SCHUBERT
String Quartet No.15 in G Major D887 NEW ZEALAND STRING QUARTET
SCHUBERT
NEW ZEALAND STRING QUARTET
Franz Schubert String Quartet No.15 in G Major D.887 1 Allegro molto moderato
20:23
2 Andante un poco moto
12:03
3 Scherzo: Trio
7:34
4 Allegro assai
11:19
TOTAL TIME
51:17
MMT2062 16 bit Digital Stereo Recording 2013 HRL Morrison Music Trust 2013 HRL Morrison Music Trust
Cover Image Rita Angus (1908-1970), Flight, 1969, oil on hardboard, 602 x 607mm, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Courtesy of the Estate of Rita Angus. Reproduced by permission of the estate of the artist, image courtesy of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
1826 is regarded as a rather troubled year in Schubert’s personal life. His ill health continued to cause him difficulty, and he was struggling to earn a viable income. Despite this, his reputation as a composer was growing both within and beyond Vienna, and this same year Schubert completed several works now recognised as masterpieces, including two major piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony and this String Quartet in G major, D.887. This quartet is Schubert’s fifteenth and final, composed over a 10-day period of intense creativity during the Viennese summer – financial constraints had prevented him from taking a summer holiday that year. Schubert was unable to find a publisher for this quartet during his lifetime as it was considered to be too long, too diverse, and too difficult. It was eventually published by Diabelli of Vienna
in 1852, but it is likely that Schubert only ever heard one of its movements in performance. The emotional first movement establishes the major/minor conflict that characterises the harmonic inventiveness of the work. The Andante begins with one of Schubert’s loveliest cello melodies but then explores contrasting moods following a dramatic interjection. Opposites also feature in the Scherzo and Trio, where the main section of the Scherzo is swift and ethereal, in contrast to the heavier rhythms of the Trio. The vigorous final Allegro has been compared to a comic opera with a full cast of heroes and villains. Sudden accents, dynamic changes and the continuing major-minor conflict convey a sense of dramatic urgency that brings the work to a brilliant climax. © Chamber Music New Zealand 2008
NEW ZEALAND STRING QUARTET
NEW ZEALAND STRING QUARTET Having toured internationally for more than 25 years, the New Zealand String Quartet has established a worldwide reputation for harmony and a unity of purpose highlighted by immense clarity, subtlety and a mastery of every shade and mood. The Quartet is known for its diverse and imaginative programming, including music of five centuries and many genres, complete cycles of Beethoven, Bartok and Berg, and the development of an international audience for New Zealand composition. The Quartet performs over eighty concerts a year, half at home in New Zealand and half overseas. Career highlights have included acclaimed debuts in London at Wigmore Hall (2000), in New York at the prestigious Frick Collection (2003) and in the famous concert series in Washington’s Library of Congress Coolidge Auditorium (2009). International tours and festival successes have taken the group to Canada and the US for bi-annual visits as well as to Mexico, Curacao, Korea, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia and the Netherlands. In 2011 the Quartet made its debut at the City of London Festival and in 2012 curated a week-long series showcasing New Zealand arts and artists at Kings Place in London. The Quartet’s extensive discography includes a three-volume CD set of Mendelssohn’s string quartets on the Naxos label. These recordings have been greeted with glowing reviews including high praise from Gramophone. Other works from the standard quartet repertoire cover composers such as Bartók, Ravel, Debussy, Beethoven, Dvorák, Berg and Wolf, as well as the premiere recording of the remarkable 1937 quartet Zoltan Székely. In 2011 the Quartet’s Atoll Records release ‘Notes from a Journey’, a collection of works by New Zealand composers, was judged Best Classical Album at the New Zealand Music Awards. The group’s last 2012 Naxos release, ‘Asian Music for String Quartet’, is also enjoying critical acclaim.
Innovative collaborations undertaken by the New Zealand String Quartet have included performances of concertos with the BBC Scottish Symphony, the Auckland Chamber Orchestra and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. They have performed with internationally renowned artists such as Colin Carr, Anton Kuerti, James Campbell, Stephen Dann, Frans Helmerson, Alexander Lonquich, Piers Lane, Nobuko Imai, Hariolf Schlichtig, Christoph Richter, Atar Arad, and Peter Nágy; the Lafayette, Lindsay, Michelangelo, Pražák and Goldner quartets, as well as jazz greats Mike Nock, Jim Hall and Wayne Marshall. The New Zealand String Quartet participates regularly in a number of international chamber music festivals, including recent appearances at the Ottawa Festival in Ottawa and the Festival of the Sound in Parry Sound, Ontario, Canada, Music Mountain in Lakeville, Connecticut, USA, the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, Queensland, Australia, and the International Music Festival in Canberra, ACT. The members play a central role in the biennial Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson, New Zealand; two members of the Quartet are Artistic Directors of this Festival and the ensemble performs in many of the concerts across the two week event, working with international guest artists. Dedicated teachers as well as performers, the group has been quartet-in-residence at Victoria University of Wellington, now Te Ko¯ki¯ New Zealand School of Music, since 1991. In North America they have been artists/teachers-in-residence at the Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta, Canada, Quartet Fest West at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and The Quartet Program at Bucknell, Pennsylvania, USA. The New Zealand String Quartet celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2012 and the current formation has played together as a full-time professional ensemble since 1994. Image Overleaf Sir Peter Siddell (1935-2011), Fiord, 2000, oil on canvas, 1000 x 1800mm, private collection. Reproduced by permission of the estate of the artist, image courtesy of Random House New Zealand.
Reflections on Schubert’s String Quartet No.15 in G Major D.887 After a period of inactivity and illness, Schubert’s creative juices suddenly burst forth in a ten-day period in July 1826 to produce an epic string quartet at more than 50 minutes duration; an intensely dramatic and emotional outpouring of his innermost feelings. Notorious for its uncompromising technical and musical demands, this work has been given a special place in our repertoire and we have taken every opportunity in our many years together to perform it. The rewards have been immense as the demands of this work have challenged every facet of our playing, both individually and as a group, and our insights and interpretation of it have matured as we have developed as musicians. This recording of one of our most beloved masterpieces represents a milestone in our career, a kind of celebration of the expressive voice we have nurtured as an ensemble over these many years.
In this work the general demands of Schubert’s musical language – the sculpting and pacing of long spun-out melodies and sections, the articulation of lightness and buoyancy, the reflection of kaleidoscopic harmonic shifts in sound, and the striving for poise, nobility, and clarity – are all pushed to the extreme. In addition, unprecedented orchestral textures appear in sharp contrast to passages of tenderness and melancholy, followed by eruptions of ecstasy and triumph. We experience a life’s journey posing questions, facing adversity, desperation and crisis, uplifted by celebration, resolution and finally transcendence Each performance of this masterpiece has been an unforgettable event for us. From the first bars we are drawn into a powerful vortex of Schubert’s inner world, forced to confront his preoccupation with death and ultimately transformed by his awe-inspiring life spirit.
Rolf Gjelsten, cello
I discovered the Schubert quartet in G major many years ago as a student in London. Hearing it for the first time was one of those rare unforgettable moments in life. I was hearing something so extraordinary, beautiful, stirring and transcendent, music that made my heart beat faster and seems to come from the heavens. There is a quality of drama in the opening passage that is so powerful that the work totally captured my imagination and heart; the abrupt swings from G major to G minor, the soft openings and violent outbursts, and the eerie shimmering tremulous accompaniment under the haunting, yearning questions of the first violin. In the many years between that first experience and the learning and playing of this masterpiece with the NZSQ, it was perpetually high on my wish list and I waited for the day when we would be ready to tackle its virtuoso technical demands and probe its emotional depths.
Gillian Ansell, viola
In this piece I’m particularly fascinated by Schubert’s use of the varying colours of keys and chords to express himself. This master melodist has a set of chord progressions as the main theme of the first movement! These recur throughout the work in many keys, textures, dynamics and moods. There’s a great deal of tragedy in it, but also an almost superhuman force of will that fights the despair. As we play the music, I aim to put myself into a ‘trance-like’ state to speak the language of the music, as opposed to the language of words and theories. In a way, I become those chord progressions so that I can tell their story. Spending many hours in this state while recording this great work was almost an out-of-body experience!
Helene Pohl, first violin
As a young player just starting out, my quartet at the time was given a warning by a well-known former first violinist from a great quartet: ‘don’t take Schubert’s big G Major on tour – it will wear you out completely!’ Almost three decades later I understand why he said this, but I also could not disagree more. This work stands out in our repertoire as one of those truly singular masterpieces. Because of its epic size and, more importantly, its vast dramatic range and varied temperament, it does indeed require its interpreters to manage their energy carefully. But it is in fact only through repeatedly experiencing the unfolding of this work’s architecture in the cauldron of live performance that we best come to know its inner secrets and truths. Schubert, so celebrated for his lyrical gifts, demonstrates in this work a compelling need to communicate the gamut of life’s terrible beauty in all its tragic and sublime dimensions. When we perform this work now, though exhausted
by the journey, we nonetheless feel blessed to be immersed in such a unique universe of expressive possibility.
Douglas Beilman, second violin
New Zealand String Quartet acknowledges the following funders and sponsors
Principal Funder New Zealand School of Music Residency
Annual Series Sponsor
Adam Summer School Sponsor
Touring Sponsor
Peter Siddell
(1935-2011)
Sir Peter Siddell KNZM QSO was born in Auckland in 1935 and educated at Mt Albert Grammar School and the Auckland College of Education. He worked as a schoolteacher and electrician until 1972 when he had his first solo exhibition and started painting full-time. Peter Siddell’s work is represented in many New Zealand corporate collections and in the permanent collections of many public institutions. Siddell is best known for his paintings of an unpopulated Auckland, drawing on things remembered, observed and imagined. He also painted the New Zealand landscape that he often traveled through and the mountains that he climbed in his youth. Fiord was one of a series of South Island landscapes he painted in 2000. He wrote, “I have not seriously climbed in Fiordland but whenever I have visited Milford Sound I have been overwhelmed by the sheer grandeur of the place.’’
Rita Angus (1908-1970) Rita Angus was born in Hastings and studied at the Canterbury College School of Art from 1927 to 1933. In the 1930s she exhibited at the Canterbury Society of Arts and with ‘The Group’ (ex-students from the Society who set up their own exhibitions), while working as a graphic artist. She painted extensively in Otago, Canterbury, and later in Hawke’s Bay and Wellington. In 1954 she bought a cottage in Thorndon, Wellington where she lived and worked until her death in 1970. Often described as one of the outstanding artists of her generation, Rita Angus was an independent and often solitary person. She had a strong sense of vocation and was single-minded in her dedication to her art. “I live to paint and paint to live” she is quoted as saying.
MMT2062 16 bit Digital Stereo Recording 2013 HRL Morrison Music Trust 2013 HRL Morrison Music Trust Recorded at St. Anne’s Church, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 29-30 November, & 1 December 2010. Producers Norbert Kraft & Bonnie Kraft Recording Engineer Norbert Kraft Digital Editing & Mastering Bonnie Kraft Executive Producer Ross Hendy Associate Executive Producer Charles Davenport Booklet Notes Editor Charles Davenport The HRL Morrison Music Trust was established in March 1995 as a charitable trust to support New Zealand musicians of international calibre. All funds received by the Trust are used to make recordings, present concerts – both in New Zealand and overseas – and assist artists to undertake artists to further develop their talents.
The HRL Morrison Music Trust gratefully acknowledges the support of the following people and organisations in the making of this recording: Bill Angus (Rita Angus Estate); Avril Dirga & Emily Siddell (Sir Peter Siddell Estate); and Random House New Zealand. The New Zealand String Quartet Trust acknowledges the generous funding support of Peter and Carolyn Diessl; and Te Ko¯ki¯ New Zealand School of Music. For more information about this recording or others by the HRL Morrison Music Trust visit www.trustrecords.com
SCHUBERT
NEW ZEALAND STRING QUARTET
Franz Schubert String Quartet No.15 in G Major D.887 1 Allegro molto moderato
20:23
2 Andante un poco moto
12:03
3 Scherzo: Trio
7:34
4 Allegro assai
11:19
TOTAL TIME
51:17
MMT2062 16 bit Digital Stereo Recording 2013 HRL Morrison Music Trust 2013 HRL Morrison Music Trust MASSEY U N IVE R SITY TR UST R ECOR DS SE R I ES