PROGRAM NOTES

baroque appearance that opens the door to three funny and mischievous dance variations on the B section of the Yiddish song. The movement closes with the reemergence of the opening processional. I wrote this movement in memory of Guillermo Limonic, who loved singing in Yiddish, and died of Covid in the early days of the pandemic. Riding with Death, the fourth movement, is based on the late Basquiat painting of the same name. It is a sparse painting, in which the horse carrying the Death Rider is represented only by its essential bones, like an X-Ray drawn by a child. The music is a gallop in the viola and cello, over which the violins “X-Ray” the melody of Willie Blind Johnson’s Dark was the Night, playing just filaments and short echoes of the song. Feather, the closing movement, describes a graceful, endless fall of a feather from the sky. Here is where I felt the spirit of Chick Corea more present than ever. He died while I was writing this quartet and at the same time studying his Children Songs. - Osvaldo Golijov

Franz Schubert

String Quartet No.14 In D Minor, D810 “Death And The Maiden”

Given Franz Schubert’s undeniable stature in the pantheon of musical luminaries, it is a challenging exercise more than two hundred years later to imagine him as greatly under appreciated within his own lifetime. There was much left to be published of his work upon his death, much of it spread out in the hands of his small social circle in Vienna. He was known in his day as a composer of mere hausmusik; part songs, lieder and various pieces for piano. Almost none of his large scale works were known by the Viennese public, much less outside of Vienna. Schubert himself was not a virtuoso performer- he wrote no concertos, so his cause was not advanced by the popular virtuosos of the era. Italy was all the rage: the incomparable and devilish violinist Paganini was enormously popular, as was the music of Rossini. And so it was left mostly to Schubert and his intimate circle of friends to organize evenings of informal performances comprised mostly of lieder and part songs with the ink still drying, referred to as Schubertiaden.

It took later figures such as Robert Schumann, who was an extremely prescient observer of the musical landscape, to elevate Schubert’s status to a wider audience. Schumann’s description from an 1840 essay on Schubert’s 9th Symphony for the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik could just as easily apply to this quartet - “And this heavenly length, like a fat novel in four volumes by Jean Paul- never-ending, and if only that the reader may go on creating in the same vein afterwards. How refreshing is their sense of inexhaustible wealth where with others one always fears the ending, troubled by the presentiment of ultimate disappointment.”

Schubert’s Death and the MaidenQuartet Quartet (1824), marks an important transition in Schubert’s music for string quartet from thehausmusik-infused works, composed mainly with his family quartet in mind, to works of grand dramatic scope (the Rosamundealso appeared earlier in the same year). Reluctantly buoyed by the musicianship of the Shuppanzigh String Quartet and a desire to increase his public scope, this quartet was composed just