Britten III

David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors

BRITTEN III ‘Dulce et decorum est’ –Wilfred Owen

Thursday Evening, May 2, 2013 at 7:30 Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio 3,216th 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 III Thursday Evening, May 2, 2013 at 7:30 ESCHER STRING QUARTET ADAM BARNETT-HART, violin AARON BOYD, violin PIERRE LAPOINTE, viola DANE JOHANSEN, cello

SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)

Quartet No. 2 in F major for Strings, Op. 92 (1941) Allegro sostenuto Adagio—Poco più animato Allegro

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)

Quartet No. 8 in C minor for Strings, Op. 110 (1960) Largo— Allegro molto— Allegretto— Largo— Largo

—INTERMISSION— VIKTOR ULLMANN Quartet No. 3 for Strings, Op. 46 (1943) (1898-1944)

Allegro moderato— Presto— Largo— Rondo—Finale

BENJAMIN BRITTEN Quartet No. 1 in D major for Strings, (1913-1976) Op. 25 (1941) Andante sostenuto—Allegro vivo Allegretto con slancio Andante calmo Molto vivace This evening’s performance is being streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive Please turn off cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices.

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

notes on the

PROGRAM

In our three part series presenting the string quartets of Benjamin Britten, we have, with each successive program, explored different aspects of the man and his music.

The first concert, reaching as far back as Gesualdo, sought to present Britten within the continuum of the great western classical tradition. Narrowing our focus, the second concert demonstrated Britten within the context of his country and epoch.

This third and last program, with three of its four works written within only a two year period, focuses on what was inevitably central to the psyche of anyone alive in Britten’s time: World War II. Prokofiev’s F major Quartet was written after the composer was forced to evacuate his home in advance of a Nazi invasion and contains Kabardino-Balkar folk tunes, rhythms and textures. Perhaps because of his relative isolation and safety, this work is mostly playful and light, with the exception of an extremely dramatic and plaintive outburst in the last movement.

Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet is a work of nearly terrifying power and searing emotional immediacy. Written in only three days during a suicidal period in the composer’s life, it is cryptically dedicated “to the victims of fascism and war.”

The composer’s son, Maxim, interprets this as a reference to the victims of all totalitarianism, while his daughter Galina says that he dedicated it to himself.

Viktor Ullmann’s Third String Quartet, written in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, is an astounding testament to the human capacity and need for music and creation in even the most dire circumstances. Ullmann’s ultimate immolation at Auschwitz-Birkenau makes him the only composer on this program to not survive the cataclysmic war.

Britten’s first quartet is the work of a young man with an already distinctly individual voice. Written during an extended stay in the United States, one can here and there detect the influence of American Jazz, or Aaron Copland, but Britten was already, as he remained, very much his own man, and this quartet closes our program, as well as our series, with an almost ecstatic optimism and joy.

–The Escher String Quartet

Quartet No. 2 in F major for Strings, Op. 92 Sergei PROKOFIEV Born April 23, 1891 in Sontzovka, Russia.

Died March 5, 1953 in Moscow.

Composed in 1941.

Premiered on April 7, 1942 in Moscow by the Beethoven Quartet.

First CMS performance on December 12, 1969.

Duration: 20 minutes When the Germans invaded Soviet Russia in June 1941, Prokofiev and several other composers were evacuated from Moscow to Nalchik, the capital of the KabardinoBalkaria Republic, in the northern Caucasus Mountains. Prokofiev recalled in his autobiography, “The Chairman of the Arts Committee in Nalchik said to us, ‘Look here ... you have a gold mine of folk music in this region that has practically been untapped.’ He went to his files and brought out some songs collected by earlier musical visitors to Nalchik. The material proved to be very fresh and original, and I settled on writing a string quartet, thinking that the combination of new, untouched Oriental folk-lore with the most classical of classic forms, the string quartet, ought to produce interesting and unexpected results.” Prokofiev began the Quartet No. 2 on November 2nd, finishing the score early the following month. Though some critics criticized Prokofiev for overemphasizing the primitive qualities of his folk materials with “barbaric” harmonies and “strident” sonorities, the quartet’s premiere, given in Moscow by the Beethoven Quartet on April 7, 1942, was a fine success.

The quartet’s opening movement follows conventional sonata form, though Prokofiev’s craggy, openinterval harmonies and virile, stamping rhythms bring a bracing peasant vitality to the old city-bred structure. Three themes make up the exposition: a string of tiny, one-measure phrases with snapping rhythms; a melody of hammered notes that moves within a tightly restricted range; and a motive of broad gestures. The themes are aggressively worked out in the development section before being recapitulated in compressed versions to round out the movement.

The second movement is music of double purpose. Its opening paragraph, the quartet’s “slow movement,” is a nocturne based on a Kabardinian love song; the center of the movement, the “scherzo,” gradually increases in speed and becomes more dance-like as the music suggests the strumming of a traditional Caucasian string instrument known as the kemange. The finale revives Haydn’s old sonata-rondo form with some modern twists, the chief of which is the quotation of a joyous Kabardinian folk dance as the main theme. The cello and viola then take up a fast, agitated figure that becomes the accompaniment to the movement’s formal second subject, an anxious melody in longer notes given by the muted violin. The opening dance theme returns, rondo-fashion, before a cello cadenza leads into a ferocious development section. The recapitulation brings back the earlier materials as expected, but in reverse order, so that the dashing dance melody is held in reserve to bring the quartet to a  brilliant conclusion.

Quartet No. 8 in C minor for Strings, Op. 110 Dmitri SHOSTAKOVICH Born September 25, 1906 in St. Petersburg.

Died August 9, 1975 in Moscow.

Composed in 1960.

Premiered on October 2, 1960 in Leningrad by the Beethoven Quartet.

First CMS performance on March 16, 1980.

Duration: 20 minutes In July 1960, Shostakovich was in Dresden composing the background music for a joint Soviet–East German film about the Second World War called Five Days, Five Nights. So moved was he by the subject of the story and by the still-unhealed scars of the city, which the Allies had reduced to rubble in 1945 in a single night of the most fearsome bombing in the history of warfare, that he poured his feelings into the musical form that he had entrusted with his most personal thoughts ever since the 1936 attack on his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District—the string quartet.

The Eighth Quartet was composed in three days in Dresden in July 1960 and dedicated to “the memory of the victims of fascism and the war.” It was premiered on October 2nd in Leningrad by the Beethoven Quartet, though the composer had to miss the performance because he was hospitalized for treatment of a broken leg he had suffered in September at the wedding festivities of his son, Maxim.

In Testimony, Shostakovich’s purported memoirs, edited by Solomon Volkov, the composer stated that the Eighth is “an autobiographical quartet.” Without

giving elucidating details, he implied that its essential message is carried by the title of a well-known song of the Russian Revolution that he quoted in the fourth movement: Exhausted by the Hardships of Prison. The chief motive running through the Quartet, and providing the germ for much of its thematic material, is Shostakovich’s musical signature: D—S—C—H, the notes D—E-flat— C—B. (The note D represents his initial.

In German transliteration, the composer’s name begins “Sch”: S [ess] in German notation equals E-flat, C is C, and H equals B-natural.)

The quartet is in five continuous movements. The D—S—C—H motive is heard immediately in imitation as the somber opening of the first movement.

Three other themes are provided for contrast: a quotation in dotted rhythms from the First Symphony; an eerie descending chromatic scale; and a reminiscence of the Fifth Symphony in the violins above the drone of the low strings. The four thematic elements are recapitulated to round out the movement, and lead without pause to a furious toccata, brutal, hammering music depicting the cruel destruction of war. The third movement is a scherzo, by turns sardonic and lyrical.

Its main theme is a snapping version of the D—S—C—H motive, and is succeeded by a restless waltz melody in the first violin. Metric uncertainty troubles the movement’s trio. The slow fourth movement explodes with an accompaniment figure transmogrified into gunshots, which temporarily cover the sound of a distant siren implied by the first violins. The three lower

voices in unison play a melody from the Eleventh Symphony (“The Year 1905”) of 1957. After a repetition of the gunshots, the Russian song Exhausted by the Hardships of Prison is intoned by the first violin above a drone. The cello is then granted a lovely fragment from the officially banned opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which Shostakovich was revising at that time as the more politically acceptable Katerina Izmaylova. The gunshots, the Russian

Revolutionary song, and the Eleventh Symphony motive in condensed versions serve as the movement’s coda.

The finale eschews Romantic apotheosis in favor of 20th-century doubt. The austere mood and the D—S—C—H theme of the first movement return, and the music seems hardly able to maintain its forward motion. Its energy dissipated, perhaps through catharsis or just from weariness, the music dies away with an inconclusive open-interval harmony. 

Quartet No. 3 for Strings, Op. 46 Viktor ULLMANN Born January 1, 1898 in Teschen (now Český Těšín), Czech Republic.

Died October 18, 1944 in Auschwitz, Poland.

Composed in 1943.

Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece.

Duration: 14 minutes Viktor Ullmann, one of the most gifted Czech composers of the early 20th century, was born on New Year’s Day 1898 into the family of a military officer of noble origins in Teschen, then a garrison city in the Austrian Empire and now known as Český Těšín, on the Czech side of the border with Poland. Ullmann was raised in Vienna, where he received a good basic education and studied piano with Josef Polnauer, a disciple of Schoenberg. In May 1916, a week after he had graduated from high school, he was drafted into the imperial army.

Though he rose to the rank of lieutenant, and was honored for his “intrepid, brave, exemplary work” for his two years on the Italian front, he returned to Vienna appalled by the horror and absurdity of war. Under parental pressure, he enrolled in the city’s university in 1918 as a law student, but continued his music education by participating in Schoenberg’s composition seminar and studying piano with Eduard Steuermann.

In May 1919, Ullmann abruptly married and moved to Prague to devote himself to music. He was hired by Alexander Zemlinsky (Schoenberg’s brother-inlaw) as chorus master, vocal coach, and conductor at the Deutsches Landestheater, and continued his composition and piano studies with Heinrich Jalowetz, a close friend of Schoenberg. Several of his works of those years—songs, chamber pieces, the Symphonic Fantasy, and the Variations and Double Fugue on a Piano Piece [Op. 19, No. 4] by Arnold Schoenberg—enjoyed successful

performances. When Zemlinsky left Prague to become Otto Klemperer’s conducting assistant at the Kroll Opera in Berlin in 1927, Ullmann took a job as music director of the opera house at Aussig (now Ústí nad Labem), 40 miles north of Prague. His productions of Tristan und Isolde and The Marriage of Figaro drew praise, but those of Strauss’ recent Ariadne auf Naxos and Krenek’s brandnew, carnivalesque, jazz-spiked opera, Jonny Spielt Auf (Johnny Plays Out), made the conservative Aussigers uneasy.

After just a single season at Aussig, Ullmann returned briefly to Prague before moving to Switzerland in 1929 as a conductor and composer of incidental music at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. At that time, he came under the influence of the doctrine of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner’s theory which maintains that awareness of the spiritual world can be achieved through a prescribed method of self-discipline that transcends absorption with material things. In 1931, Ullmann abandoned his musical interests, and moved (with a new wife) to Stuttgart to run a bookstore devoted to Steiner’s philosophy. When the Nazis came to power two years later, Ullmann returned both to music and to Prague, where he struggled to make a living as a teacher, lecturer, critic, broadcaster, advocate of new music, and composer. Despite his financial difficulties during those years, he composed four piano sonatas, a piano concerto, several song cycles, an opera (after Kleist’s Der zerbrochene Krug [The Broken Jug]), and other works which won performances and prizes in Prague, Geneva, and London.

On September 8, 1942, Ullmann was sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt (Terezín in Czech),

an hour’s drive north of Prague, an extraordinary place where the Nazis allowed the prisoners, many of them Jewish artists and intellectuals from Prague, to stage concerts, plays, operas, recitals, and other events. Ullmann was assigned to organize performances and lectures, and to document the musical activities of the camp as its music critic.

Freed from the necessity of earning a living, and keenly aware of both the urgency of his situation and, for the first time, of his Jewish heritage, Ullmann blossomed creatively in that most unlikely of situations, completing more than 20 known works, including three piano sonatas, a string quartet, song cycles, choral arrangements of Hebrew and Yiddish songs, a melodrama on Rilke’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (The Song of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke), cadenzas for Beethoven’s first four piano concertos, and his masterpiece, the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis (The Emperor of Atlantis), during his two years at Theresienstadt. “In no way whatsoever did we sit down and weep on the banks of the waters of Babylon,” he wrote. “Our effort to serve the Arts respectfully was proportionate to our will to live, in spite of everything.” On October 16, 1944, after such remnants of civilized behavior as had been tolerated at Theresienstadt no longer served the Nazis’ interests, Ullmann was transported to Auschwitz, along with 18,500 others that month. He died in a gas chamber two days later.

Ullmann completed his String Quartet No. 3 in January 1943, when the musical activities at Theresienstadt were at their height. It is his only chamber work to survive—two earlier quartets, an octet for winds, strings, and piano, and sonatas

for violin and for quarter-tone clarinet, all composed before he was incarcerated, have vanished. The Third Quartet is not only a richly expressive document of Ullmann’s mingled hope and despair at that difficult time, but also a remarkably inventive piece of musical architecture in which a scherzo and a Largo section are inserted into a large, modified sonata form. The work opens with a section that Ullmann labeled an “exposition,” with a yearning chromatic melody serving as the main theme and an arching cello strain providing the subsidiary subject. Instead of proceeding directly to the expected development section,

however, the quartet first passes through a wry scherzo with a brief central trio of hammered ensemble chords. Following the development, based entirely on the exposition’s main theme, the viola presents a theme built from all 12 pitches as the subject for the deeply felt Largo.

The theme of the Rondo-Finale is a variant of the main theme of the first movement. The episodes separating its returns include a tense, imitative dialogue in short notes involving all of the participants and a climactic recall of the opening movement’s main theme as a sort of vestigial rounding-out of the quartet’s overarching sonata form. 

Quartet No. 1 in D major for Strings, Op. 25 Benjamin BRITTEN Born November 22, 1913 in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England.

Died December 4, 1976 in Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

Composed in 1941.

Premiered on September 21, 1941 in Los Angeles by the Coolidge String Quartet.

First CMS performance on March 13, 2009.

Duration: 27 minutes Benjamin Britten was 26 in 1939, and much unsettled about his life. Though he had already produced 14 works important enough to be given opus numbers and a large additional amount of songs, chamber music, choral works, and film and theater scores, he felt his career was stymied both by an innate conservatism among the British music public and by

the increasingly assured threat of war in Europe. Additionally troubling was his proclaimed pacificism in a nation girding itself for battle. In January 1939, his friends poet W.H. Auden and novelist Christopher Isherwood left for America in search of creative stimulation and freedom from what Auden called the English artist’s feeling of being “essentially lonely, twisted in dying roots.” With the promise of a performance of his Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge by the New York Philharmonic in August and the prospect (never realized) of writing a score for a Hollywood film about King Arthur, Britten decided to follow Auden, and in May he left England with his life-long companion, the tenor Peter Pears, intent on becoming a citizen of the United States. Britten and Pears arrived in New York in late June, and were invited to Amityville, Long Island “for a weekend” by William and

Elizabeth Mayer; it was to be their home for much of the next three years. Despite frequent bouts of depression and ill health, Britten composed freely in America, producing such important scores as the Violin Concerto, Les Illuminations, the Michelangelo Sonnets, the Sinfonia da Requiem, and the Ceremony of Carols.

Though Britten was growing increasingly anxious about his exile, he wanted to see more of the United States and perhaps try his hand at scoring a Hollywood movie, so he wangled an invitation to spend the summer with the British duo-piano team of Rae Robertson and his wife, Ethel Bartlett (for whom he had composed the Introduction and Rondo alla Burlesca the year before), at their home in Escondido, California, and drove cross-country with Pears in June. Soon after they arrived, Britten was paid a visit by Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the noted American patron of the arts, who had received a glowing report about the young composer two years before from his teacher, Frank Bridge. Mrs. Coolidge gave the cash-short Britten a much-welcomed commission for a string quartet, and instructed that its premiere would take place in Los Angeles in September with an ensemble that she sponsored in that city. With a deadline imminent, Britten set to work immediately, though the only retreat he could find from the Robertsons’ constant practicing was a tool shed with a fan turned on at full power; the new piece was completed before the end of July.

Britten’s trips to Los Angeles to prepare the first performance were enough to convince him to abandon the idea of composing for Hollywood (“really horrible” he called it), though he did reach a crossroads in his career in California when he discovered an article in an

English magazine about the poet George Crabbe (1755-1823) by E.M. Forster.

Forster’s piece led Britten to Crabbe’s poem The Borough, which dealt with the rugged life in the Suffolk fishing villages near where 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.” The seed for his epochal opera Peter Grimes was thus sown 6,000 miles from its East Anglian setting. The String Quartet No. 1 achieved sufficient success at its premiere on September 21st that it received the Library of Congress Medal later that year. After his California sojourn, Britten went back to Amityville, where he stayed until sailing for home in March 1942.

The Quartet No. 1 opens in slow tempo with a shimmering curtain of gently syncopated harmonies suspended in the high strings above delicate pizzicato comments by the cello. A boldly contrasting motive in sharply marked rhythms serves as the formal second subject in this sonata-form movement. Developed versions of these two contrasting musics occupy the movement’s center, the first (shimmering harmonies) shorter on this appearance, the second (strongly rhythmic) more expansive. Both return near the movement’s end in a greatly compressed recapitulation. The Allegretto con slancio (with enthusiasm), the quartet’s scherzo, begins as a hobgoblin sack of dry chords from which the triplet-driven theme is gradually let out. Enough triplets escape to provide an impatient central trio for the movement before they are stuffed back into the sack to restore quiet. A surprise punch line caps this delicious joke. The Andante is framed by soft hymnal music

whose brooding quality looks forward to the Moonlight interlude in Peter Grimes that paints the scene of the restless village at night. The smooth, wideranging arpeggios that accumulate in the central episode recall the cello’s music at the beginning of the quartet. The energetic finale is spun from three ideas: a nimble motive that includes a flashing downward arpeggio; a unison melody

in long notes draped upon animated cello figurations (which incorporate transformations of the arpeggio); and a galloping strain in triplet rhythms.

These motives are interwoven and juxtaposed to create a freewheeling mixture of sonata and rondo forms, and provide a spirited and gleeful ending to this, the last major composition of Britten’s American years.  ©2013 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, 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 also records the complete Mendelssohn Quartets for release by BIS. Previous recordings include ‘Stony Brook Soundings’ Vol. 1 (Bridge Records), which features

upcoming

the quartet in the premiere recordings of five new works. Other recordings include the Amy Beach Piano Quintet with Anne-Marie 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.

EVENTS

BRITTEN AT 100 Friday, May 10, 7:30 PM • Alice Tully Hall An all-Britten program celebrating the composer’s 100th birthday.

MOZART CELEBRATION Sunday, May 19, 5:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall Tuesday, May 21, 7:30 PM • Alice Tully Hall A festive program of Mozart masterworks closes the season.