BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Castalian String Quartet
1 Orlande de Lassus (1532–1594) La nuit froide et sombre* [2:34]
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) String Quartet No 15 in A minor, Op. 132 2 Assai sostenuto – Allegro [10:06] 3 Allegro ma non tanto [8:49] 4 Molto adagio (Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit) [16:18] 5 Alla marcia, assai vivace [2:20] 6 Allegro appassionato [6:27]
Thomas Adès (b. 1971) The Four Quarters 7 I. Nightfalls [7:03] 8 II. Morning Dew [3:01] 9 III. Days [3:19] 10 IV. The Twenty-fifth Hour [3:42] 11 John Dowland (1563–1626) Come, heavy sleep* [2:57]
Total playing time [66:43] * arr. Sini Simonen
Sini Simonen violin 1 Daniel Roberts violin 2 Charlotte Bonneton viola Christopher Graves celloAn exciting collaboration
Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) has been at the forefront of international artist development since 1984 – nurturing and launching some of the most significant careers on the world stage, including Ian Bostridge, Alison Balsom, the Belcea Quartet, and Delphian artists Sean Shibe and Philip Higham.
Released in August 2020 to great acclaim both in the UK press and internationally, recorder player Tabea Debus’s recital album Ohrwurm inaugurated a partnership between Delphian Records and YCAT which the two organisations have specially tailored to offer precious recording opportunities for the most promising young artists. The collaboration unites YCAT’s mission of developing careers at a world-class level with Delphian’s twenty-year reputation for bold, considered programming. From initial concept planning, through recording and editing to the final packaged and digital product, the scheme reflects and enhances both Delphian’s and YCAT’s commitments to nurturing their musicians’ artistic development and long-term careers.
Following on from Tabea Debus, LSO principal oboe Olivier Stankiewicz, longstanding violin/piano duo Benjamin Baker and Daniel Lebhardt, and accordionist Samuele Telari joined the Delphian family with releases in spring and summer 2021. The Castalian String Quartet’s debut album is the first of six further Delphian/YCAT artist releases to be announced for 2022 and 2023. The complete collection will offer audiences around the world an engaging and varied series of albums, covering repertoire from the fourteenth century to the present day.
Delphian and YCAT are indebted to the generosity of Alastair and Liz Storey that supports this partnership. They are also grateful to the Cosman Keller Art & Music Trust for its support of the Castalian String Quartet and of the present album.
Notes on the music
‘For God’, Ludwig van Beethoven once wrote in his diary, quoting an ancient religious text from India, ‘time absolutely does not exist.’ The idea of existing between two worlds – in time and beyond time – courses similarly through the writing of the poet and essayist T.S. Eliot. It is present not only in his transmutation of philosophical, mythological and religious ideas into verse but also in his own situation, as part of a tradition yet wholly of his own time.
Eliot heard it in Beethoven. He strove to reach the liberated hinterlands heard throughout the composer’s late quartets – ‘to get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music’. Eliot recognised the seismic effect that suffering and subsequent relief had on Beethoven’s creativity –particularly on the form of the composer’s String Quartet No 15 in A minor, Op. 132, whose score was reportedly spread across the poet’s desk as he worked on his own seminal Four Quartets.
That process, and its reverse, is reflected in each of the works included here. Beethoven’s A minor quartet most obviously travels from the terrestrial to the celestial and back. Thomas Adès’s second string quartet, its own title glancing in Eliot’s direction, traces the ‘four quarters’ of a day towards a time which cannot – literally cannot, in the case of Adès’s notation – be wholly quantified. It is, for the Castalian String Quartet’s second violinist Daniel Roberts, ‘an hour we cannot enter, that exists only in the realms of mystery and fantasy’.
Bookending the album are works that present those concepts without the checked baggage of post-Enlightenment philosophy – as clear as day, you could say, were it not for the overbearing presence of night. John Dowland longs for the darkness of sleep, or perhaps the oblivion of death. Orlande de Lassus tethers nature, in the form of the constantly renewing cycles of night and day, to a protoBeethovenian oscillation between despair and hope.
Recorded on 14-16 June 2021 in Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: James Waterhouse
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
www.ycat.co.uk
Cover image: Dave Hoefler / Unsplash Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com Design: John Christ Booklet editor: John Fallas Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com
@ delphianrecords
@ delphianrecords @ delphian_records
Eliot’s ‘beyond poetry’ was bound up in the concept of (re)awakening. He equated cycles of exploration and knowledge with those of day and night: emerging from blindness into vision, yes, but on some deeper level returning from the freedom and timelessness of thought represented by night and sleep, to the enforced rigidity and mental compulsion of actual time (day, consciousness).
Lassus was born in the Franco-Flemish city of Mons, but served for three decades as a musician at the Bavarian court in Munich. He was charismatic, visionary, almost certainly suffering from bipolar disorder. He never forgot his French roots, as is evidenced by his prolific contribution to the genre of the French chanson. These polyphonic ditties became
Notes on the music
immensely popular in sixteenth-century France and dealt with subjects from the bawdy to the bucolic, from dance to devotion, from pleasure to pain. The more ribald examples developed their own allegorical (and delightfully zoological) shorthand for sex. Lassus was not averse to writing the latter, which suited his unparallelled ability to create distinctly earthy, sensual sounds within the strict musical rubric of the late 1500s. But those skills were just as well suited to more subtle and melancholy texts. For Lassus, like his younger English contemporary Dowland, a text was a pathway into music, and would dictate everything from the shape of a phrase to its harmonic context. The piece heard here, first published in 1576, is a setting of the poem La nuit froide et sombre by Joachim du Bellay (1522–1560), a conscious glance back at the tradition of Greek and Roman poetry personified by Ovid: La nuit froide et sombre, Couvrant d’obscure ombre La terre et les cieux, Aussi doux que miel Fait couler du ciel Le sommeil aux yeux. Puis le jour suivant, Au labeur duisant, Sa lueur expose
Et d’un teint divers Ce grand univers Tapisse et compose.
[The cold, dark night, covering with dark shadow the earth and the heavens, makes sleep as sweet as honey roll down from above into our eyes.
Then the day takes up its work – giving out its glow, and with varied dyes weaving and composing this great universe.]
Du Bellay’s words, which can be traced directly over Lassus’s music even when not sung, present ‘the themes of this disc in miniature’, says the Castalians’ first violinist, Sini Simonen. From the darkness of night emerges day, the cycle of nature tracing the journey of the soul. Lassus writes it into his harmonies and voice-leading, given new clarity in the Quartet’s own transcription for strings. Night sags and moans; day ‘spreads its light’ with agility, optimism and newfound major keys.
At this time, keys and intervals were accumulating distinct associations. Musicologists have noted how Dowland’s abrupt shift from G major to B major in his lute song Come, heavy sleep would have suggested a move from tenderness and persuasion to harshness and desperation. In similar vein, the interval of a falling perfect fourth – deployed by Dowland for the two syllables of ‘heavy’, the
opening phrase’s first downward step – was associated with weakness and fear.
The song is included as the twentieth and last in Dowland’s Booke of Songs or Ayres, published in 1597. The composer, who fled religious persecution, is known for a particular brand of melancholy and directness that far overrides any of those cultivated key or interval associations. Here, he uses the concept of sleep as a metaphor for death. As Lassus wakes the album into day and life, so Dowland sets it back down into night and death.
Beethoven’s quest to exist outside time –nowhere more apparent than in the remote slow movement of the aforementioned String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132 – surely stemmed from his confrontations with death, disease and mortality. ‘We cannot stay outside time,’ says Simonen, ‘but we can touch the heavens.’ She describes the quartet as an arc, moving from the anguished to the heavenly before crashing back to earthly suffering.
This is the second in Beethoven’s series of five epic late quartets, works that peer deep into human suffering and suggest, hopefully, that through the magnificence of nature and/ or spirituality we might transcend our earthly concerns and the burdens of existence.
All five see Beethoven imagining textures and sonorities that look far into the future – and, in
the case of Op. 132, juxtapose the mysteriously simple with the ferociously complex.
In the summer of 1825, two years before his death, Beethoven’s burdens were heavy indeed. He was experiencing a serious inflammation of the intestine to complement his profound deafness and had been ordered to avoid the food (and drink) he loved. This is the state of mind that spawned the quartet’s opening movement. It is built, as is the whole quartet, on an angular motif: two sets of semitone steps, heard immediately on the cello (G#–A–F–E) but taken up without delay by the other instruments in canon. The echoing of this motif permeates the movement, in what the composer and musicologist Robert Simpson described as a ‘dark circling’.
After a torrent of notes from the first violin, the music seems increasingly prone to distraction and digression, resulting in an accumulation of gesture equivalent, for the writer Michael Steinberg, to ‘coherence through struggle with confusion’. There is similar wildness in the second movement, whose minuet dance is destabilised by irregular rhythmic patterns and insistent expression markings before being further confused by an apparently straightfaced trio section.
The quartet’s heart, lasting nearly half its total duration, is its slow movement, subtitled
Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart (‘Song of Thanksgiving from a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode’). Beethoven had long been considering a major work using one of the ancient ‘modes’ associated with church music – the genomes of melodic construction that predate our concept of tonality. In this case, his use of the Lydian mode places the music in a tonal hinterland, in neither a major nor minor key, until distinct sections in an unmistakable D major rip into the conversation as if from another world.
Those sections – labelled ‘finding new strength’ in the score – strike three times, after three renditions of the slow ‘thanksgiving’ chorale that each feel changed by what has gone before. The last airing is marked mit inniger Empfindung (‘with innermost feeling’). Ultimately, it leads to music that seems somehow touched by the divine – beyond time, beyond what would normally even be considered musical movement – and to a profound silence that only extends the music’s air of private meditation.
The rapt atmosphere is shattered by the ‘cruel blandness’ (Simpson again) of a little march movement that seems oddly confused by its own gait. A quasi-operatic recitative on violin leads to the final movement’s opening Allegro appassionato, a frothing three-in-a-bar
sea whose surface undulations, born of cello machinations, throw the quartet’s instruments into all manner of unusual registers. When the anxiety reaches a high point, it becomes clear that crisis can only lead to resolution.
Sure enough, the music reaches the relative safe harbour of a fluttering, nonchalant A major, before sidestepping into E major to make good on its victory of the spirit. But an edgy uncertainty stalks the quartet right to the point of its emphatic final bars. Beethoven had triumphed over his illness (temporarily, as it would prove). But this was no public display of victory. Evidence suggests the composer only ever intended this quartet and its companions for performance among friends. Beethoven’s journey to the abyss and back was apparently a private affair.
Thomas Adès’s quartet The Four Quarters had a very public premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York on 12 March 2011, courtesy of its commissioners the Emerson String Quartet. The Emersons went to Adès knowing, in part, what they would get: an absolutely contemporary work, exploring new sounds and new techniques, but one written inside the classical tradition. Devices such as canon and ostinato permeate Adès’s playful, lyrical, yet hard-edged and uncompromising music, which often exhibits tangible links with the music of the past.
The Four Quarters charts the progress of a day, before ultimately breaking free from time altogether. Like Beethoven, Adès disrupts his own rhythmic and metric rubric to create music that questions our relationship with time, while, also like Beethoven, muddying the tonal waters to unsettle our idea of place. We often hear harmonics and other high pitches without a supporting fixed bass. The result, as Roberts says, is music ‘pervaded by an ethereal beauty’.
Glassy harmonics induce the first movement’s ‘Nightfalls’, and Adès’s displacing tricks begin almost immediately. The two violins, in duet, establish the unsettled feeling that pervades the work by means of an ostinato (a repeating pattern) written against the implications of the time signature. The movement rises to three emphatic climaxes. In ‘Morning Dew’ the quartet is awoken abruptly from slumber, its plucked strings suggesting glistening water droplets perched on leafy limbs. Gait and metre constantly shift, as random as rainfall. Here, Roberts observes, as in so much of the score, the music is based on simple scalic motions up or down. ‘Days’ presents a resonant reflection on the passing of time, built around another unstable ostinato. The single-note looping rhythm we hear on second violin remains steady across changing time signatures, while everything else played appears to cut against it. At the
movement’s peak, all four instruments lock into the ostinato in a rhythmic unison, before being displaced again – a possible reference to the rise and fall of the sun. ‘No matter what happens in our lives, no matter how much we try and distract ourselves from change,’ says Roberts, ‘time will march on and the days will pass relentless.’
Or will they? Adès’s last movement, ‘The Twenty-fifth Hour’, appears to break free from time altogether. It is cast in the unique time signature of 25/16 (twenty-five semiquavers per bar, divided into 8+3+8+6), an elusive metre for a fictional time of day. Recalling the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Op. 132, Adès marks this music alla marcia (‘marchlike’) while also insisting it should be rendered ‘danceable, rhythmical … cantabile and dolcissimo ’ (‘singing and extremely sweet’). After an ecstatic climax and a cascade of scales, the sketchy rhythmic apparatus falters and fades, giving way to a timeless calm comparable to Beethoven’s. This one, though, is uninterrupted. As Roberts suggests: ‘everything has happened, yet nothing has.’
© 202 2 Andrew Mellor
Andrew Mellor is a critic for Gramophone and the Financial Times and a Consultant Editor at Opera Now. His book on Nordic cultures, The Northern Silence, is published by Yale in 2022.
Notes on the music
Hailed for their ‘powerful individuality of sound’ and ‘instinctive singularity of musical intention’ (The Scotsman ), for performances that are ‘full of poetry, joy and sorrow’ and ‘realised to such perfection’ (The Observer ), the Castalian String Quartet are quickly emerging as one of the most exciting and in-demand quartets on the world stage.
Named 2019 Royal Philharmonic Society
Young Artist of the Year, their recent and forthcoming highlights include debut invitations to Carnegie Hall, the Vienna Konzerthaus, Philharmonie de Paris, Berliner Philharmonie, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Flagey Brussels, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Aldeburgh, East Neuk, Spoleto, North Norfolk, Heidelberg Spring, Rheingau, Mosel and Dresden festivals. The Quartet’s 2019/20 Wigmore Hall Brahms and Schumann series featured collaborations with Stephen Hough, Cédric Tiberghien, Michael Collins, Nils Mönkemeyer, Isabel Charisius and Ursula Smith. A recording of the complete Haydn Op. 76 quartets is forthcoming on the Wigmore Live label.
The Castalian String Quartet was formed in 2011. They studied with Oliver Wille of the Kuss Quartet at the Hochschule für Musik in Hannover, soon winning 1st Prize at the 2015 Lyon Chamber Music Competition and 3rd Prize at the 2016 Banff International
String Quartet Competition. Within just a few seasons the Quartet made critically acclaimed debuts at Lincoln Center, New York, the Vancouver Recital Series, Salle Bourgie in Montreal, and The Phillips Collection in Washington DC. Among the Quartet’s many notable collaborators to date are Aleksandar Madžar, Alasdair Beatson, Simon Rowland-Jones, Daniel Lebhardt and Olivier Stankiewicz, and their mentors include Simon Rowland-Jones, David Waterman and Isabel Charisius. In 2016 the Quartet was a prizewinner at the Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) International Auditions, and more recently they were named recipients of the inaugural Merito String Quartet Award/ Valentin Erben Prize and of a 2018 BorlettiBuitoni Trust Fellowship.
The Quartet’s name is derived from the Castalian Spring in the ancient city of Delphi. According to Greek mythology, the nymph Castalia transformed herself into a fountain to evade Apollo’s pursuit, thus creating a source of poetic inspiration for all who drink from her waters. The writer Hermann Hesse chose Castalia as the name of the futuristic European utopia in which his novel The Glass Bead Game is mostly set. The book’s protagonist, a Castalian by the name of Knecht, is mentored in this land of intellectual thought and education by the venerable Music Master.
Ohrwurm (YCAT Vol 1)
Tabea Debus, Jonathan Rees, Alex McCartney DCD34243
Rising talent Tabea Debus makes an immediate impression as she joins the roster of Delphian house artists, coaxing an astonishing spectrum of moods and timbres from an array of Renaissance and Baroque recorders. Equally astounding is the tightness and responsiveness of her interaction with gamba player Jonathan Rees and lutenist Alex McCartney, while solos for recorder alone bookend the programme chronologically with music from the fourteenth century and the twenty-first.
‘There’s a lovely sense of affectionate irreverence … Renaissance and Baroque works are despatched with an almost folky exuberance, and it’s a toe-tapping joy’
— Presto Classical, August 2020, EDITOR’S CHOICE
Mozart: Sonatas K 304, K 378 & K 454 (YCAT Vol 2)
Olivier Stankiewicz, Jonathan Ware
DCD34245
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the craft of transcription reached its zenith. Popular works such as favourite opera arias were offered to the public in domestically playable versions, and chamber and orchestral works published with alternative scoring options or reworked entirely for different instruments. Thus taking its place in a now somewhat buried tradition that has its roots in the composer’s own time, this cherishable recording by LSO principal oboist Olivier Stankiewicz reimagines three of his best-loved violin sonatas for oboe and piano.
‘The expansive K454 and the genial K378 come off exceptionally well … Jonathan Ware is an ever-attentive co-conspirator’
— Gramophone, August 2021
Castalian String Quartet Also available on Delphian PRESTO Editor’s Choice August 2020‘1942’: Prokofiev – Copland – Poulenc (YCAT Vol 3) Benjamin Baker, Daniel Lebhardt DCD34247
Since winning First Prize at the 2016 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York, New Zealand-born violinist Benjamin Baker has established a presence across the globe, with acclaimed solo, chamber and concerto appearances on five continents. His Delphian recording debut sees him joined by regular duo partner Daniel Lebhardt in a programme of three powerful works which were all begun in 1942. Each marked in its own way by a world at war, these sonatas show three of the twentieth century’s most individual composers engaging themes of private loss, political uncertainty and music’s enduring ability both to reflect and to transcend circumstance.
‘Baker and Lebhardt are superb partners, with a rare passion and energy’ — Apple Music, April 2021
J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations (YCAT Vol 4) Samuele Telari accordion DCD34257
Samuele Telari’s instrument is essential to his conception of this eternally fresh, kaleidoscopic work. The accordion’s bellows bring out and intensify dynamic contrasts in the slower variations, while the sparkling, faster ones are powered by a pure virtuosity that flows along the two manuals, imitating or chasing one another in resonant stereophony. Bach’s immortal masterpiece shines with new light here, keyboard dexterity meeting a string-like expressivity, both heightened by Telari’s interpretative subtlety and impeccable control.
‘The whole recording is joyful’
— BBC Radio 3 Record Review, July 2021
Recordings of the Year
2020 – Winner
J.S. Bach: Lute Suites, BWV 996–998 Sean Shibe DCD34233
Three years as a Delphian artist have seen Sean Shibe record music from seventeenth-century Scottish lute manuscripts to twenty-first-century works for electric guitar, picking up multiple editor’s choices and award nominations for each release. Now he turns to the music of J.S. Bach, with three works whose obscure early performance history –encapsulated by the appearance of the phrase ‘pour la luth ò cembal’ in the composer’s hand at the head of the manuscript of BWV 998 – belies their status as repertoire staples for modern guitarists.
‘such depth of tone, colour and intricacies of touch … Shibe’s musicmaking is masterful, beautiful and convincing in every way’
— The Times, May 2020
Postcard from Nalchik: Haydn – Prokofiev – Shostakovich Edinburgh Quartet DCD34081
Prokofiev’s Second Quartet shows a Russian composer writing home from the geographical margins, just as 150 years earlier Haydn had looked outwards, to the Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna of Russia and her husband the future Tsar, dedicatee of the six quartets subsequently published as the Austrian master’s Op. 33. Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet, meanwhile, demands – and here receives – total expressive commitment in a work which, the composer darkly suggested to a friend, was written in his own memory.
‘Seriously fine performances – exceptional in the Shostakovich – of an attractively varied programme’
— BBC Music Magazine, Christmas edition 2014, FIVE STARS
Also available on Delphian PRESTO
DCD34272