10 minute read
AROD QUARTET
PRELUDE 2 PM
Musical Prelude by young artists from the San Diego Youth Symphony
Support for this program generously provided by:
Th e Family of Teddie Lewis
Th e Discovery Series is generously supported by:
Gordon Brodfuehrer Jeanette Stevens
La Jolla Music Society’s 2021-22 Season is supported by The Conrad Prebys Foundation, The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, Banc of California, The Lodge at Torrey Pines, ProtoStar Foundation, Vail Memorial Fund, ResMed Foundation, Bright Events Rentals, Ace Parking, Brenda Baker and Steve Baum, Raffaella and John Belanich, Gordon Brodfuehrer, Mary Ellen Clark, Joy Frieman, Joan and Irwin Jacobs, Dorothea Laub, Jeanette Stevens, Debra Turner, Bebe and Marvin Zigman.
AROD QUARTET
SUNDAY, MARCH 20, 2022 · 3 PM
THE BAKER-BAUM CONCERT HALL
MOZART String Quartet in C Major, K.465 “Dissonant” (1756–1791) Adagio; Allegro Andante cantabile Menuetto: Allegro Allegro non troppo
BARTÓK String Quartet No. 1, Sz.40
(1881–1945) Lento Poco a poco accelerando al Allegretto Introduzione: Allegro; Allegro vivace
INTERMISSION
RAVEL String Quartet in F Major (1875–1937) Allegro moderato. Très doux Assez vif. Tres rythmé Très lent Vif et agité Arod Quartet Jordan Victoria, Alexandre Vu, violins; Tanguy Parisot, viola; Jérémy Garbarg, cello
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg Died December 5, 1791, Vienna Composed: 1785 Approximate Duration: 29 minutes
When Mozart arrived in Vienna, the towering figure in music was Franz Joseph Haydn, then nearly 50. Haydn had taken the string quartet, which for the previous generation had been a divertimento-like entertainment, and transformed it. He liberated the viola and cello from what had been purely accompanying roles and made all four voices equal partners; he further made each detail of rhythm and theme and harmony an important part of the musical enterprise. Under Haydn’s inspired hands, the string quartet evolved from entertainment music into an important art form. Mozart, who was 25 when he arrived in Vienna, quickly grasped what the older master had achieved with the string quartet and embarked on a cycle of six quartets of his own. These are in no sense derivative works—they are thoroughly original quartets, each of them a masterpiece—but Mozart acknowledged his debt (and admiration) by dedicating the entire cycle to Haydn when it was published in 1785.
The “Dissonant” Quartet, the last of the six, was completed on January 14, 1785. The nickname comes from its extraordinary slow introduction. The quartet is in C major and the music opens with a steady pulse of C’s from the cello, but as the other three voices make terraced entrances above, their notes (A-flat, E-flat, and A—all wrong for the key of C major) grind quietly against each other. The tonality remains uncertain until the Allegro, where the music settles into radiant C major and normal sonata form. The surprise is that after this unusual introduction, the first movement is quite straightforward, flowing broadly along its bright C-major energy; an ebullient coda eventually draws the movement to a quiet close. The Andante cantabile develops by repetition, its lyric main idea growing more conflicted as it evolves. The Menuetto sends the first violin soaring across a wide range, while the dramatic trio section moves unexpectedly into urgent C minor. After these stresses, the concluding Allegro, in sonata form, returns to the bright spirits of the opening movement. This finale, which has a brilliant part for the first violin, fairly flies to its resounding close.
Mozart may have been struck by Haydn’s quartets, but now it was Haydn’s turn to be amazed. When he heard the “Dissonant” Quartet and two others of this cycle performed at a garden party in Vienna in February 1785, Haydn pulled Mozart’s father, Leopold, aside and offered as sincere a compliment as any composer ever gave another: “Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.”
String Quartet No. 1, Sz.40 BÉLA BARTÓK
Born March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklos, Hungary Died September 26, 1945, New York City Composed: 1909 Approximate Duration: 30 minutes
Bartók composed his First String Quartet while he was a 27-year-old professor at the Budapest Academy of Music. He made the first sketches in 1907, did most of the composition in 1908, and completed the quartet on January 27, 1909, but the music had to wait over a year for its première. The Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet gave the first performance at an all-Bartók concert in Budapest on March 19, 1910.
Any composer who sets out to write a string quartet is conscious of the thunder behind him, of the magnificent literature created for this most demanding of forms. When Beethoven composed his first set of string quartets in the last years of the eighteenth century, he was quite aware of the example of Haydn (who was still composing string quartets at that time) and of Mozart. A century later, Bartók, too, was aware of the example of the past, and many have noted that in his First Quartet Bartók chose as his model one of the towering masterpieces of the form, Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Opus 131. Both quartets begin with a long, slow contrapuntal movement that opens with the sound of the two violins alone, both show a similar concentration of thematic material, both quartets are performed without breaks between their movements, both recall in their finales themes that had been introduced earlier, and both end with three massive, stinging chords. Yet Bartók’s First Quartet does not sound like Beethoven, nor was he trying to write a Beethoven-like quartet. Instead, Bartók took as a very general model a quartet that he deeply admired and then used that model as the starting point to write music that is very much his own.
If the First Quartet does not have the distinct personality of Bartók’s later essays in this form, it nevertheless shows a young composer in complete command of the form. Bartók’s mastery is evident throughout the First Quartet. The quartet is in three movements, rather than the traditional four; these movements are played without pause, and there are subtle relationships between those three movements. From the beginning, Bartók was quite willing to reimagine quartet form (of his six quartets, only the last is in four movements, and even this is a highly modified structure). Finally, one of the features of Bartók’s mature style already present in the
First Quartet is his assured handling of motivic development. Ideas that first appear as only a tentative few notes will gradually yield unsuspected possibilities (and riches) as they evolve across the span of a complete work.
Many have noted that the First Quartet gets faster and faster as it proceeds. The music moves from a very slow opening movement through a second movement marked Allegretto and on to a very fast finale that grows even faster in its closing moments. Simply as musical journey, this quartet offers a very exciting ride. It gets off to quite a subdued start, however. The Lento opens with the two violins in close canon, and their falling figure will give shape to much of the thematic material that follows. Cello and viola also enter in canon, and this ternary-form movement rises to resounding climax before the viola introduces the central episode with a chiseled theme marked molto appassionato, rubato. The reprise of the opening canon is truncated, though this too rises to a grand climax before falling away to the quiet close.
Bartók proceeds without pause into the second movement. A duet for viola and cello and then for the two violins suggest another fundamental shape, and then the movement takes wing at the Allegretto. The first violin’s first three notes here take their shape from the very opening of the Lento, but now they become the thematic cell of a very active movement. Some have been tempted to call this movement in 3/4 a waltz, but the music never settles comfortably into a waltz rhythm, and soon the cello’s firm pizzicato pattern introduces a second episode. After all its energy, this movement reaches a quiet close that Bartók marks dolce, and he goes right on to the Introduzione of the finale. Here the cello has a free solo (Bartók marks it Rubato) of cadenza-like character, and the music leaps ahead on the second violin’s repeated E’s. Molto vivace, says Bartók, and he means it: this will be a finale filled with scalding energy. In unison, viola and cello sound the main theme (adapted from the main theme of the second movement), and off the music goes. For all its length and variety, the finale is in sonata form with a second theme, a recurring Adagio episode, and a lengthy fugue whose subject is derived from what we now recognize as the quartet’s fundamental shape. As he nears the conclusion, Bartók pushes the tempo steadily forward, and his First String Quartet hurtles to its three massive final chords. String Quartet in F Major MAURICE RAVEL
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, Basses-Pyrenées, France Died December 28, 1937, Paris Composed: 1902–3 Approximate Duration: 30 minutes
Ravel wrote his only string quartet in 1902–3, while still a student at the Paris Conservatory, and the first performance was given by the Heymann Quartet in Paris on March 5, 1904, two days before the composer’s twentyninth birthday. Ravel’s quartet is in many ways similar to the Debussy quartet, written in 1893—there are parallels between the structure, rhythmic shape, and mood of the two works—but Ravel dedicated his quartet “To my dear teacher Gabriel Fauré,” who was directing Ravel’s work at the Conservatory.
One of the most distinctive features of Ravel’s quartet is its cyclic deployment of themes: the first movement’s two main themes return in various forms in the other three movements, giving the quartet a tight sense of unity. Some have charged that such repetition precludes sufficient thematic variety, but Ravel subtly modifies the color, harmony, and mood of each reappearance of these themes so that from this unity comes enormous variety.
The first movement is marked Allegro moderato, but Ravel specifies that it should also be Très doux (“Very gentle”). The calm first subject is heard immediately in the first violin over a rising accompaniment in the other voices, and this leads—after some spirited extension—to the haunting second theme, announced by the first violin and viola two octaves apart. The relatively brief development rises to a huge climax—Ravel marks it triple forte—before the movement subsides to close with its opening theme, now gracefully elongated, fading gently into silence.
The second movement, Assez vif—Très rythmé, is a scherzo in ternary form. The opening is a tour de force of purely pizzicato writing that makes the quartet sound like a massive guitar. Some of this movement’s rhythmic complexity comes from Ravel’s use of multiple meters. The tempo indication is 6/8(3/4), and while the first violin is accented in 3/4 throughout, the other voices are frequently accented in 6/8, with the resulting cross-rhythms giving the music a pleasing vitality. The slow center section is a subtle transformation of the first movement’s second theme. At the conclusion of this section comes one of the quartet’s most brilliant passages, the bridge back to the opening material. Here the pizzicato resumes quietly, gathers speed and force, and races upward to launch the return of the movement’s opening theme. This is wonderful writing for quartet, and the scherzo drives straight to its explosive pizzicato cadence.
The third movement—Très lent—is in free form, and perhaps the best way to understand this movement is to approach it as a rhapsody based loosely on themes from the first movement. Beneath these themes Ravel sets a rhythmic cell of three notes that repeats constantly, but it remains an accompaniment figure rather than becoming an active thematic participant. The movement’s impression of freedom results in no small part from its frequent changes of both key and meter.
After the serene close of the third movement, the fourth—Agité—leaps almost abrasively to life. Agitated it certainly is, an effect that comes from its steadily driving double-stroked passages, and this mood continues across the span of the movement. The basic metric unit here is the rapid 5/8 heard at the beginning, though Ravel changes meter frequently, with excursions into 3/4 and 5/4. Once again, material from the first movement returns, and after several lyric interludes the finale takes on once again the aggressive mood of its opening and powers its way to the close.
Ravel’s quartet generated a mixed reaction at its première in 1904. One of those most critical was the dedicatee, Gabriel Fauré, who was especially bothered by the unorthodox finale, which he thought “stunted, badly balanced, in fact a failure.” But when Ravel, troubled by such criticism, turned to Debussy for his estimation, the latter offered the best possible response: “In the name of the gods of Music and for my sake personally, do not touch a note of what you have written.”
