Brentano String Quartet, January 29, 2019

oneppo chamber music series David Shifrin, artistic director

Brentano String Quartet Mark Steinberg, violin • Serena Canin, violin Misha Amory, viola • Nina Lee, cello

Tuesday, January 29, 2019 | 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall

Robert Blocker, Dean

Program lamentations Joseph Haydn 1732–1809

Dmitri Shostakovich 1906–1975

Carlo Gesualdo 1566–1613

“Eli, Eli” from The Seven Last Words of Christ for string quartet, Hob. 53

Elegy for string quartet (1931) after Katerina’s Aria, Act III of Lady Macbeth of Mtensk

“Mercè!, grido piangendo” from Madrigals, Book V arr. for string quartet by Mark Steinberg (2018) “Moro, lasso, al mio duolo” from Madrigals, Book VI arr. for string quartet by Bruce Adolphe (2004)

Haydn

“Consumatum Est” from The Seven Last Words of Christ for string quartet, Hob. 55

Elliott Carter 1908–2012

Elegy for String Quartet (1943)

Guillaume Lekeu 1870–1894

Molto Adagio sempre cantante e doloroso (Mon âme est triste jusqu’à la mort) (1887)

intermission

Béla Bartók 1881–1945

String Quartet No. 2, Sz. 67 I. Moderato II. Allegro molto capriccioso III. Lento

As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.

Artist Profiles Brentano String Quartet Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim. Within a few years of its formation, the quartet garnered the inaugural Cleveland Quartet Award and the Naumburg Chamber Music Award. In recent seasons the quartet has appeared in the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, and Australia.

The Brentano String Quartet has performed many musical works that pre-date the string quartet as a medium, including the madrigals of Gesualdo, fantasias of Purcell, and secular vocal works of Josquin. The quartet has also worked closely with some of the most important composers of our time, including Elliott Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Chou Wen-chung, Steven Mackey, Bruce Adolphe, and Gyรถrgy Kurtรกg, and has commissioned works from Wuorinen, Adolphe, Mackey, David Horne, and Gabriela Frank. The quartet has been privileged to collaborate with such artists as Jessye Norman, Joyce DiDonato, Richard Goode, Jonathan Biss, and Mitsuko Uchida.

In fall 2014, the quartet became the quartetin-residence at the Yale School of Music, succeeding the Tokyo String Quartet in that position. >> www.brentanoquartet.com

Program Notes lamentations Notes on the program Mark Steinberg Mother I shall weave a chain of pearls for thy neck with my tears of sorrow.

The stars have wrought their anklets of light to deck thy feet but mine will hang upon thy breast...

This my sorrow is absolutely mine own and when I bring it to thee as my offering thou rewardest me with thy grace.

– Rabindranath Tagore: from Gitanjali There exists an old tradition of professional lamenters, who, as a service to those who grieve, digest and transfigure that grief in giving it voice. What greater faith in art can be imagined? This program of lamentations celebrates that art of cathartic expression in songs of lamentation from Purcell and Gesualdo through Shostakovich and Carter, evincing strength and vulnerability in equal measure, through the intimacy and immediacy of the string quartet.

One of art’s most potent functions is to give form and expression to that which can at times threaten to isolate us. From the rudaalis of India who wail for the deceased as a service to those of higher caste who are prohibited from displaying such emotions publicly to the ancient keening of Ireland and Wales, archetypal embodiments of wailing are embedded deep in our rituals and somatic expressions. For the ancient Greeks poetic elegy and music were intertwined, recitations being accompanied by the flute or the oboe-like aulos. Rilke, in

the Duino Elegies speaks of when Linos, the son of a Muse, and the greatest of early musicians, was killed by Apollo in a fit of jealousy: “Is the story in vain, how once, in the mourning for Linos, venturing earliest music pierced barren numbness, and how, in the horrified space which an almost deified youth suddenly quitted forever, emptiness first felt the vibration that now charms us and comforts and helps?” Music as expression, and music as the beginnings of consolation.

This program begins with what may be the most famous of laments, Dido’s Lament by Henry Purcell, from the opera Dido and Aeneas. It features in the ever-repeating bass line that descending pattern that would so often be associated with grief and death.

Dido, abandoned by her Aeneas, and by life itself as she dissolves in heartbreak, sings “When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create no trouble, no trouble in thy breast; Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate. Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.”

Later in the program we hear from another female protagonist in the Shostakovich Elegy.

This is the composer’s own transcription of an aria from his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Although he chooses to call it, in the string quartet version, an elegy, the original does not speak of death but rather of loneliness: “no one will come to me…

The days go by in a joyless procession, my life will flash past without a smile. No one, no one will ever come to me…” Here is the death of possibility, desire and hope, although not without a certain underlying lightness which brings to mind that

curiously Chekhovian amalgam of tragedy and comedy. There is also an elegy from very early in Elliott Carter’s long career, a rich and passionate piece that also opens into hope and possibility.

Two transcribed madrigals by the great Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo stand at the center of this collection of laments.

Both speak of death and abandonment and are replete with Mannerist distortions in their evocatively elusive harmonic shifts.

Doubt, doom, and uncertainty infiltrate the rhetoric, and any sense of stability is fraught throughout. The music often threatens to whirl into chaos. The amount of emotional turmoil we can precariously contain within our lives is on occasion fantastically large. At times we feel we just barely manage to cheat the forces of collapse. This is the volatile world of heightened experience these madrigals evoke, repeatedly holding us in the grip of the concentrated moment.

The remaining pieces, the two Haydn movements and the Molto adagio by the scarcely known Belgian composer Guillaume Lekeu, who studied with Franck and only lived to be 24, have to do with the Passion of Christ. Haydn wrote his Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross for a commission from the cathedral in Cadiz in Spain. For each of the last words (“Father, father, why hast thou forsaken me?” and “It is done.” are the two presented on this program) he was to write a slow movement for meditative contemplation of the words which would be spoken by the priest. All the windows of the cathedral was draped in black for the premiere of the work. Lekeu’s dark,

passionate and tolling work is inspired by the words of Jesus on the night before the Crucifixion: “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.”

On the second half of this program we have Bartók’s Quartet No. 2, arguably his most grief-stricken work. The quartet was written during the First World War, in an atmosphere of desolation and with much to grieve for the state of the world. Here the composer dives deep into a well of longing, regret and darkness. Ending in bleak despair, it is perhaps the purest and most intimate lament of all. The ending, and the shape of the work as a whole, seem to channel narrative and emotional truths from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Although there is no known official connection, the works seem to inhabit eerily similar worlds and paths.

Passion that breeds compassion.Embodiment and form given to grief. Motion as a way to channel emotion. Memory and commemoration. The directness or oblique concealment of expression, the honest blossoming into voice of the bereft sadness in these works both compel us and begin the path toward healing. We may well be reminded of Albany’s (or Edgar’s, depending on the version) line at the end of King Lear: “The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

Oneppo Chamber Music

2018–2019 Season

About the Oneppo Chamber Music Series

feb 26

Jordi Savall with Le Concert des Nations Music from the film Tous les Matins du Monde, featuring works

by Couperin, Lully, and more

Chamber music is an integral part of the Yale School of Music, and this concert series presents many of the world’s leading concert artists on the stage of Morse Recital Hall.

apr 16

A Far Cry gravity: a progression of works for strings.

Pärt: Silouan’s Song Xenakis: Aroura Kernis: Musica Celestis Bartók: Divertimento for String Orchestra Golijov: Tenebrae

Ever since Sprague Memorial Hall was built in 1917, it has been home to chamber music performances. The origins of this series can be traced to concerts organized

by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, widely considered the godmother of chamber music in America.

May 7

Competition Winners Performances by the winners of the School’s annual Chamber Music Competition

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Upcoming Events feb 3 Il flauto magico

Collection of Musical Instruments The recorder ensemble Boreas Quartett Bremen performs works by Tallis, Byrd, Bach, and more, with guest artist Han Tol. 3 pm | Collection of Musical Inst.

Tickets $30, Yale staff and seniors and museum associates $25, students $15 feb 13 Roberto Prosseda, piano

Horowitz Piano Series A performance by guest artist Roberto Prosseda, whom Gramophone has said “has a fiery and fluent technique.”

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The Yale Philharmonia performs its annual concert in the intimate Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall.

7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall Tickets start at $12, Yale faculty/ staff $8, students $5 feb 24 Steven Isserlis, cello, and Robert Levin, fortepiano

Collection of Musical Instruments “Put them together and something magical happens” — Gramophone 3 pm | Collection of Musical Inst.

Tickets $30, Yale staff and seniors and museum associates $25, students $15 feb 26 Jordi Savall: Tous les Matins du Monde

Oneppo Chamber Music Series Viola da gamba virtuoso Jordi Savall leads an ensemble in a program of music from film Tous les Matins du Monde.

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