Brentano String Quartet with Ettore Causa, viola, October 3, 2023

David Shifrin, artistic director

Brentano String Quartet with Ettore Causa,

viola

Tuesday, October 3, 2023 | 7:30 pm

Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall

José García-León, Dean

Program

Wolfgang Amadeus

Mozart

1756–1791

String Quartet in D major, K. 499, “Hoffmeister”

I. Allegretto

II. Menuetto. Allegretto

III. Adagio

IV. Allegro

James MacMillan

b. 1959

Johannes Brahms

1833–1897

Memento (1994)

For Sonny (2012)

intermission

String Quintet No. 2 in G major, Op. 111

I. Allegro non troppo ma con brio

II. Adagio

III. Un poco allegretto

IV. Vivace ma non troppo presto

Ettore Causa, viola

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

Mark Steinberg, violin

Serena Canin, violin

Misha Amory, viola

Nina Lee, cello

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, among them 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 György Kurtág, 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 quartet-in-residence at the Yale School of Music, succeeding the Tokyo String Quartet in that position.

Ettore Causa, viola

Awarded both the P. Schidlof Prize and the J. Barbirolli Prize for “the most beautiful sound” at the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition in 2000, Italian-born violist Ettore Causa has been praised for his exceptional artistry, passionate intelligence, and complete musicianship. He has made solo and recital appearances in major venues around the world, and has collaborated extensively with internationally renowned chamber musicians.

At the Yale School of Music, Causa teaches graduate-level viola students and coaches chamber ensembles. Before he joined the faculty in 2009, Causa taught both viola and chamber music at the International Menuhin Music Academy. He attended the International Menuhin Music Academy, where he studied with Alberto Lysy and Johannes Eskar, and the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Michael Tree.

Causa has published CDs on the Claves label. His recording Romantic Transcriptions for Viola and Piano, on which he performs his own transcriptions, was awarded “5 Diapasons” by the French magazine Diapason.

In 2015, Causa was an honored guest at the 43rd International Viola Congress, where he performed his own arrangement of the Schumann Cello Concerto. He is an honorary member of British Viola Society, and he performs on a viola made for him by Frederic Chaudière in 2003.

Program Notes

Quartet in D major, K. 499 mozart

Misha Amory

Mozart’s K. 499 Quartet is subtitled the “Hoffmeister” Quartet, after his friend (and sometime publisher) Franz Hoffmeister. A more apt, descriptive title for the work might be the “Figaro” Quartet, after the extraordinary opera that Mozart composed in the same year. Like The Marriage of Figaro, the quartet is built around the key of D major: in Mozart’s music this is often a radiant place, shot through with life and joy. But more essentially, the two works share a particular and complex comic sensibility: the onlookers enjoy the joke, the witty remark, the unsuspecting victim, but they sense at the same time a pathos, a shadow, or a sorrow underlying the moment. So much of the potency of Mozart’s genius lies in this, his ability to simultaneously evoke laughter and tears in a single phrase, a single gesture.

The first movement opens in a way that seems utterly innocent and guileless: a united gesture that wishes us “good morning,” then dividing into pairs of instruments that bow and hold the door for each other. Every aspect of the scene is so blithe and untroubled, in fact, that it is impossible not to suspect that somebody has a trick up his sleeve; and sure enough, the music explodes into B minor, and life starts to get complicated. Eventually the second violin line launches into an undulating, traveling pattern of eighth notes whose motion will carry on through

most of the rest of the movement. The characters in this story are destined to travel through many different scenes on this eighth-note carriage, but, as in life, they won’t necessarily be able to control the journey, or choose when to get off. The comedy of manners persists, flowing imperturbably along, urbane on the surface, but with many an ironic aside, many a clever subplot. Twice, at important structural points, the eighth-note carriage grinds to a halt; in the silence one can imagine the traveler peering behind one curtain, and then another, uncertain, perhaps suspecting a trick, only to be swept up again in a new direction. The second time this happens, near the very end of the movement, Mozart provides a musical rejoinder that is so eloquent and touching that the previous jokes and deceptions seem suddenly not to matter at all; as in Figaro, he treats the victims of his humor with unexpected tenderness, and we too fall a little bit in love with them in the end.

The second movement is a minuet of startling pomp and grandeur, nearly orchestral in its demands on the quartet — a departure from the typical minuet in Mozart’s chamber music, which tends to dwell on what is subtle and clever. Here, again, the image of an operatic scene appears before our eyes, perhaps a set piece with gilded trappings which fills the stage with dancers at a grand ball. Harmonically, there are hints of darkness, chromatic twists and turns; but in the main, these dancing characters are compelled to maintain their demeanor,

to observe the forms. By contrast, the central Trio section whisks us off to a side room, filled with cunning minor-key whispers, arguments, elaborate handoffs. No Mozart opera is without schemers and plotters.

The third movement descends one key level, down to a deeper and darker G major. It is the same key in which, in a sublime and moving scene at the very end of Figaro, the Count pleads with his wife to forgive him and be reconciled. In the quartet, the atmosphere is lovely in the same intimate, dusky way, the air full of confession; but where the Count’s music is simple, unclothed, almost painfully bare, here the writing is ornate, wingèd, impossibly graceful. The finishing of one phrase or idea constantly dovetails or elides with the start of the next idea, creating the impression of feet never touching the ground, always being lifted gently into the next updraft, a seamless outpouring of eloquence. Almost from the start, Mozart uses chromatic motion to darken the scene, to twist the knife within what is essentially radiant and blissful; and throughout the movement that chromatic tendency will persist, conjuring a penumbra of minor hovering constantly near each glowing, major-key utterance. The musicologist Maynard Solomon described these shadowy, unbalanced hallmarks of Mozart’s late style as evoking “a sense of restlessness and instability, and even of the uncanny and dangerous… these beauties express the nameless feelings, those that are elusive, fused, ambivalent, fantastic.” Joy, pain, love,

dread: the place where they overlap, their meeting point, is captured in Mozart’s greatest music.

The finale is by far the most carefree of the four movements, and at the same time it is in some ways the most compositionally ambitious, filled with contrapuntal games, sequences with more than one idea occurring simultaneously, rhythmic complexity. There are two main ideas that alternate and sometimes overlap or clash. The first is a graceful, fluttering triplet shape in the first violin which stops short, teasingly, a couple of times in its utterance, before flying away, rising just out of reach. The other idea is a childlike, scampering tune in an eighth-note scale, even more fun-loving than the first melody, eventually playing dodgeball or tag with itself in syncopated rhythms. The movement’s mission is to alternate the two ideas in ever increasing proximity to each other, playfully, to the point where they start to tangle and layer on top of one another. Between the simplicity of the material and the sophistication of the combinations, the effect is that of two small children turning out to be able to converse brilliantly about quantum physics or Shakespeare. In this sense, the movement prefigures the great finales of Mozart’s 39th or 41st symphonies — and recalls the most elaborate writing in Figaro — where the richness and complexity of his invention somehow coexist with an essential joy and lightness, buoyancy and freedom.

Memento and For Sonny macmillan

Notes by the composer

A brief movement for string quartet, Memento was written in memory of a friend, David Huntley, the representative of Boosey & Hawkes in the USA, who died in 1994. It was premiered at his memorial concert in New York by the Kronos Quartet. The music is slow, delicate, and tentative and is based on the modality of Gaelic lament music and the Gaelic heterophony of psalm-singing in the Hebrides.

For Sonny is a little miniature for string quartet written in memory of a little boy, the grandson of a friend, who died a few days after his birth.

Throughout, the first violin plays a simple fragment, like a nursery rhyme, repeating over and over again, pizzicato. The other instruments provide an ever-changing context for this little tune, sometimes accompanying it with easy harmonies, sometimes straying into stranger territory.

String Quintet in G major, Op. 111 brahms

Misha Amory

Among our great composers, Johannes Brahms led an unusually blessed existence. He was adored and feted during his lifetime, dubbed one of the “Three B’s” (along with Bach and Beethoven), enjoying a kind of rock-star fame in German-speaking countries and beyond. He composed his music during a period where audiences were possibly larger, more knowledgeable, and more enthusiastic than any time before or since. He made a good living — and eventually became quite wealthy — as a composer, pianist, and conductor, but mainly as a composer; and unlike the greats before him (including Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert) he wrote anything he pleased at leisure, not having to solicit work, find an employer, or rely on commissions. He attained this independence by his late twenties and lived to be 63, enjoying robust health for his entire life. He was surrounded by loving friends and never lacked for human companionship.

In spite of this, nobody would call him a happy man. In the midst of all the adulation, he constantly doubted his own abilities, considering himself a poor successor to the great composers of the past. He also had intimacy issues, to put it charitably — he pushed his friends and his romantic prospects away repeatedly and hurtfully, and felt himself to be forever an outsider. One might expect a composer of his good fortune to

understand joy and fulfillment, and to be especially inclined to write music that laughs, exults, and sparkles. But much of his “happiest” music, such as the B-flat String Quartet, the Academic Festival Overture, or the third movement of his Fourth Symphony, can have a hardworking, determined quality that compares unflatteringly to the blissful grace of Mendelssohn or the dazzling, unreasoning joy of some Schumann. The most beloved music by Brahms tends, rather, to be that which conveys loneliness, sorrow, distant thunder, radiant and melancholy depths. When he ends a minor-key movement in major, as at the conclusion of the G major Violin Sonata, or the Third Symphony, we are not gladdened, but moved to tears by the tender, bereft beauty of this music.

But then there is the G major Viola Quintet. Anybody wishing to refute the image of “Brahms as brooder” would surely cite this piece, whose famous opening bounds off the page with joy — irrepressible, authentic. One friend, hearing it for the first time, described it as “Brahms in the Prater!” (referring to the composer’s beloved Vienna park where he walked every day); Brahms replied, “You’ve got it!” Accompanied by churning upper strings, an astounding cello melody unfolds, spanning nearly three octaves, Olympian in its energy. Eventually the first violin is drawn in and spars with the cello, contrapuntal sparks flying. The first section of the movement is a process of gradual calming, leading to a warmer melody in the two violas, and later a third

theme which is more delicate and waltzlike. The movement occupies an enormous expressive canvas, ranging from orchestral brilliance all the way to the most intimate of whispers. Throughout, Brahms indulges in all of the composer’s craft for which he is known — rhythmic reimaginings of the meter, imitative overlaps, and a love of examining small parts of his melodies, gradually transforming and recombining them with each other so that they eventually become something else entirely. The symphonic pretensions of this movement are unmistakable; in fact, Brahms’s friend and biographer Max Kalbeck speculated that the material in this movement was originally intended for a fifth symphony, which never came to be.

The second movement, an Adagio, is extraordinarily ambiguous on many levels. Harmonically, it sits on the knifeedge between two keys, D minor and A major, the former trying to assert itself but constantly sliding toward the latter (and as if that weren’t enough, the main melody spends most of its time in a third key, C major). At the same time, the music alternates between two moods or textures: we hear on the one hand a somber, ceremonial tread that verges on the funereal at times, and on the other hand a wandering triplet line that is unmoored, searching and lonely. Even the form of the movement is irresolute, having the outline of a free fantasia, but also carrying the qualities of a set of variations. The music is like a question that a thinker is putting to himself, over and over; the frustration mounts until

there is a sudden outbreak of intensity, but still the answer eludes him. When it finally comes — a moment of terrible D-minor realization — turbulence and upheaval ensue, the instruments shouting at each other over seething waves of triplets. The dust settles, and the theme reappears one last time, broken and disconsolate, having found resolution but not peace.

A wistful dancelike movement follows; at first the opening melody seems to echo the harmony and contour of the previous movement, but quickly becomes something else, a waltz in the shadows, accompanied by shuddering, gentle syncopations. The melody halts over and over, trying to find its way, eventually starting over in an even softer voice. This is a movement of snippets; sometimes the melody does manage to put together an arc of four bars, but more often the music is composed of aborted attempts, hesitations, sighs, gasps. In a central section, the sun comes out, the two violas sing a simple two-bar idea that is answered, voices flipped, in the violins; it is a moment of respite and blue skies. Of course, with Brahms, the cloud cover is never far away; the doubt-laden chromatic wandering returns, sun and shadow vying with one another until a shocking, accented dissonance heralds the return of the original dance, halting and overcast as ever.

The Hungarian or Gypsy flavor was beloved by Brahms (it seems that he did not distinguish too finely between the two); he listened constantly to Gypsy

music in the Viennese cafes that he frequented, and one of his closest friends, the violinist Joseph Joachim, was Hungarian. The terse final movement of the Quintet embraces this flavor from the beginning, alternating a fun, scurrying melody with a more vigorous, leaping response. As in the second movement, there is a harmonic tension between two keys, the movement attempting to assert a B minor identity, but pulled irresistibly toward joyful G major. There is a wealth of melodies in the movement, the first two ideas being rapidly succeeded by a sighing upward motif over a billowing texture, and eventually a skirling arpeggio with a lilting offbeat accent. Toward the end of the movement, the fight between B minor and G major finds a compromise, as a B major version of the main theme is proposed in a delicate, hushed passage. But the tension of this compromise is too much to bear, and the music explodes outward, into a suspenseful moment of silence. In the rollicking coda that follows, G major triumphs utterly, conveyed by a giddy Gypsy theme which appears out of nowhere, complete with the typical rapid offbeat accompaniment of one of Brahms’s cafe bands. Amid the celebration, we can make out our main themes from the movement, whirled away in the dance, no longer caring about niceties of structure or development, only the high noon of exuberance and celebration.

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