet was written within the last year of Britten’s life, and seems almost autobiographical, as if Britten was aware that his life was slipping away.

The last movement quotes the “I love you” motif from Britten’s opera Death in Venice, and the piece concludes with a slow and stately passacaglia that perhaps moves “towards the light.” Elgar’s Quartet in E minor was likewise one of his last compositions, although he lived for another 16 years after its completion. The quartet is nearly symphonic in its scale, range of sound, and expression, with a gorgeous slow movement that Elgar’s wife described as “captured sunshine.” Both of these pieces stand in contrast to the youthful and charming Novelletten by Frank Bridge, who was the first to discover Britten as a young prodigy and became his first composition teacher.

In this all-British program we wished to include the music of a living master.

Birtwistle’s challenging score interested us with its rhythmic strength and coloristic writing. It is also a perfect accompaniment to the Britten in its exploration of different textures within the string quartet. This can be heard most clearly in the Frieze 2, which pairs voices in the quartet like Britten’s Duets movement, and in the Fantasia 4, where the viola’s solo role can be compared to that of the first violin in the Britten movement Solo.

–The Escher String Quartet

Novelletten for String Quartet Frank BRIDGE Born February 26, 1879 in Brighton, England.

Died January 10, 1941 in Eastbourne.

Composed in September 1904.

Premiered by the English String Quartet on a student concert at the Royal College of Music in London on November 24, 1904.

Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece.

Duration: 11 minutes Frank Bridge was one of the leading English musicians during the years between the two World Wars. Born in 1879 in Brighton, where he played violin as a boy in a theater orchestra conducted by his father, he entered the Royal College of Music as a violinist but turned to composition after winning a scholarship in 1899. Following his graduation, Bridge played in the Grimson, Joachim, and English string quartets, and also earned a reputation as a conductor good enough for Thomas Beecham to appoint him as his assistant with the New Symphony Orchestra in 1906. Bridge thereafter conducted opera at the Savoy Theatre and at Covent Garden, and appeared at the Promenade Concerts and with such major orchestras as the London Symphony and the Royal Philharmonic. In 1923, he toured the United States as conductor of his own music, giving concerts in Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and New York. When he returned to England, he bought a small country house at Friston in Sussex, near Eastbourne, and spent most of his remaining years there, composing, accepting an occasional conducting

engagement, and guiding the progress of his gifted student Benjamin Britten.

Bridge wrote his Novelletten in September 1904 at the end of his study at the RCM and premiered it on a student concert at the school on November 24th with his own English String Quartet; he regarded it as his first mature chamber work after numerous experiments during “the nursery period,” as he called his student days. The Novelletten may have been a sort of test run for submitting an entry to the prestigious chamber music composition contest sponsored by Walter Wilson Cobbett, a successful London businessman, amateur violinist, and enthusiastic patron of the arts—Bridge placed second among the 67 entrants in the competition the following year with his Phantasy for String Quartet in F minor and won first prize in Cobbett’s contest in 1907 with his Phantasie for Piano Trio in C minor. The first of the Novelletten is lyrical and nocturnal in its outer sections but becomes more impassioned in its central episode, which begins with a forceful melody in the cello. The charming Presto is built from three thematic elements—a brief, pizzicato gesture (A); a theme of teasing character in descending chromatic notes (B); and a tender melody (C) — arranged according to a symmetrical plan: A–B–C–B–C–B (in quicker 6/8 meter)–A. The Allegro vivo begins with a main theme comprising a bold, dottedrhythm statement and a restless, legato passage; the second theme is a rhapsodic, arching strain shared between viola and cello. A development-like section fills the center of the movement, though its

materials are only loosely related those of the exposition. The earlier themes are reversed in the recapitulation, with the rhapsodic second subject and the dotted-

rhythm main theme separated by a brief reminiscence of the nocturnal music that  opened the first movement.

Quartet No. 3 for Strings, Op. 94 Benjamin BRITTEN Born November 22, 1913 in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England.

Died December 4, 1976 in Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

Composed in 1975.

Premiered on December 19, 1976 in Aldeburgh by the Amadeus Quartet.

First CMS performance on April 14, 1978.

Duration: 26 minutes

In 1972, Benjamin Britten, not yet 60, learned that he had a faulty heart valve and could not expect to live long, or well, without surgery. He was then composing the opera Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s novella, for his life companion and greatest interpreter, the tenor Peter Pears, and he told his doctors that he would not submit to surgery until the score was finished. The opera was sketched by the end of the year, and orchestrated and completed

by March 1973. In May, Britten entered a London hospital for his surgery, but he suffered a slight stroke during the operation, and he was generally weakened and without full use of his right arm thereafter. He convalesced during the summer by reading Haydn and Eliot, and strengthened his right hand by writing letters to friends. He had to miss the premiere of Death in Venice at the Aldeburgh Festival in June, but he was

cheered by good reviews for the opera and excellent ones for Pears in the role of Aschenbach. Britten was able to attend a private performance of Death in Venice in September at Aldeburgh, and he traveled to London when the opera was given at Covent Garden the following month.

By spring 1974, Britten was again up to doing some creative work, first revising his early String Quartet in D and the 1941 opera Paul Bunyan, and then composing a setting of Eliot’s The Death of Saint Narcissus for Pears and harpist Osian Ellis. The Suite on English Folk Tunes (“A time there was ...”) followed later that year, and the cantata Phaedra, for Janet Baker, and some small vocal works in 1975. Britten was well enough

by November to travel to Venice, where he was able to visit many of his favorite palaces, gardens, and galleries with the help of his nurse and some devoted friends. He had begun composing the Third String Quartet, his first work in that form in 30 years, before he left England, and completed the score in Venice on November 16th. Though greatly worn down by the heat wave and drought of the summer of 1976, that year he managed to make eight new settings of folk songs for Pears and Ellis, arrange his 1950 Lachrymae (originally for viola and piano) for string orchestra, and compose a Welcome Ode for school musicians for the Queen’s jubilee visit to Suffolk. In June, it was announced that he had been made a life peer, with

the title Baron Britten of Aldeburgh. In September, the Amadeus Quartet came to rehearse the new Third Quartet for him, but when Mstislav Rostropovich visited Britten in late November, he reported that his old friend was “very sick, his hands trembling.” On December 4, 1976, Britten died at Aldeburgh. Exactly two weeks later, the Amadeus Quartet gave the premiere at Aldeburgh of the Quartet No. 3, Britten’s last major composition.

The Third Quartet’s five movements are arranged, arch-like, around the central third movement, the Solo, whose stratospheric, keening cantilena for the first violin (marked “Very calm”) is disturbed at its mid-point by nervously jumping gestures placed above murmuring figures in the low strings.

Two scherzo-like movements flank the Solo. Preceding it is a strident Ostinato based on repetitions of a vaulting fournote pattern that sounds like a string tune-up gone wild. Following the Solo is a Burlesque, whose sardonic character and grotesque waltz-trio pay tribute to Britten’s much-admired colleague Dmitri Shostakovich, who died in Moscow two months before the Third Quartet was begun. The opening movement, Duets, exploits the various pair groupings within the ensemble. Britten organized the finale as a Recitative and Passacaglia, and subtitled it “La Serenissima,” referring (at least) to the city of Venice, where the quartet was completed, and to his own Death in Venice, which he quoted in the

Recitative. Autobiographical association seems inescapable here. Aschenbach, the central figure of the opera, is a renowned writer who travels from Munich to Venice to revive his flagging creativity, and discovers there, before he dies, a vision of perfect, unattainable beauty in the Polish boy Tadzio. The Recitative borrows five melodic phrases from Death in Venice, one for each of the players and a final one for the ensemble, separated by previews of the gently pulsing theme of the Passacaglia: the barcarolle motive, associated with Aschenbach’s dramatically significant rides in a gondola (cello); the theme of Aschenbach’s longing for and pursuit of Tadzio (second violin); a phrase from the music accompanying the “Games of Apollo” scene, in which Aschenbach sees Tadzio as the incarnation of a Greek god (first violin, pizzicato); Aschenbach’s line, “When the Sirocco blows, nothing delights me” (viola); and a united statement of the moment of crushing realization when Tadzio passes by him at the close of Act I and Aschenbach utters the words, “I love you.” Britten said that he derived the recurring theme of the Passacaglia—two solemn threemeasure phrases, mostly confined to the cello—from the tolling sounds of Venetian bells. The music moves at a steady, inexorable gait, a kind of serious, though not solemn, processional, and reaches, in its last, weightless page, Britten’s unanswerable question. 

Selections from Nine Movements for String Quartet Harrison BIRTWISTLE Born July 15, 1934 in Accrington, Lancashire, England.

Composed between 1991 and 1996.

Premiered on April 28, 1996 in Witten, Germany by the Arditti String Quartet.

This piece was first performed at CMS on December 3, 2004 as part of the larger work Pulse Shadows.

Duration: 10 minutes

Harrison Birtwistle, born in Accrington, Lancashire in 1934, entered the Royal Manchester College of Music in 1952 on scholarship as a clarinetist. There he met composers Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr and pianist John Ogdon, and together they formed the New Music Manchester Group, which was largely dedicated to the performance of works by Schoenberg and his followers.

After leaving the RCM, Birtwistle served as a military bandsman before moving to London to study clarinet with Reginald Kell at the Royal Academy of Music.

He worked for a time as a professional clarinetist and taught at the Cranborne Chase School in Dorset, but by the mid 1960s, he had turned his attention principally to composition. He spent a year as a visiting fellow at Princeton University in 1966, and upon his return to England founded a contemporary music group—the Pierrot Players—with Maxwell Davies. When Davies assumed sole directorship of the Pierrot Players in 1970 and changed their name to The

Fires of London, Birtwistle established an experimental ensemble, Matrix, with fellow clarinetist Alan Hacker. After teaching at Swarthmore College and the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1973 to 1975, Birtwistle went back to London, where he was music director of the newly established National Theatre until 1983. He has also served as Composer-in-Residence with the London Philharmonic (1993-1998), Henry Purcell Professor of Music at King’s College, University of London (1994-2002), Endowed Chairholder in Music Composition at University of Alabama School of Music (2001-2002), and Director of Composition at London’s Royal Academy of Music (1997-2009); he is currently Visiting Professor at the RAM. Birtwistle’s many honors include the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1986), Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville (1987), British knighthood (1988), Siemens Prize (1995), Companion of Honour (2001), and honorary doctorates from seven British universities.

The creation of Sir Birtwistle’s Nine Movements for String Quartet was interwoven with the periodic development of a song cycle the composer was working on during the same period. These two strands of parallel invention were ultimately bound together by Birtwistle into the creation of a single, concertlength work titled Pulse Shadows.

Birtwistle came to know the poetry of Paul Celan (1920-1970), whose probing and expressionistic writings were

indelibly shaped by his experiences in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, in the late 1980s in the translations of the German-born and English-trained poet, historian and teacher Michael Hamburger. Birtwistle set Celan’s White and Light for soprano, two clarinets, viola, cello, and double bass for the Brighton Festival in 1989, and followed that song three years later with Night and Tenebrae.

In 1991, he composed a “Frieze” for string quartet based on a single idea—a musical counterpart to the decorative bands of repeating patterns running across a wall in a classical building— for the 90th birthday of Alfred Schlee, head of the Viennese contemporary music publisher Universal Edition. Two years later he added to the quartet piece a pair of Fantasias—freely formed, with a loose succession of sections, as in the Elizabethan instrumental genre— and recognized that the songs and the quartet movements shared a common

emotional world and complemented each other in expression, style, and sonority.

Birtwistle called the quartet pieces “the songs that could not be written,” perhaps because Celan’s disturbing word-images were better suggested by an abstract instrumental movement than by specific verbal presentation. Over the next three years, he brought the two complementary cycles—one grown from his Celan settings for voice and ensemble, the other for string quartet—to a total of nine movements each and titled the entire work Pulse Shadows. “My Pulse Shadows,” Birtwistle wrote, “[consists of] two interleaved independent strands of music, each with its own logic and its own ensemble, sharing various elements and inhabiting the same domain. The music expresses itself as a series of movements, each made from a single element, asking the question: which is the shadow, which the image.” 

Quartet in E minor for Strings, Op. 83 Edward ELGAR Born June 2, 1857 in Broadheath, England.

Died February 23, 1934 in Worcester.

Composed in 1918.

Premiered on May 21, 1919 at Wigmore Hall, London by the British String Quartet.

Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece.

Duration: 26 minutes It seemed that Elgar’s world was crumbling in 1918. Four years of war had left him, as so many others, weary and numb from the crush of events.

His family decided that a place in the

country might offer some relief from the difficulties of life in London, so they rented a spacious thatched-roof cottage called Brinkwells, near the West Sussex village of Fittleworth. (Petworth House, immortalized in the late paintings of J.M.W. Turner, is only a short walk away.) Elgar settled into Brinkwells in April 1918, and the transformation in his physical and emotional conditions was swift and beneficent. The fresh, country air, long walks along the lanes and through the woods, and freedom from the stress of city life and worries of the war restored him remarkably, and by summer he was planning four new works, his first important compositions since Falstaff had been completed in 1913: a violin

sonata, a string quartet, a piano quintet, and a concerto for cello.

W.H. Reed, an excellent violinist and a close associate of Elgar during the composer’s later years, noted the profound effect that the woody surroundings of Brinkwells had on the chamber works written there in 1918. Reed visited West Sussex frequently, trying out Elgar’s new music, offering advice on points of string technique, and joining the composer in his rambles through the countryside. Standing in stark contrast to the halcyon environs of Brinkwells Cottage, however, was a blasted plateau at Flexham Park, near Bedham, capped by an eerie copse of gnarled and twisted trees struck by lightning that Reed wrote produced “a ghastly sight in the evening.” Elgar, enthralled with misty legends and supernatural tales, saw some mystical significance in these strange trees, which his wife, Alice, described as “sad” and “dispossessed.” Both of the moods associated with Brinkwells—the haunted and the pastoral—play among the notes of the String Quartet in E minor (also the key of the Violin Sonata and the Cello Concerto) that Elgar completed there on Christmas Eve 1918. Reed arranged a private reading of the score at Elgar’s London home in Hampstead on January 7, 1919 (George Bernard Shaw, who began his literary career as a London music critic in the 1880s, was among the guests) and led its public premiere at Wigmore Hall on May 21st, when he was joined by violinist Albert Sammons, violist Raymond Jeremy, and cellist Felix Salmond; pianist William Murdoch was added to the ensemble for the first performance of the Piano Quintet on that same concert.

The quartet’s first movement, dark and restless, begins with an anxious main theme of jagged rhythms and short, fluid gestures passed among the participants; the second subject, somewhat brighter in mood, threads the fluid gestures into a more continuous melody. These ideas are played out in the discursive development section, with the fluid gesture providing a continuing presence. The recapitulation begins with an almost ghostly recall of the main theme before turning more vigorous (appassionato and nobilmente, one of Elgar’s most characteristic markings, exhorts the score at two climactic points).

The coda, rooted in the principal subject, reaches a hymnal close that turns, grudgingly, to a major chord only for its final sound.

The sweetly melancholy second movement is based on a theme of almost folk-like purity introduced by the second violin and then shared by the ensemble.

Formal and expressive balance are provided by a complementary episode incorporating a three-note sighing figure and a graceful octave leap upward in the first violin. The lovely main theme returns, as does the episode, and the movement closes with a subdued iteration of the opening melody that is more memory than restatement. Lady Alice Elgar, whose health was beginning to fail when her husband was writing the quartet, was particularly fond of this movement, calling it “captured sunshine.” It was played at her funeral, on April 10, 1920. Elgar’s creative spirit died with her.

Alice said that the finale is “most fiery, sweeping along like a galloping of stallions.” The main theme begins with tense, snapping rhythms before moving

on to a quick, widely arched phrase in the first violin. A forceful transition leads to the second theme, lyrical in contour and mild in character. The development uses motives from both themes. The

meet tonight’s

themes are reversed in the recapitulation before the opening subject is spun into an extended coda to bring the quartet to a vigorous conclusion.  ©2013 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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, and Joseph Silverstein. 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.

upcoming

EVENTS

LOVE SONGS Friday, March 8, 7:30 PM • Alice Tully Hall Featuring lieder by Brahms, Berg, Ullmann, Schumann, and Schubert Winter Festival

SHOSTAKOVICH: THE COMPLETE QUARTETS performed by the Jersualem Quartet

SHOSTAKOVICH CYCLE I Sunday, March 17, 5:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall Quartet Nos. 1, 5, 6, and 12

SHOSTAKOVICH CYCLE II Tuesday, March 19, 7:30 PM • Alice Tully Hall Quartet Nos. 4, 8, 10, and 11

SHOSTAKOVICH CYCLE III Friday, March 22, 7:30 PM • Alice Tully Hall Quartet Nos. 3, 7, 13, and 14

SHOSTAKOVICH CYCLE IV Sunday, March 24, 5:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall Quartet Nos. 2, 9, and 15