1314 Program Notes: Alexander String Quartet

program

Mondavi center

alexander string quartet with Robert Greenberg

Sunday, October 6, 2013 Sunday, january 5, 2014 Sunday, february 23, 2014 Sunday, march 16, 2014

ALEXANDER STRING QUARTET Zakarias Grafilo and Frederick Lifsitz, Violins Paul Yarbrough, Viola Sandy Wilson, Cello Vanderhoef Studio Theatre Individual support for the Alexander String Quartet series provided by Thomas and Phyllis Farver.

P. 2 | Sunday, October 6, 2013 • 2PM & 7PM

String Quartet No. 1, Op. 2

Andante poco rubato; Allegro

Lento assai; Tranquillo

Presto

Allegro

P. 4 | sunday, February 23, 2014 • 2PM & 7PM

Kodály

Intermission (2PM only) String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7, Sz. 40

Lento

Poco a poco accelerando al Allegretto

Introduzione: Allegro; Allegro vivace

Intermission (2PM only) Bartók

P. 3 | Sunday, January 5, 2014 • 2PM & 7PM

String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10

Allegro

Andante; Allegro giocoso

String Quartet No. 4, Sz. 91

Allegro

Prestissimo, con sordino

Non troppo lento

Allegretto pizzicato

Allegro molto

P. 6 | Sunday, March 16, 2014 • 2PM & 7PM Kodály

Intermission (2PM only) String Quartet No. 2, Sz. 67

Moderato

Allegro molto capriccioso

Lento

String Quartet No. 3, Sz. 85 Bartók

Prima parte: Moderato

Seconda parte: Allegro

Ricapitulazione della prima parte: Moderato

Coda: Allegro molto

String Quartet No. 5, Sz. 102

Allegro

Adagio molto

Scherzo: Alla bulgarese (vivace)

Andante

Finale: Allegro vivace

Bartók

Bartók Intermission (2PM only) String Quartet No. 6, Sz. 114

Mesto; Vivace

Mesto; Marcia

Mesto; Burletta

Mesto

2PM Performances: Musicologist, author and composer Robert Greenberg provides commentary throughout the concert.

7PM Performances: The quartet performs this program without intermission, then remains for a Q&A session with the audience.

The artists and fellow audience members appreciate silence during the performance. Please be sure that you have switched off cellular phones, watch alarms and pager signals. Videotaping, photographing and audio recording are strictly forbidden. Violators are subject to removal.

Sunday, October 6, 2013 String Quartet No. 1, Op. 2

Andante poco rubato; Allegro

Lento assai; Tranquillo

Presto

Allegro

Kodály

Intermission (2PM only) String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7, Sz. 40

Lento

Poco a poco accelerando al Allegretto

Introduzione: Allegro; Allegro vivace

Bartók

PROGRAM NOTES Kodály and Bartók: String Quartets No. 1 In 1909 four young Hungarian musicians—violinists Imre Waldbauer and János Temesváry, violist Antal Molnár and cellist Jenö Kerpely— formed a string quartet dedicated to the cause of new music. At a time when musical life in Hungary was generally moribund, the WaldbauerKerpely Quartet gave the Hungarian premiere of Debussy’s String Quartet in 1910 (with Debussy in attendance) and performed quartets

by Schoenberg and other contemporary composers. But the young quartet had been formed specifically to advance the cause of Hungarian music. Its members were close friends with two young professors at the Budapest Academy of Music, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, and for the quartet’s very first concerts—in March 1910—it played two “composer evenings.” Each was devoted to the music of one of those composers, and these two concerts would be optimistically hailed as “the double birthday of modern Hungarian music.” On March 17, the Kodály evening brought the premiere of his String Quartet No. 1, Cello Sonata and various piano pieces. Two days later, on March 19, the Bartók evening saw the premiere of his String Quartet No. 1, short works for the piano performed by the composer and the Budapest premiere of his Piano Quintet. It is a mark of the dedication of the members of the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet that they had nearly 100 rehearsals before they felt they were ready to give those first concerts, and over the next year the ensemble performed these two quartets throughout Europe, including performances in Berlin, Vienna and Paris.

When I die, they’ll bear me to the graveyard.

They’ll place a wooden cross upon my grave.

Come out to me on a moonlit evening.

Fling yourself down against my grave marker.

At the Allegro, the upward sweep of the cello’s theme restates the song’s melody in a slightly modified form. This movement is in sonata form, and when the more lyric second theme—marked Poco sostenuto— arrives in the first violin, it too is revealed as a variation on the cello’s opening song.

After a brief introduction, the second movement takes shape around the first violin’s long opening melody in 9/8, itself a derivation of the cello’s statement at the beginning of the quartet. Kodály builds this movement on several fugato extensions of that theme, and along the way the pizzicato cello reprises the shape of the original song. The third movement, marked Presto, is the quartet’s scherzo. Its racing opening section gives way to a Più moderato central episode built on a long duo for viola and cello. A return of the opening material rushes this movement to a vigorous close.

The last movement is in variation form, but it opens with a revisiting of material heard earlier in the quartet. Only when this is complete does Kodály announce his basic theme, marked Allegretto semplice and played by the first violin over steady accompaniment. There follow eight variations, most of them at quick tempos. A charming story about this movement: the composer’s wife Emma wrote the fifth variation, a spirited Allegretto in 5/8, and in a footnote in the score Kodály gave her full credit for the variation. The First String Quartet concludes with a Presto coda.

This music—youthful, vigorous, and flavored with Hungarian inflections—seems entirely normal to us today. It is the work of a young composer heir to the classical tradition and finding a voice of his own in the folk material of his own country. Yet it went straight up the nose of the conservative music critics in Budapest. In his study of Kodály’s music, László Eösze quotes several of these reviews. One critic denounced Kodály “for holding both thought and melody in contempt,” while another declared that while Kodály was responsible for teaching harmony at the Academy, “he completely shunned it in his own work.”

Another critic denounced Kodály as “a deliberate heretic.”

String Quartet No. 1, Op. 2 Zoltán Kodály (Born December 16, 1882, in Kecskemet, Hungary; died March 6, 1967, in Budapest, Hungary)

A century later, we may smile at these statements, but their language and fury suggest some of the atmosphere that Kodály, Bartók and the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet were forced to confront during the first decade of the 20th century.

Zoltán Kodály composed his First String Quartet in 1909 when he was 27. Four years earlier, Kodály and Bartók had embarked on their first joint expedition to collect Hungarian folk songs, and now Kodály began to incorporate the melodies, rhythms and shapes of that music into his own compositions. The First String Quartet—at 40 minutes long, a substantial work—is one of his earliest compositions to show this influence.

String Quartet No. 1, Sz. 40 Béla Bartók (Born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklos, Hungary; died September 26, 1945, in New York City)

The first movement opens with an introductory Andante poco rubato dominated by the cello’s long song, which will furnish the quartet’s fundamental material. This theme, built on shifting meters, is derived from an old Hungarian folk song with the first line Lement a nap a maga járásán. It may be useful to know the text of that song: The sun has gone down in its own true course.

A golden oriole calls on the Tisza riverbank, A golden oriole and a nightingale.

My darling is lovely—how can I part from her?

Bartók made the first sketches for his String Quartet No. 1 in 1907, did most of the composition in 1908, and completed the quartet on January 27, 1909, but the music had to wait more than a year for its premiere at the “Bartok evening” in March 1910. Any composer who sets out to write a string quartet is inevitably aware 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, Op. 18, in the last years of the 18th century, he was quite aware of the example of Haydn (who was still composing string quartets at that time) and of Mozart; the young Beethoven copied out movements from Mozart’s quartets as a way of studying them. A century later, Bartók too was aware of the example of the past, and many have noted that in his First Quartet he chose as his model one of the towering masterpieces of the MondaviArts.org | 2

form, Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 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 finales recall 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 of 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 27-year-old composer in complete command of the form. There have been very few first string quartets that speak with such confidence.

Bartók’s mastery is evident in many ways in the First Quartet. Composed in three movements, rather than the traditional four, the piece is played without pause, and there are subtle relationships between the 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 that is a highly-modified structure). Immediately striking to anyone who hears (or plays!) this music is how difficult it is—from the initial moments of the First Quartet, Bartók’s quartets require virtuoso performers who are then pushed to the limits of their technique. Bartók did not play a string instrument, yet his command of those instruments appears to have been instinctual. If some of the writing does not seem at first idiomatic (in the sense that it does not conform to “traditional” string writing), it nevertheless makes sense on its own terms and is well-suited to the instruments, provided they are in the hands of supremely-capable players. 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 as they evolve across the span of a complete work.

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 a 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 figure that follows. Here and throughout this movement Bartók carefully specifies molto espressivo— this closely-argued music is expressive indeed. 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 the movement takes wing at the ensuing Allegretto. The first violin’s initial three notes here take their shape from the very opening of the Lento, but now these three notes 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 cell’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, instructs 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.

Sunday, January 5, 2014

String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10

Allegro

Andante; Allegro giocoso

Kodály

Intermission (2PM only) String Quaret No. 2, Sz. 67

Moderato

Allegro molto capriccioso

Lento

Bartók

Program Notes String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10 Zoltán Kodály The Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet, which premiered the first quartets of Bartók and Kodály in 1910, continued its support during the difficult years of World War I, and in 1918 it gave the first performances of the second quartets of each composer. Bartók would remain interested in chamber music throughout his life, but Kodály completed all of his comparatively few chamber works early in his career (all were composed during the second decade of the 20th century), before changing course about 1920, turning first to orchestral music and later to choral works. He wrote no more quartets after his Second.

That is our loss. Unlike Bartók, who played no string instrument, Kodály played violin, viola and cello, and his quartet writing is idiomatic and assured. Further, his quartets show that ideal idiom he and Bartók sought of a fusion of Hungarian folk music and classical form. Kodály does not quote Hungarian folk melodies in his Second Quartet—all the thematic material is his own—but the melodic shapes and inflections of the Hungarian folk music (and spoken language) he loved so much give this quartet much of its distinctive flavor.

The structure of the Second Quartet is unusual. It opens with a concise sonata-form movement and concludes with a long movement that performs the function of both slow movement and finale. The opening Allegro is built on three separate melodic ideas, all of which proceed along a gently rocking 6/8 meter. The tone of this movement is subdued though not somber, and it draws to a quiet close. The concluding section opens with a long Andante that Kodály specifies should be Quasi recitativo. It is built on a series of solos structured on parlando inflections: that is, mirroring the sound of speech. The music proceeds without pause into the finale, aptly marked Allegro giocoso (“fast, happy”). This movement is a series of dances—it is built on six different thematic ideas—and it bursts to life with a vigorous dance over what sounds like the drone of bagpipes. Kodály moves from the swaying 6/8 of the opening movement to the fundamentally duple meter of Hungarian folk music here, leaping between dances and finally driving his Second Quartet to its exciting conclusion on a great accelerando.

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String Quartet No. 2, Sz. 67 Béla Bartók In 1912, depressed by the state of musical life in Hungary and the failure of his own music to find an audience, Bartók withdrew from public life. With his wife and infant son, he moved to the village of Rákoskeresztúr, then a suburb of Budapest. He stopped composing, gave no concerts and introduced no new music, choosing instead to concentrate on teaching and folk music research. World War I brought musical life in Hungary to a virtual halt, and Bartók—with time on his hands and perhaps refreshed by a self-imposed silence that had lasted three years—resumed composing. In 1915 he wrote the Romanian Folk Dances, a product of his folk-music research and—a century later— still one of his most popular compositions. In that same year, Bartók began work on his Second String Quartet, completing it two years later, in October 1917. The Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet gave the first performance in Budapest on March 3, 1918.

The most immediately striking feature of the new quartet is its form.

Bartok’s First Quartet had offered a dizzying accelerando across its three-movement span. His Second Quartet is also in three movements, but these take a wholly unexpected order: a moderately-paced opening movement is followed by a fast central movement, and the quartet concludes with a very slow movement.

In 1936 Bartók was asked to provide an analysis of this quartet, but he refused, saying: “There is in any case nothing extraordinary in the form. The first movement is in normal sonata form, the second a kind of rondo with a development-like section in the middle, and the last the most difficult to define: ultimately it is some kind of augmented ABA form.” Accurate as far as it goes, that statement does not begin to suggest the complexity and ingenuity of each movement or of the quartet as a whole. Nor does it suggest the emotional impact of this music.

The opening Moderato does seem to be in sonata form; it introduces several different theme groups and develops all of them. But for all their contrast, these themes are cousins—they all grow out of the first violin’s gently soaring opening melody, and one of the pleasures of this music lies in recognizing the many ways this shape and sequence of intervals recur throughout the movement. While there are moments of power here, the fundamental impulse in this movement is lyric, and several of the incarnations of the opening shape—marked tranquillo on each appearance—sing with a breathtaking loveliness. It is on this shape that the movement trails off into silence.

Critics invariably link the Allegro molto capriccioso with Bartók’s one folk music gathering trip to Africa. In 1913, two years before he began this quartet, Bartók had visited Biskra, in the desert of Algeria, and collected about 200 local melodies. Anchored on its pounding opening rhythm (a drumbeat often described as “barbaric”), the powerful, dancing opening theme returns in various forms throughout this movement. There is wildness in this music, which is full of the exotic sounds of swooping glissandos and snapped pizzicatos. Bartók relaxes the pace for the central episode, but the opening energy soon returns. The ending of this movement is dazzling: Bartók mutes all four instruments for the Prestissimo coda. The first violin and viola are in 6/4, but the second violin and cello are in 4/4 as this music races ahead, first at a whisper and then—as the mutes come off—at a shout. The movement is cut off by a fierce recall of the drumbeat rhythm from the very beginning.

After the volcanic energy of the middle movement, the quartet concludes with a somber and very slow movement, drained of the color and vitality of the previous movement. While the tempo is quite slow (the marking is Lento), Bartók subtly varies the pace—there are several

slow tempos here. This movement has been described as episodic, but it really offers a series of variations on its opening figures. What is not so readily apparent is that these theme-shapes are themselves derived from the violin melody at the very beginning of the quartet—the unity of this quartet is extraordinary. The movement makes its somber way to the close, where it concludes with two ambiguous pizzicato strokes.

The energy of the opening movements is left far in the past, and this stunning music comes to a bleak and uncertain conclusion.

Sunday, February 23, 2014 String Quartet No. 3, Sz. 85 Bartók

Prima parte: Moderato

Seconda parte: Allegro

Ricapitulazione della prima parte: Moderato

Coda: Allegro molto Intermission (2PM only) String Quartet No. 4, Sz. 91

Allegro

Prestissimo, con sordino

Non troppo lento

Allegretto pizzicato

Allegro molto

Program Notes String Quartet No. 3, Sz. 85 Béla Bartók Ten years separate Bartók’s Second String Quartet from his Third. That decade saw the successful premiere of his opera Bluebeard’s Castle, the scandal that surrounded the premiere of the Miraculous Mandarin and his return to composing for the piano. In July 1927 Bartók was soloist at the premiere of his First Piano Concerto in Baden-Baden, Germany, and that summer—at 46—he composed his Third String Quartet, completing the score in September. Just as he was leaving on his first concert tour of America that fall, Bartók submitted the manuscript to a chamber music competition sponsored by the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia. Bartók returned to Europe in March 1928 without hearing anything about the competition, and, after waiting nearly a year, he gave up and began to make arrangements to have the quartet published in Europe. At just that point the news arrived: Bartók had split first prize with the Italian composer Alfredo Casella. His share of the prize was $3000, welcome news for a composer who was never wholly free from financial worries throughout his life. Bartók had powerful friends on the committee of six judges who awarded the prize, among them Wilhelm Mengelberg (conductor of the New York Philharmonic), Fritz Reiner (conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony) and Frederick Stock (conductor of the Chicago Symphony). And in passing, it should be noted that the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, which had been founded in 1820, is still active today, and Bartók’s manuscript for his Third Quartet remains one of its prized possessions.

The shortest of Bartók’s six quartets, the Third Quartet has proven the thorniest of that cycle—critics invariably refer to it as “anti-romantic.”

The Third Quartet is marked by a fierce concentration of materials and

by Bartók’s refusal to use traditional melodic themes. In their place he makes use of short motives that are almost consciously athematic in their brevity. The quartet takes as its basic thematic cell a three-note figure announced by the first violin in the sixth measure: G rising to D and falling to A. That motif and a handful of others are then subjected to the most rigorous and concentrated polyphonic development: canon, fugato, inversion, simultaneous presentation of material. The structure MondaviArts.org | 4

is equally concentrated. Only 15 minutes long and performed without pause, the Third Quartet nevertheless divides into four sections: First Part, Second Part, Recapitulation of the First Part, and Coda, which is essentially a recapitulation—or a revisiting—of the second part.

Bartók accentuates the fierce concentration of this music by enlivening it with one of the richest palettes of sound from any of his quartets.

The Third Quartet opens with a sound he rarely used in his quartets— artificial harmonics—and then takes the music through a panoply of string sonorities: slithering ponticellos, martellato chords snapped off at the frog of the bow, passages tapped out with the wood of the bow rather than bowed with the hair, quick glissandos that span more than an octave, passages played entirely over the fingerboard to produce the most whispery textures. One cannot separate music and sound, of course, and the sonic phantasmagoria of this quartet is part of its unbelievable concentration of material.

The first and second parts are essentially sonata-form movements without their recapitulation sections. The First Part (marked Moderato) is built on the seminal three-note figure, which will then recur in untold shapes. Three strident chords mark the transition to the second subject, yet here the “accompaniment” of the lower strings incorporates the basic shape of this quartet, as does the violin duet above them. At the very end of the movement, the second violin and viola have a sustained duet in which this figure is finally made to sing diatonically (and very beautifully). The Second Part (marked Allegro) begins with a sustained trill: moving between different instruments, this trill goes on for 39 measures and returns throughout. This “part” is built on two ideas: the cello’s strummed pizzicato chords near the opening and the first violin’s hurtling dance tune, draped along asymmetric meters. As part of the vigorous development, Bartók treats these themes fugally and at one point even combines them. The brief concluding sections bring the missing recapitulations, but now Bartók—who never liked to repeat anything literally—shortens and concentrates his material even more stringently.

In the words of Halsey Stevens, the material from the first two parts here makes “a psychological return, not a physical one.” The dance rhythms of the Second Part race ahead, and the Quartet No. 3 concludes on stinging dissonances hammered out by all four instruments.

The first performance of the Third String Quartet took place in Philadelphia on December 30, 1928. The quartet on that occasion was made up of the principal string players of Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra: concertmaster Mischa Mischakoff, David Dubinsky, Samuel Lifschey, and Willem van den Burg. The Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet gave the European premiere of the Third Quartet on February 19, 1929, in London’s Wigmore Hall, and that quartet gave the Budapest premiere a month later on March 20, 1929, at a concert that included the world premiere of Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4.

String Quartet No. 4, Sz. 91 Béla Bartók Ten years separated his Second and Third Quartets, but after completing the Third during the summer of 1927, Bartók waited only a year to write his Fourth String Quartet. He composed the Fourth between July and September of 1928, even before he had heard the Third. The Fourth was completed so quickly, as we have seen, that when the WaldbauerKerpely Quartet gave the Hungarian premiere of the Third on March 20, 1929, in Budapest, that same concert concluded with the world premiere of the Fourth. Perhaps it is not surprising that the Third and Fourth Quartets are so close in time: the advances consolidated in the Third burst into full flower in the Fourth, which speak a deeper and more expressive language.

The Fourth Quartet is one of the earliest examples of Bartók’s fascination with arch form, an obsession that would in some ways shape the works he composed over the rest of his life. There had been hints of symmetrical formal structures earlier, but the Fourth Quartet is the first explicit and unmistakable statement of that form—the form here is palindromic. At the center of this five-movement quartet is a long slow movement, which Bartók described as “the kernel” of the entire work. Surrounding that central movement are two scherzos (“the inner shell”) built on related material, and the entire quartet is anchored on its powerful opening and closing movements (“the outer shell”), which also share thematic material. There is a breathtaking formal balance to the Fourth Quartet, and that balance is made all the more remarkable by its concentration: the entire five-movement work spans only 23 minutes.

The Third Quartet had been marked by its attention to string sonority, but the Fourth takes us into a completely new sound-world. It marks the first appearance of the “Bartók pizzicato” (the string plucked so sharply that it snaps off the fingerboard), but there are many other new sounds here as well: strummed pizzicatos, fingered ninths, chord arpeggios both up-bow and down-bow. If the Third Quartet had opened up a new world of sound for Bartók, in the Fourth he luxuriates in those sounds, expanding his palette, yet employing these techniques in the service of the music rather than as an end in itself.

One of the most remarkable things about the Fourth Quartet is its motivic concentration. Always a characteristic of Bartók’s music, that concentration is here focused in dazzling ways. Much of the Fourth Quartet is derived from a simple rising and falling figure announced by the cello in the opening moments of the first movement. Bartók then takes this six-note cell through an almost infinite variety of forms, themes, rhythms, harmonies and permutations. Such a description makes this music sound cerebral and abstract. In fact, the Fourth Quartet offers some of the most exciting music Bartók ever wrote, as if the “cerebral” technique of the Third Quartet was the gateway into this new world of passion and beauty.

Many observers have been tempted to describe the outer movements of the Fourth Quartet as being in sonata form, and it is true that they are structured—generally—on the notion of exposition, development and recapitulation. But to try to push those movements into a traditional form is to violate them. The outer movements of the Fourth Quartet do not divide easily into those component sections, and in fact the entire quartet is characterized by a continuous eruption and transformation of ideas. Themes develop even as they are being presented and continue to evolve even as they are being “recapitulated.” For Bartók, form is a dynamic process rather than a structural plan.

The Allegro opens with an aggressive tissue of terraced entrances, and beneath them, almost unobtrusively, the cello stamps out the quartet’s fundamental thematic cell in the seventh measure. This tight chromatic cell (all six notes remain within the compass of a minor third) will then be taken through an infinite sequence of expansions: from this pithy initial statement through inversions, expansions to more melodic shapes, and finally to a close on a massive restatement of that figure.

If the outer movements are marked by a seething dynamism, the three interior movements take us into a different world altogether. Bartók marks the second movement Prestissimo, con sordino and mutes the instruments throughout. The outer sections are built on the opening theme, which is announced by viola and cello in octaves. The central section, which does not relax the tempo in any way, rushes through a cascade of changing sonorities—glissandos, pizzicatos, grainy ponticello bowing—before the return of the opening material. This movement comes to a stunning close: glissandos swoop upward and the music vanishes on delicate harmonics.

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At the quartet’s center lies one of Bartók’s night-music movements.

Textures here are remarkable. At the beginning Bartók asks the three upper voices—the accompaniment—to alternate playing both without and also with vibrato: the icy stillness of the former contrasts with the warmer texture of vibrato. Beneath these subtly shifting sonorities, the cello has a long and passionate recitative that has its roots in Hungarian folk music, and the first violin continues with a series of soaring trills suggestive of bird calls.

The fourth movement is the companion to the second, this one played entirely pizzicato. The viola’s main theme is a variant of the principal theme of the second movement, here opened up into a more melodic shape. This use of pizzicato takes many forms in this movement: the snapped “Bartók pizzicato,” arpeggiated chords, strummed chords, glissandos.

Brutal chords launch the final movement. This is the counterpart to the opening movement, but that opening Allegro is now counterbalanced by this even faster Allegro molto. Quickly the two violins outline the main theme, a further variation of the opening cell, which returns in its original form as this music dances along its sizzling way. As if to remind us how far we have come, the quartet concludes with a powerful restatement of that figure.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

String Quartet No. 5, Sz. 102

Allegro

Adagio molto

Scherzo: Alla bulgarese (vivace)

Andante

Finale: Allegro vivace

Bartók

Intermission (2PM only) String Quartet No. 6, Sz. 114

Mesto; Vivace

Mesto; Marcia

Mesto; Burletta

Mesto

Program Notes String Quartet No. 5, Sz. 102 Béla Bartók It was Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the generous champion of contemporary music (and many other good causes), who commissioned Bartók’s Fifth String Quartet. Bartók composed the quartet within the span of one month (August 6–September 6, 1934), apparently intending it for the Pro Arte Quartet, but it was the Kolisch Quartet that gave the first performance at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. on April 8, 1935. The Fifth Quartet is one of the most immediately accessible of Bartók’s quartets, dazzling in its writing for the four instruments and striking for the variety of sound it generates. In some outward respects, Bartók’s Fifth Quartet duplicates the arch structure of his Fourth Quartet. Its five movements are constructed in the shape of a palindrome: powerful first and last movements frame the quartet, while the even-numbered movements—based on similar material— provide balance with their night-music eeriness. At the very center of the quartet is a dazzling scherzo built on folk rhythms; its ABA form provides the capstone of the arch and is itself a palindromic form. But there are differences from the Fourth Quartet: Bartók specified that the outer movements here are in classical forms (sonata form and rondo),

and he reverses the sequence of the inner movements, so that two slow movements frame a central scherzo.

While the Fifth Quartet is not “in” a particular key, its tonality is centered on B-flat, and the opening Allegro hammers out a sequence of B-flats at the very beginning. The movement is based on three quite different (and extremely animated) theme groups. Bartók turns the entire movement into a small arch-form of its own by recapitulating these themes in reverse order, and the music powers to a close on a unison B-flat. The second movement, Adagio molto, opens with a series of quiet trills, and over chorale-like chords the first violin plays its first true theme, a subdued rising sequence marked pianissimo.

Swirling “night” sounds—tremolos, pizzicatos and tiny runs—make up the center section. The opening material returns, and the movement vanishes with a quiet cello glissando that trails off into nothing.

At the center of the quartet is a dizzying Scherzo that Bartók marks Alla bulgarese—“in the Bulgarian manner”—referring to the folk-dance rhythms that drive the movement and give the music its curiously unbalanced pulse. The opening rhythm is a pattern of 4+2+3 eighths, while the trio section rushes ahead on a pattern of 3+2+2+3 eighths.

Despite what seem daunting rhythms, this movement truly does dance—at times furiously—and at the very end the music flickers out on a fragment of its opening theme.

The Andante, fourth-movement companion to the second movement, opens with similar music, this time not trilled but played pizzicato. In this opening section comes one of the most impressive sounds in the quartet: all four instruments have unison patterns of quiet sextuplets, played with a ricochet bow. The animated center section swirls ahead violently, before subsiding as the ricochet patterns return and the movement ends with a series of triple-stopped cello glissandos.

The powerful last movement returns to the mood and manner of the opening. It is in modified sonata form, and along the way the viola launches a fugato that is almost buried inside the whirling texture. The many ingenuities of this movement, which include inversion of its main themes, are too numerous to trace here. Some of the music’s character may be taken from Bartók’s indications in the score: passages are marked strepitoso (“noisy”) and con slancio (“with rage”). Near the end comes a passage that has unsettled many: the music grows quiet, and a simple little tune emerges in A major. This tune seems at first hopelessly innocent (it has been described as a “hurdy-gurdy tune”), but in fact it is a derivation of the main theme of the second movement and has recurred in many forms since. Having ground out this seemingly absurd tune in A major, Bartók moves it up to B-flat major, but keeps the accompaniment in A major. The resulting discord sounds mindless, and Bartók gives this section the wonderful marking Allegretto, con indifferenza. No one is quite sure what this 22-measure aside is doing here, though it has provoked numerous “explanations.” Having paused for this aside, the music resumes furiously (Bartók’s marking is con slancio), and the Fifth Quartet hurtles to its close on another resounding B-flat.

String Quartet No. 6, Sz. 114 Bartók and violinist Zoltán Székely were longtime friends and colleagues. The two gave numerous duo recitals, and it was for Székely that Bartók wrote both his Second Rhapsody and his Second Violin Concerto. In 1937, Székely became first violinist of the Hungarian String Quartet, and one of his initial actions as leader of that quartet was to commission a new string quartet from Bartók. That project began to occupy Bartók’s thoughts in the months after the premiere of the Second Violin Concerto in Amsterdam on March 21, 1939.

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While the late 1930s saw the creation of some of Bartók’s finest works, these were difficult years for the composer, who found himself increasingly alienated from Europe and life there. The Nazis’ rise to power troubled Bartók deeply (after Hitler came to power in 1933, he forbade the performance or broadcast of any of his works in Germany), and the growing Nazi influence in Hungary made his position there precarious. The summer of 1939, which he spent in Switzerland, brought a moment of relief amid the gathering gloom: there he wrote the Divertimento for string orchestra and began the new string quartet, which would be his sixth. He had the first movements sketched when war broke out in September, and he completed the quartet in November after returning to Budapest. The death of his mother in December—an event so devastating to Bartók that he could not attend her funeral—cut his last remaining tie to Europe, and he moved the following year to America, where he would spend the five final—and very difficult years—of his life.

Given the circumstances of its creation, one would expect this quartet to be somber, and so it is. But it is also extraordinarily beautiful and moving music. Listeners instinctively sense the depth of feeling in this quartet, the last work Bartók completed in Europe, but they differ sharply over what the music “means.” Halsey Stevens hears “despair” in the final movement, and others have suggested that the quartet sprang from “an abyss of emotional upheaval or collapse.” Others, though, have heard a measure of acceptance, of calm, in the quartet’s stunning final measures.

The Sixth is the only one of Bartók’s quartets in the traditional four movements, but even here Bartók could not be “traditional”: he had originally intended to preface each movement with a slow section marked Mesto (sad). He stayed with this plan through the first three movements, but upon returning to Budapest in the fall of 1939, he was emotionally unable to write the rousing rondo finale he had originally intended (he actually began to compose this finale but abandoned the plan after sketching its first 90 measures). Instead, he expanded the fourth Mesto into a movement of its own, and it is on this bleak note that the quartet concludes.

Solo viola sings the haunting first Mesto, (13 measures of yearning, lonely music). The Vivace that follows is in sonata form, based on the vigorous opening figure and a slightly swung second subject. Full of sudden tempo shifts and ingenious treatment of thematic motifs, the first movement closes with the first violin’s high A shimmering quietly all alone. The second movement opens with a Mesto played by cello and colored by the rustle of the tremolo inner voices. The second movement itself, titled Marcia, is based on rhythms derived from the verbunkos, the old Hungarian recruiting dance. This raspy march—Bartók marks it risoluto, ben marcato—lurches along dotted rhythms, unexpected accents and glissandos; the middle section offers virtuoso passages for cello and first violin in their highest registers while the viola plays a cimbalom-like accompaniment. After a somber Mesto interlude featuring the first violin, the third movement (also in three-part form) is marked Burletta, and a burlesque it certainly is, with the jokes built around snapped pizzicatos and violin glissandos set a grinding quarter-tone apart. The fourth movement opens again with the Mesto theme introduced by the first violin but subsequently shared by all. Bartók constructs the ensuing finale entirely from that bleak melody. This is briefly relieved by reminiscences of themes from the first movement, but the Mesto music reasserts itself before the unnerving close: below a quiet chord from the violins, the cello slowly sounds the ambiguous concluding pizzicato chords, themselves a distant memory of the Mesto theme. Bartók bids farewell to Europe— and perhaps to an entire way of life—as this haunting music fades into silence.

ALEXANDER STRING QUARTET Having celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2011, the Alexander String Quartet has performed in the major music capitals of five continents, securing its standing among the world’s premier ensembles.

Widely admired for its interpretations of Beethoven, Mozart and Shostakovich, the quartet’s recordings of the Beethoven cycle (twice) and Shostakovich cycle have won international critical acclaim. The quartet has also established itself as an important advocate of new music through more than 25 commissions from such composers as Jake Heggie, Cindy Cox, Tarik O’Regan, Augusta Read Thomas, Robert Greenberg, Martin Bresnick, Cesar Cano and Pulitzer Prize-winner Wayne Peterson.

The Alexander String Quartet is a major artistic presence in its home base of San Francisco, serving since 1989 as Ensemble in Residence of San Francisco Performances and Directors of the Morrison Chamber Music Center in the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at San Francisco State University.

The Alexander String Quartet’s annual calendar of concerts includes engagements at major halls throughout North America and Europe.

The quartet has appeared at Lincoln Center, the 92nd Street Y and the Metropolitan Museum in New York; Jordan Hall in Boston; the Library of Congress and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C.; and chamber music societies and universities across North America. Recent overseas tours have brought them to the U.K., the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, France, Greece, the Republic of Georgia, Argentina and the Philippines.

Among the fine musicians with whom the Alexander String Quartet has collaborated are pianists Joyce Yang, Roger Woodward, Anne-Marie McDermott, Menachem Pressler and Jeremy Menuhin; clarinetists Joan Enric Lluna, David Shifrin, Richard Stoltzman and Eli Eban; soprano Elly Ameling; mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato; cellists Lynn Harrell, Sadao Harada, and David Requiro; and jazz greats Branford Marsalis, David Sanchez and Andrew Speight. The quartet has worked with many composers including Aaron Copland, George Crumb and Elliott Carter, and has long enjoyed a close relationship with composerlecturer Robert Greenberg, performing numerous lecture-concerts with him annually.

The Alexander String Quartet added considerably to its distinguished and wide-ranging discography over the past decade. Recording exclusively for the FoghornClassics label, the most recent addition is the fall 2013 release of the combined string quartet cycles of Bartók and Kodály (recorded on the renowned Ellen M. Egger matched quartet of instruments built by San Francisco luthier, Francis Kuttner). Their recording of music by Gershwin and Kern was released in the summer of 2012, following the spring 2012 recording of the clarinet quintet of Brahms and a new quintet from César Cano, in collaboration with Joan Enric Lluna, as well as a disc in collaboration with the San Francisco Choral Artists. Next to be released will be a multidisc Brahms album.

The Alexander’s 2009 release of the complete Beethoven cycle was described by Music Web International as performances “uncompromising in power, intensity and spiritual depth,” while Strings Magazine described the set as “a landmark journey through the greatest of all quartet cycles.” The FoghornClassics label released a three-CD set (Homage) of the Mozart quartets dedicated to Haydn in 2004. Foghorn released a six-CD album (Fragments) of the complete Shostakovich quartets in 2006 and 2007, and a recording of the complete quartets of Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco composer, Wayne Peterson in the spring of 2008. BMG Classics released the quartet’s first recording of Beethoven cycle on its Arte Nova label to tremendous critical acclaim in 1999.

—All program notes provided by Eric Bromberger.

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The Alexander String Quartet was formed in New York City in 1981 and captured international attention as the first American quartet to win the London International String Quartet Competition in 1985.

The quartet has received honorary degrees from Allegheny College and Saint Lawrence University and Presidential medals from Baruch College (CUNY).

The Alexander String Quartet is represented by BesenArts LLC BesenArts.com The Alexander String Quartet records for FogHornClassics asq4.com

ROBERT GREENBERG Robert Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1954, and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1978. Greenberg received a B.A. in music, magna cum laude, from Princeton University in 1976.

His principal teachers at Princeton were Edward Cone, Daniel Werts and Carlton Gamer in composition, Claudio Spies and Paul Lansky in analysis, and Jerry Kuderna in piano. In 1984, Greenberg received a Ph.D. in music composition, with distinction, from the University of California, Berkeley, where his principal teachers were Andrew Imbrie and Olly Wilson in composition and Richard Felciano in analysis.

Greenberg has composed more than 50 works for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles. Recent performances of his works have taken place in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, England, Ireland, Greece, Italy and the Netherlands, where his Child’s Play for String Quartet was performed at the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam.

Greenberg has received numerous honors, including three Nicola de Lorenzo Composition Prizes and three Meet-The-Composer Grants.

Notable commissions have been received from the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Alexander String Quartet, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, San Francisco Performances, and the XTET ensemble. Greenberg is a board member and an artistic director of COMPOSERS, INC., a composers’ collective/ production organization based in San Francisco. His music has been published by Fallen Leaf Press and CPP/Belwin, and recorded on the Innova label.

California/Haas School of Business Executive Seminar, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School Publishing, Kaiser Permanente, the Strategos Institute, Quintiles Transnational, the Young Presidents’ Organization, the World Presidents’ Organization and the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Greenberg has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, INC. Magazine, The Times of London, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, the University of California Alumni Magazine, Princeton Alumni Weekly and Diablo Magazine. For 15 years Greenberg was the resident composer and music historian to National Public Radio’s “Weekend All Things Considered” and “Weekend Edition, Sunday” with Liane Hansen.

In February 2003, The Bangor Daily News (Maine) referred to Greenberg as the “Elvis of music history and appreciation,” an appraisal that has given him more pleasure than any other.

In May 1993, Greenberg recorded a 48-lecture course titled “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music” for the Teaching Company/Great Courses Program of Chantilly, Virginia. (This course was named in the January, 1996 edition of Inc. Magazine as one of “The Nine Leadership Classics You’ve Never Read.”) The Great Courses is the preeminent producer of college-level courses on media in the U.S. Twenty-five further courses, including “Concert Masterworks,” “Bach and the High Baroque,” “The Symphonies of Beethoven,” “How to Listen to and Understand Opera,” “Great Masters,” “The Operas of Mozart,” “The Life and Operas of Verdi,” “The Symphony,” “The Chamber Music of Mozart,” “The Piano Sonatas of Beethoven,” “The Concerto,” “The Fundamentals of Music,” “The String Quartets of Beethoven,” “The Music of Richard Wagner” and “The Thirty Greatest Orchestral Works” have been recorded since, totaling more than 550 lectures. The courses are available on both CD and DVD formats and in book form.

Greenberg’s book How to Listen to Great Music was published by Plume, a division of Penguin Books, in April 2011.

Greenberg lives with his children Lillian and Daniel and a very cool Maine coon (cat) named Teddy in the hills of Oakland.

Greenberg has performed, taught and lectured extensively across North America and Europe. He is currently music historian-in-residence with San Francisco Performances, where he has lectured and performed since 1994. He has served on the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley, California State University, East Bay and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he chaired the Department of Music History and Literature from 1989–2001 and served as the Director of the Adult Extension Division from 1991–1996. Greenberg has lectured for some of the most prestigious musical and arts organizations in the United States, including the San Francisco Symphony (where for 10 years he was host and lecturer for the Symphony’s nationally-acclaimed “Discovery Series”), the Chautauqua Institute (where he was the Everett Scholar-in-Residence during the 2006 season), the Ravinia Festival, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Van Cliburn Foundation, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Villa Montalvo, Music@Menlo and the University of British Columbia (where he was the Dal Grauer Lecturer in September of 2006). In addition, Greenberg is a sought-after lecturer for businesses and business schools. For many years a member of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania/Wharton School’s Advanced Management Program, he has spoken for such diverse organizations as S.C. Johnson, Canadian Pacific, Deutsches Bank, the University of MondaviArts.org | 8