brentano string quartet oneppo chamber music series David Shifrin, Artistic Director May 13, 2015 • Morse Recital Hall
Robert Blocker, Dean
Oneppo Chamber Music Series
brentano string quartet Wednesday, May 13, 2015 • 7:30 pm • Morse Recital Hall David Shifrin, Artistic Director mark steinberg, violin • serena canin, violin misha amory, viola • nina lee, cello
Franz Joseph Haydn 1732–1809
String Quartet No. 36 in B-flat major, Op. 50, No. 1 I. Allegro vivace II. Adagio non lento III. Menuetto: Poco allegretto IV. Finale: Vivace
James MacMillan b. 1959
String Quartet No. 3 (2007) I. Molto rubato II. Largo III. Patiently and painfully slow intermission
Johannes Brahms 1833–1897
String Quartet No. 3 in B-flat major, Op. 67 I. Vivace II. Andante III. Agitato (Allegretto non troppo) — Trio — Coda IV. Poco allegretto con variazioni
As a courtesy to the performers and audience, silence electronic devices. Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.
Brentano String Quartet
Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim. “Passionate, uninhibited and spellbinding,” raves the London Independent; the New York Times extols its “luxuriously warm sound [and] yearning lyricism”; the Philadelphia Inquirer praises its “seemingly infallible instincts for finding the center of gravity in every phrase and musical gesture”; and the Times (London) opines, “the Brentanos are a magnificent string quartet… This was wonderful, selfless music-making.” Beginning in July, 2014, the Brentano Quartet succeeds the Tokyo Quartet as Artists in Residence at Yale University, departing from their 14-year residency at Princeton University. The quartet also currently serves as the collaborative ensemble for the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. In recent seasons, the Quartet has traveled widely, appearing all over the United States and Canada, in Europe, Japan, and Australia. It has performed in the world’s most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York; the Library of Congress in Washington; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the Konzerthaus in Vienna; Suntory Hall in Tokyo; and the Sydney Opera House. The Quartet has participated in summer festivals such as Aspen, the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, the Edinburgh Festival, the Kuhmo Festival in Finland, the Taos School of Music, and the Caramoor Festival. In 2012, the Brentano String Quartet provided the central music (Beethoven Opus 131) for the critically-acclaimed independent film A Late Quartet. The feature film, directed by Yaron Zilberman and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Christopher Walken and Mark Ivanir, was screened in major cities throughout North America, including Toronto, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. In addition to performing the entire two-century range of the standard quartet repertoire, the Brentano Quartet has a strong interest in both very old and very new music. It has performed many musical works pre-dating the string quartet as a medium, among them madrigals of Gesualdo, fantasias of Purcell, and secular vocal works of Josquin. Also, the quartet has worked closely with some of the most important composers of our time, among them Elliott Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Chou Wenchung, Steven Mackey, Bruce Adolphe, and György Kurtág. The Quartet has commissioned works from Wuorinen, Adolphe, Mackey, David Horne, and Gabriela Frank.
Brentano String Quartet
Among the Quartet’s latest collaborations with contemporary composers is a new work by Steven Mackey, One Red Rose, which was commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Yellow Barn, and the Nasher Center to commemorate the 50 th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Other new commissions include a piano quintet by Vijay Iyer (a graduate of Yale College), a work by Eric Moe which had its premiere in September 2012 (with Christine Brandes, soprano), and a new viola quintet by Felipe Lara (to be performed with violist Hsin-Yun Huang). The quartet has been privileged to collaborate with such artists as soprano Jessye Norman, pianist Richard Goode, and pianist Mitsuko Uchida. The Quartet enjoys an especially close relationship with Ms. Uchida, appearing with her on stages in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In spring 2013, the second of three recordings featuring the late Beethoven Quartets was released on Aeon Records. Previous recordings include a disc of Mozart (also on Aeon), and the Opus 71 quartets of Haydn. In the area of newer music, the quartet has released a disc of the music of Steven Mackey on Albany Records, and has also recorded the music of Bruce Adolphe, Chou Wen-chung and Charles Wuorinen. Within a few years of its formation, the quartet garnered the first Cleveland Quartet Award and the Naumburg Chamber Music Award. In 1998, cellist Nina Lee joined the quartet, succeeding founding member Michael Kannen. The quartet is named for Antonie Brentano, whom many scholars consider to be Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved,” the intended recipient of his famous love confession. » www.brentanoquartet.com The Brentano String Quartet records for aeon (distributed by Allegro Media Group).
Notes on the Program
franz joseph haydn String Quartet No. 36 in B-flat major, Op. 50, No. 1 Haydn wrote his Opus 50 quartets in 1787. Like Mozart with his final three quartets, he dedicated them to King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, who was a music lover and an enthusiastic amateur cellist. Perhaps for this reason the cello part, throughout the six quartets, has little moments in the sun, snatches of brilliance or brief alluring melodies – a more subtle featuring than in Mozart’s Prussian Quartets, as if Haydn was attempting to judge very carefully how much of a burden of exposure to place on his royal (and hopefully generous) dedicatee. The first of these quartets, Opus 50, No. 1 in B-flat, opens with patchwork. Haydn seems to be sifting through his musical remnants, setting himself the challenge of fashioning an entire movement out of brief motifs and incomplete notions. The cello starts alone, trudging along on a single repeated pitch. When the other instruments enter, it is only to play a little “ender” gesture, just when one would expect a proper melody of decent length to be initiated. There is obviously humor in this approach, but at the same time we are being treated to a display of composer’s virtuosity, as we behold the delicate architecture of an extended form gradually taking shape, despite resting on such a seemingly trivial, flimsy foundation. The non-melodic, repeated pitch of the cello opening is destined to become the ubiquitous vehicle of the movement, gently carrying and shepherding all of these inchoate, fragmentary bits of music into wholeness.
The second movement is a set of variations on a courtly, elegant theme. Simplicity seems to be the focus here; however, Haydn being Haydn, he bases his theme not on periods of four bars (the usual, regular length), but rather six bars, so that we detect a gleam of something richer, more oblique, underlying this simple world. The variations are not ambitious – one with a first-violin descant, one minor and operatic, and one embellished from below by cello filigree – rather, this music is content to bask in its world of rhythmic grace and simple, glowing harmony. The Minuet is jocular, full of Haydnesque energy, featuring a straightforward melody that is put through its paces, appearing in all possible registers, harmonized now from below, now from overhead, and finally on all sides. The contrasting Trio section is, like much of the first movement, an exercise in minimalization: a cute, sparkling descending line in the first violin announces that, for a while, we will be dealing in only quarter-beat rhythms, both in the melody and the accompaniment. Only at the very end of the Trio is the music permitted to branch out into goofy, hiccuping eighth-beats, before the more robust main section of the Minuet returns. The final movement has a clearly more active nature than its predecessors. In this busy, high-energy context, the composer indulges happily in contrapuntal exchange between the voices – question and answer, rude interruption, amusing pauses and brilliant outbursts, all in an atmosphere of joyful congeniality. Only occasionally does the music verge towards minor, a mocktragic sighing that is quickly laughed off. At one point the first violin part is side-
Notes on the Program
tracked into a daydreaming cadenza, where it lingers for a few seconds before being teased back into the dance. After a couple of fakeouts – the listener is being tested to make sure he is paying attention – the movement closes triumphantly.
as being, of necessity, a slow movement. And again, it’s a kind of song, a song for the first violinist accompanied by the three other players. The movement begins low in the registers of the instruments and gradually rises to the very heights of these registers…”
– Misha Amory
– James MacMillan
james macmillan String Quartet No. 3 (2007)
johannes brahms String Quartet No. 3 in B-flat major, Op. 67
“The first movement is probably the most substantial of the three movements, at about 10 minutes or so. There’s a kind of spectral memory of sonata form in this movement, in that there are contrasting themes that enter into a kind of dialogue, a battle with each other, that are led through a development, and even through a recapitulation. The basis of the whole work can be heard really in this opening melody. My interest in chant – various forms of chant, not any specific form – I think has shaped the nature of this first melody. It’s monodic, it’s singable, cantabile; but it’s inflected modally and ornamentally. “The second movement begins with a series of little fragments, little shards of material, little “noise events”, I suppose... One of the players [in the Takács Quartet] described this movement as a ‘strange landscape, which even stranger characters walk through, and out the other end, leaving the bareness of the landscape intact at the end.’ Those characters are a waltz, a march, and a kind of circus tune. I suppose this movement could be regarded eventually as a kind of scherzo. “Therefore I thought of the last movement
In the summer of 1875, the 42-year-old Brahms was summering in the beautiful German town of Ziegelhausen, and trying to avoid working on his special bugbear, the First Symphony. Instead he wrote quite a lot of other beautiful music, including his Third String Quartet, all of which he dismissed in a letter to a friend as “trifles,” a way to put off the serious work that lay ahead. In the event, he didn’t procrastinate for long, as the symphony was published and premiered the following year; and the Third Quartet, according to Joseph Joachim, was later to become his favorite of the three quartets. While this quartet may have been a “trifle” to its composer, there is nothing trivial about it – or its predecessors – for string quartets who undertake to play it. It is common knowledge to performers of Brahms’ chamber music that the sextets, and many quintets, that he wrote are kinder to their performers than the string quartets. The sound palette of Brahms’ musical imagination was of a peculiar richness and depth, to the point that five or six performers provided the right natural sonority, but
Notes on the Program
four would find themselves just that much more taxed, their resources that much more stretched. This difference works its way into the skin of the quartets, making them more interestingly effortful and craggy, subtly altering their essence. As one listens to this music, one senses a tension between the large sound-concept and the slightly smaller box that it has been fit into, which places its own stamp on the piece, independent of the musical content itself. Brahms’ Third Quartet truly sounds like the work of a man on his summer holiday. Especially in its outer movements there is a feeling of the countryside, of sunshine. The first movement has strong ties to the same movement of Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet. Aside from sharing its key and its meter – fairly superficial traits – the Brahms evokes the atmosphere of the hunt from the very opening, imitating hunting horns perhaps even more faithfully than Mozart’s music. In many of its most important melodies and motifs it specifically recalls similar material from the earlier piece. And, perhaps most importantly, there seems a conscious effort at simplicity of harmony and texture in many sections, from a composer who, like Mozart, was intricate and dark. In the main melody at the opening, Brahms uses the simplest call-and-response, a quiet playful idea that is trumpeted back immediately in forte; this exchange continues, evoking a child’s game of monkey see, monkey do, rare and disarming in its artlessness. Much later we hear the other main idea of the movement, a basic skipping up and down a few steps of a major scale, again an evocation of child’s play, written intentionally to be rhythmically and harmonically as simple as possible. This is not to say that
the movement is devoid of darker or more complicated music – there is quite a lot of shadow, as well as plenty of involved counterpoint – but at the movement’s close we are left with a recollection of sunny, carefree laughter, a conscious setting-aside of worry and convolution. The second movement is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary slow movements Brahms ever wrote, despite a crowded field of contenders. A hushed unison opening branches out into harmony, introducing a tender and reaching aria for the first violin. Again we are struck by the simplicity of the rhythm in this melody (although the harmonic underpinnings are now richer and more chromatic, more typically Brahms); perhaps the singer is young, sweetly naïve, discovering first love. The contrasting middle section presents a fiercer, prouder idea in dotted rhythms, which alternates with a smoother, more mysterious choral response; this world is plural, the many voices in concert rather than the single, private one. From here the first violin embarks on a wandering fantasy of 16ths, meeting a partner (the second violin) with whom he conducts a difficult, searching conversation. Ultimately the music reaches an anguished climax, after which we are eased into a return of the opening song – this time shared between the cello and first violin, an easier, more graceful exchange than the earlier one. An expressive coda returns to the arching gesture which opened the movement, exploring it more fervently, and reaches another passionate climax before closing at last with a prayerful cadence. The third movement is a different story: troubled, elusive and restless, yet graceful
Notes on the Program
too, evoking an unnameable dance. Now the viola is the hero, singing out boldly while the other instruments, muted, band together in shadowy support. The Agitato in the movement’s title is felt rhythmically – in the persistent, obsessive rhythms of the opening idea, in the tendency towards hemiola (grouping beats in two’s against the movement’s triple meter), and in moments that halt and jar ill-fittingly. But there is also a latent agitato feel in the harmony of the music, which wanders, changes key constantly, and shades towards minor even in major-key passages. The first violin often steps forward, a counterpart to the viola, sometimes agreeing with him, sometimes interrogating and confronting him, providing a kind of balance without which the music might tilt dangerously out of control. A shorter middle Trio section provides a lighter, more tightly structured contrast: at first the three muted instruments play a fragmented, graceful tune, then the viola enters and sings a mournful melody against its repetition. After the return of the main section, and the climax which it attains a second time, a strangely calm coda follows, bringing a disconsolate almost-peace, an uneasy conclusion to the movement. With the finale, the mood of the piece returns to the geniality of the opening movement, though not at first matching its energy. Here we have a set of variations, which recalls the finale of Beethoven’s “Harp” Quartet so strongly that it seems like an homage of sorts. As with the Beethoven, the movement is a lighter companion to three more intense preceding movements. Both the Beethoven and the Brahms feature a quite short, slightly irregular theme in two repeated sections, charmingly laconic,
playing it close to the vest. The two movements also share many details: a variation where the cello plays repeated triplet notes under legato duple rhythms in the other instruments, an early variation featuring the viola, and a fantasy-like coda. However, the Brahms movement deviates from the script when, after several variations have gone by, the music from the first movement stages a kind of invasion, crashing in and assuming command of the proceedings for awhile. But the variation structure persists, despite the intrusion, and ultimately we perceive that the invading forces are subsumed in the landscape of the music, though they never disappear entirely. Late in the coda, the storyline flags, gently losing momentum and finally coming to a nearhalt, before the movement is swept to a close in one joyous flourish. – Misha Amory
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