Program Book - CSO Chamber Music: Lincoln String Quartet at Northeastern Illinois University

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-FOURTH SEASON

Sunday, November 17, 2024, at 3:00

Northeastern Illinois University

CSO Chamber Music Series

LINCOLN STRING QUARTET

Qing Hou Violin

Lei Hou Violin

Lawrence Neuman Viola

Kenneth Olsen Cello

MOZART String Quartet in F Major, K. 590

Allegro moderato

Allegretto

Minuetto: Allegretto

Allegro

INTERMISSION

DEBUSSY String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 10

Animé et très décidé

Scherzo: assez vif et bien rythmé

Andantino: doucement expressif

Très modéré

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.

COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda

WOLFGANG MOZART

Born January 27, 1756; Salzburg, Austria

Died December 5, 1791; Vienna, Austria

String Quartet in F Major, K. 590

COMPOSED 1790

Given the steady deterioration in Mozart’s health, finances, and prospects in Vienna at the beginning of 1789, it is not surprising that he eagerly accepted the invitation of fellow Freemason and former student Prince Karl Lichnowsky to assess the career possibilities in Berlin. Lichnowsky, an officer in the Prussian army, regularly visited the court at Berlin and suggested that he could arrange an audience with King Frederick William II, nephew and successor of the immensely cultured Frederick the Great and an avid music lover and a cellist of more than modest accomplishment. Mozart left Vienna with Lichnowsky on April 8. After stops in Prague, Dresden, and Leipzig, prince and composer arrived in Berlin on April 25.

In Berlin, Mozart met with the king’s director of chamber music, the French cello virtuoso Jean-Pierre Duport, and renewed his acquaintance with the oboist Friedrich Ramm, who had won the composer’s friendship in Mannheim a dozen years earlier by performing the oboe concerto (K. 314) five times in ten days. Duport and Ramm were

apparently unable to arrange a meeting with Frederick William for Mozart immediately, so he went back to Leipzig for a few days to give a concert of his own music at the Gewandhaus. Back in Berlin, on May 19, Mozart attended a performance of The Abduction from the Seraglio in his honor at the Imperial Theater and heard a concert by his student, the eleven-year-old Johann Nepomuk Hummel, whose ambitious father was then shepherding his prodigious child through an extensive concert tour of Europe. On May 26, Mozart was finally granted an audience with the king, which went well enough for Frederick William to commission from the Viennese visitor a set of six string quartets for himself and a half-dozen piano sonatinas for his eldest daughter, Fredericka. As a down payment, Mozart was presented with 100 Friedrichs d’or in a fine gold box.

Mozart arrived home in Vienna on June 4, 1789, and immediately set to work on the commission for the Prussian court. Sometime in July (the manuscripts were not dated precisely), he completed the Quartet in D major (K. 575) and one of the piano sonatas (K. 576)—and then stopped. His health was poor that summer, his finances worse, and his worry about Constanze, pregnant for the fifth time in seven

years, acute, and most of what energy he could muster was channeled into preparing the revival of Figaro ordered by Emperor Joseph II for the end of August. The commission for Così fan tutte followed that production, and Mozart could not return to the Berlin commission until May 1790, when the B-flat major quartet (K. 589) was completed. The third quartet (K. 590 in F major), Mozart’s last work in the genre, was finished in June. Unable to fulfill the balance of the commission and desperate for cash, Mozart sold the three quartets to the publisher Artaria for a pittance later that year. Artaria waited, in vain, for the three quartets that would complete the set and did not announce their publication until December 28, 1791, three weeks after Mozart had died. Frederick William probably never saw or heard these works that his patronage had inspired.

As would be expected in a composition made to order for a cello-playing king, that instrument is given a featured prominence throughout these quartets, a technique that causes the viola and second violin to be drawn thoroughly into the music’s unfolding argument in order to achieve

tonal balance and textural homogeneity. This conversational quality is heard in the opening movement of the F major quartet (K. 590), where the cello provides both the bass of the ensemble and a worthy partner for the upper voices. The main theme is built from a simple rising triad followed by a quick dash down the scale, and these two motifs provide the material for much of what follows. Indeed, so potent did the little triad idea prove to be that Mozart cobbled from it the theme of the minuetto and the (kingly) bass line at the beginning of the second movement. The opening movement proceeds in the expected sonata form—the second theme is a tastefully arching melody initiated by the first violin—but not without some quirks of rhythm, phrasing, and harmony indicative of the romantic tendencies that increasingly marked the music of Mozart’s last years.

opposite page : Wolfgang Mozart, silverpoint portrait by Dora Stock (1760–1832), taken during a visit to Dresden in 1789 | this page: A view of Vienna from the Belvedere Palace, painted by Bernardo Bellotto (1721–1780), Vienna, ca. 1758–61. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna | next page: Debussy, 1895, photographed by Paul Nadar (1856–1939)

COMMENTS

The second movement, another sonata form, carefully balances the short hymn-like phrases of its opening with smoothly flowing ribbons of scales and arpeggios. Though the minuetto uses the familiar dance idiom that two generations of Viennese composers had brought to maturity, it, like the first movement, has unsettling anomalies, the most evident of which are its eccentric phrase structures: fourteen measures for the opening theme rather than the expected, symmetrical sixteen measures; fourteen for its return; ten measures for the opening theme of the trio; and fifteen (!) for its reprise. At a time when past norms were buffeted by revolutionary ideas—the Bastille fell in Paris less than a year before this quartet was written—Mozart here showed his sympathy for the restless spirit of the

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

times without abandoning the traditional forms or the good taste that characterized his life’s work. Though the playful finale, yet another sonata form, is less daring than the minuetto, it stops and starts in unexpected places, changes dynamics willfully, and indulges in more intricate counterpoint than some Viennese music lovers of the day might have thought strictly necessary. For all of its elegance and polish, the F major quartet is as forward-looking as Don Giovanni, the Requiem, and the G minor symphony, mined with the time bombs of romanticism that Beethoven would detonate after arriving in Vienna only ten months after Mozart died. Planted among these notes are the seeds of a new musical age that Mozart helped to nurture but would not live to see.

Born August 22, 1862; St. Germain-en-Laye, France

Died March 25, 1918; Paris, France

String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 10

COMPOSED 1893

By 1893, when he turned thirty, Claude Debussy had acquired a modest reputation in Paris as the composer of songs, piano pieces, and miscellaneous vocal and orchestral works, as a winner of the Prix de

Rome, and a bohemian musician much under the sway of the symbolist poets Mallarmé and Régnier. His distinctive creative personality had already been demonstrated to the city’s circle of progressive music lovers by the Petite Suite, arabesques, and Suite bergamasque (from which comes the well-known Clair de lune), but the wider recognition of his genius began when the cantata La damoiselle élue (The Blessed Damzel)

was premiered at a concert of the Société Nationale on April 8, 1893. By that time, he had already begun sketching out an opera based on Maeterlinck’s newly published drama Pelléas et Mélisande, a project that would take him a decade to complete, and written much of a ballet score inspired by Mallarmé’s voluptuous poem “L’Après-midi d’un faune” (The Afternoon of a Faun). The other major endeavor of 1893 was a string quartet, a curious undertaking, perhaps, for a composer of Debussy’s decidedly impressionistic proclivities, but one he apparently felt necessary to show that he could handle the classical forms that had occupied much of his long study at the conservatory and as a Prix de Rome recipient—it is indicative in this regard that the quartet is the only one of his works to which he formally assigned an opus number.

The quartet opens with a distinctive, modally inflected motif (marked by a quick, three-note ornamental cell) that serves both as the melodic germ from which the first movement grows and as the motto theme that returns in later movements to unify the work’s overall structure. The frequent recurrences of the motto throughout the opening movement, usually in transformations of sonority, harmony, and mood, are separated by episodes of mildly contrasting character. The second movement is a

free adaptation of the form and manner of a scherzo. The opening section posits a repetitive viola ostinato built from the motto theme around which swirl sparkling pizzicato effects for the other instruments. The center of the movement is occupied by a rhythmically augmented version of the motto theme first given by the violin above a rustling accompaniment. A modified return of the opening section rounds out the movement. The Andantino, sensual, lyrical, permeated with the sweet sensations of early spring, evokes a similar expressive and stylistic world to the one Debussy conjured in the contemporaneous Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. The two-part introduction to the finale comprises a slow-tempo transformation of the motto and a quicker, mock-fugal passage derived from the scherzo theme. The viola initiates the main part of the movement with a rapid motif that is tightly restricted in range. This phrase and further transformations of the motto theme occupy the remainder of the movement, which ends with a sunbright flourish.

Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.

PROFILES

Qing Hou Violin

Qing Hou has been a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1997.

Before joining the CSO, she was a member of the San Francisco Symphony. An avid chamber musician, she has performed at the Manchester Music Festival, Music in the Vineyards, El Paso Pro Musica, ChamberFest Brown County, Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, and Chamber Music Quad Cities. She has also performed with Mistral Music (Boston) for many years. Chamber music collaborators have included artists such as Pinchas Zukerman, Daniel Barenboim, and Yefim Bronfman. Hou has toured Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Luxembourg with musicians from the German Radio Philharmonie Orchestra Saarbrücken.

In 1997 she founded the Lincoln String Quartet with three other CSO colleagues (including her sister, violinist Lei Hou, and violist Lawrence Neuman, who is now her husband). The quartet has been featured many times in performances at the Northwestern University Winter Chamber Music Festival, on WFMT radio, and at venues around Chicago. In addition, the quartet has performed in Santiago, Chile, as part of the Beethoven Foundation concert series.

As a soloist, Qing Hou has appeared with orchestras in Boston, Baltimore,

Chicago, and China. In the fall of 2003, she made her debut as soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

A native of China, Hou studied at the Central Conservatory in Beijing before coming to the United States in 1988 to continue her studies. She holds degrees from the Peabody Conservatory and the New England Conservatory.

Qing Hou is an artist-faculty member at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.

Lei Hou Violin

Lei Hou joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1997, appointed by Daniel Barenboim. Previously, she was a member of the first violin section of the Cleveland Orchestra and served as assistant principal second violin of the National Symphony Orchestra for six years, appointed by Mstislav Rostropovich. As an active chamber musician and soloist, Hou has performed with Pinchas Zukerman, Yefim Bronfman, and members of the Guarneri and Alban Berg quartets. She toured Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Luxembourg with musicians from the German Radio Orchestra.

Lei Hou is a former member of the Manchester String Quartet of Washington (D.C.). She has been a

featured soloist in concerts broadcast on National Public Radio, WFMT radio Chicago, and WBJC Baltimore and has recorded chamber music by Mozart, Hoffmeister, and Beethoven for German radio. Hou has served on the faculties of the University of Maryland and Den Nye Opera Academy (now Bergen National Opera) in Norway and given master classes at Seoul National University, Korea National University of Arts, and the Central Conservatory of Music and Middle School in Beijing.

Hou studied at Shanghai’s Middle School of Music and Conservatory of Music and the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University. Her festival experience includes performances at the Marlboro, Tanglewood, Sun City, and Western Maryland music festivals, the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, and the Ravinia Festival’s Steans Music Institute. She frequently performs with the Lincoln Quartet with which she has toured South America.

Lei Hou shares the stage with her sister Qing, who is also a violinist with the CSO.

Lawrence Neuman Viola

Lawrence Neuman has been a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1991. Before coming to Chicago, he was violist with the Miami String Quartet. As a chamber musician, he is frequently

heard throughout Chicago and has performed across the United States and Europe. He has appeared at festivals and chamber music series in Boston, Marlboro, La Jolla, Madison, Napa, Portland, and Davenport. Chamber music collaborators have included Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman, Yefim Bronfman, Lydia Artymiw, Gil Shaham, and Aaron Rosand.

During the 1998–99 season, Neuman took a leave of absence from the CSO to serve as principal viola of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. He has taught viola and chamber music at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University for several years.

A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Neuman attended the Eastman School of Music, the University of Southern California, and the Cleveland Institute of Music, and he was a student of Heidi Castleman, Donald McInnes, and Robert Vernon.

Kenneth Olsen Cello

Kenneth Olsen joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as assistant principal cellist in 2005. A native of Albany, New York, he began his musical studies at his public elementary school at the age of eight. He soon went on to study with Martha Vivona, followed by Luis Garcia-Renart of Bard College. Olsen received his bachelor’s degree from the

Cleveland Institute of Music as a student of Richard Aaron and went on to pursue graduate work at the Juilliard School under Joel Krosnick.

An avid chamber musician, Olsen has performed at numerous festivals around the country, including the Aspen Music Festival, Tanglewood, and Ravinia Festival (where he is an alumnus of the Steans Institute). He has also appeared

as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on numerous occasions.

Olsen is a founding member of the East Coast Chamber Orchestra, a conductorless string orchestra that began in 2001 as a group of friends from leading conservatories and music festivals around the country. He is also a founding member of Civitas Ensemble, established in 2011.

CSO Chamber Music

12/3 Winter Quartet Plays Mahler, Saariaho & Fauré

2/2 CSO Chamber Music at the University of Chicago

2/23 CSO Chamber Music at the Beverly Arts Center

3/4 Civitas Ensemble Plays Bonis & Dvořák

3/23 The Wabash Avenue Music Collective at Senn High School

4/6 CSO Chamber Music at the University of Chicago

4/27 South Loop Quintet at South Shore Cultural Center

6/10 Mozart & Britten with the Chicago Symphony Chamber Players