oneppo chamber music series
David
Shifrin,
artistic director
Takács Quartet
Tuesday, January 21, 2025 | 7:30 p.m.
Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
José García-León, Dean
Program
Ludwig van Beethoven 1770–1827
Leosˇ Janácˇek 1854–1928
String Quartet No.1 in F major, Op. 18 No. 1
I. Allegro con brio
II. Adagio affettuoso ed appasionato
III. Scherzo. Allegro molto
IV. Allegro
String Quartet No. 1 (1923)
I. Adagio con moto
II. Con moto
III. Con moto – Vivace – Andante – Tempo I
IV. Con moto
Beethoven
intermission
String Quartet No. 7 in F major, Op. 59 No. 1
I. Allegro
II. Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando
III. Adagio molto e mesto
IV. Thème russe. Allegro
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 Profile
Takács Quartet
Edward Dusinberre, violin
Harumi Rhodes, violin
Richard O’Neill, viola
András Fejér, cello
The Takács maintains a busy international touring schedule. In 2025 the ensemble will perform in South Korea, Japan and Australia. The Australian tour is centered around a new piece by Kathy Milliken for quartet and narrator. As Associate Artists at London’s Wigmore Hall, the group will present four concerts featuring works by Haydn, Britten, Ngwenyama, Beethoven, Janáček, and two performances of Schubert’s cello quintet with Adrian Brendel. During the season the ensemble will play at other prestigious European venues including Barcelona, Budapest, Milan, Basel, Bath Mozartfest and Bern.
The group’s North American engagements include concerts in New York, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Lajolla, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Tucson, Portland, and Princeton, and collaborations with pianists Stephen Hough and Jeremy Denk.
The members of the Takács Quartet are Christoffersen Fellows and Artists in Residence at the University of Colorado, Boulder. During the summer months the Takács join the faculty at the Music Academy of the West, running an intensive quartet seminar.
The Takács Quartet is known for its innovative programming. In 2021–2022 the ensemble partnered with bandoneon
virtuoso Julien Labro to premiere new works by Clarice Assad and Bryce Dessner, commissioned by Music Accord. In 2014 the Takács performed a program inspired by Philip Roth’s novel Everyman with Meryl Streep at Princeton, and again with her at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto in 2015. They first performed Everyman at Carnegie Hall in 2007 with Philip Seymour Hoffman. They have toured 14 cities with the poet Robert Pinsky, and played regularly with the Hungarian Folk group Muzsikas.
In 2014 the Takács became the first string quartet to be awarded the Wigmore Hall Medal. In 2012, Gramophone announced that the Takács was the first string quartet to be inducted into its Hall of Fame. The ensemble also won the 2011 Award for Chamber Music and Song presented by the Royal Philharmonic Society in London.
The Takács Quartet was formed in 1975 at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest by Gabor Takács-Nagy, Károly Schranz, Gabor Ormai and András Fejér, while all four were students. The group received international attention in 1977, winning First Prize and the Critics’ Prize at the International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France. The Quartet also won the Gold Medal at the 1978 Portsmouth and Bordeaux Competitions and First Prizes at the Budapest International String Quartet Competition in 1978 and the Bratislava Competition in 1981. The Quartet made its North American debut tour in 1982. Members of the Takács Quartet are the grateful beneficiaries of an instrument loan by the Drake Foundation. We are grateful to be Thomastik-Infeld Artists.
Program Notes
String Quartet No.1 in F major, Op. 18 N0.1
beethoven
Laura Usiskin
Though he would come to write seventeen string quartet masterpieces, Beethoven did not compose his first quartet until age thirty, well after establishing himself as a composer. Op. 18 No. 1 was actually the second of the six Opus 18 quartets to be written but the first in the published order, thus carrying on the tradition from Haydn and Mozart of placing the most demanding quartet first in the cycle. The quartet’s rigor derives from its length, particularly the extensive first and fourth movements, as well as its emotionally charged second movement and fast, virtuosic third movement. The year of its composition, 1800, also marks the point at which Beethoven began to go deaf.
Beethoven’s strength as a composer did not lie in his melodies. Here, the material upon which the first movement is based is merely a short motive consisting of a turn around the note F. Despite its simplicity, the motive appears throughout the movement in a myriad of inventive guises. A second, gentler theme makes an appearance, but the first motive dominates. The movement takes shape not only through its use of sonata form but through the contrast of the motive’s first appearance, which is played softly while all the voices remain within the range of a single octave, and its recapitulation, which is fortissimo in a three-octave spread. Along with the main motive, harmonic inventiveness and
dynamic contrast give a fitful feeling to the music.
Beethoven himself said that the Adagio second movement depicts the tomb scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, the music offers an expressive poignancy fit for such an emotional scene. An initial haunting violin melody floats over the other three voices’ triplets that pulsate like a heartbeat. Pregnant silences add to the music’s drama. The emotional climax occurs near the end, with the heartbeat pulses in the inner voices accelerating and the violin and cello parts conversing in near hysteria.
The Scherzo provides a stark contrast to the second movement. Its asymmetrical phrases and unexpected accents give the music humor and continually surprise the listener. The trio section contains folksy grace notes as well as virtuosic violin passagework.
The last movement is full of multiple ideas that are all contained within sonata-rondo form. Similar to the first movement, Beethoven introduces a short opening motive that he develops extensively throughout the movement. This motive, a fast triplet passage in the first violin, gives the entire movement deftness and lightness. As to be expected from a final movement, the piece ends with an enthusiastic drive to the finish.
String Quartet No. 1
Janácˇek
Liam Viney
Janácˇek’s First String Quartet was inspired by Tolstoy’s tragic tale of a woman disappointed in marriage and betrayed by her lover. “I had in mind a miserable woman, suffering, beaten, wretched, like the great Russian author Tolstoy wrote about in his Kreutzer Sonata.” So wrote the sixty-nine year old Janácˇek in a 1924 letter to Kamila Stolsslova, a young married woman 38 years his junior. She had become the muse that inspired many of his semiautobiographical later compositions. Indeed his Second Quartet, Intimate Letters, was written explicitly as a “labor of love” and is literally influenced by events in their relationship. The First Quartet is not directly concerned with Janácˇek’s personal life, however the new relationship with the young Madame Stosslova may have been the catalyst that ignited the desire to respond so passionately to Tolstoy’s story. Having read the novel, Janácˇek was devastated by the unfaithful wife’s murder at the hands of her jealous husband, and he furiously completed his quartet over a nine-day period in 1923.
The work was commissioned by the Bohemian Quartet, and according to the second violinist (the composer Josef Suk), Janácˇek intended the work to represent a sort of musical protest, condemning any form of despotic male behavior towards women. As such, the quartet remains programmatic, but is more of a psycho-
logical response to Tolstoy’s novel than a bar by bar depiction of the plot. Nevertheless, the essential shape of the story can be readily discerned.
The first movement establishes the dramatic foundation by painting a portrait of the heroine, focusing on “compassion for the miserable, prostrate female being”. The very opening “sigh” is a motive that not only signifies the pathos of our heroine, but also contains the pitch cell that generates material for the entire movement. The outline of a sonata form can be traced throughout, but not in the syntax of the tonal tradition (i.e. specific key-relationships, balanced phrasing and goal-oriented harmonic progressions). Rather it is a mold for Janácˇek’s thematic narrative. The “recapitulation” is perhaps better described as an emotionally charged memento of the opening than an event of great formal significance. The second movement develops the drama by introducing the seducer, portrayed by a buoyantly foppish variant of the very opening motive from the first movement. Scurrying figuration and chilling sul ponticello passages hint of the impending tragedy, and the first admissions of love are heard. The third movement opens with a “light and timid” duet between violin and cello, but this movement ultimately represents the crisis. The opening melody is reminiscent of the beautiful second theme from the first movement of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata (which had, of course, inspired Tolstoy in turn). Yet this very beauty serves to unleash the passions of our protagonists, including the jealous
husband. Frenzied interruptions of wild figuration accumulate until the heroine pleads for compassion and finally retreats into an expanded vision of the love theme from the opening. The fourth movement opens with the tormented heroine’s monologue, recalling the sighing motive from the first movement. This motive also provides the work’s climax. But rather than end the piece with the terrible deed, and deny the very existence of love as does Tolstoy in the “Kreutzer Sonata”, Janácˇek seeks to refute Tolstoy’s position and deviate from the great author’s ultimate message. Ironically, while Tolstoy’s novel blames music for encouraging adultery, and ascribes to it all manner of “the most immoral effects”, Janácˇek uses music instead as a source of catharsis and a symbol of hope for love and the spirit of humanity.
String Quartet No. 7 in F major, Op. 59 No. 1
beethoven
Nathan Reiff
The three string quartets of Beethoven’s Op. 59, commissioned by the Russian Count Andreas Razumovsky while he served as ambassador in Vienna, constitute for many scholars the beginning of the composer’s “middle quartets.” By the time of the commission in 1806, though, Beethoven had already written many of the monumental works of his middle period and enjoyed a substantial degree of fame. So, while the string quartet still retained some of its connotations as a lighter genre suitable for entertainment, Beethoven found himself
at a stage in his career where he wished to expand the form’s expressivity and virtuosity.
The first quartet in the Op. 59 collection does just that, but it also stretches the genre in more overt ways, as well; Op. 59, No. 1, typically lasts more than 40 minutes in performance, significantly longer than any of Beethoven’s earlier efforts in the area. The first movement is in sonata form and begins with a melody passed between the first violin and the cello. This primary theme is subjected to substantial alteration and fragmentation over the course of the movement, allowing Beethoven to explore a wide range of harmonic areas and characters.
In a move that predates Prokofiev by a century and a quarter, Beethoven replaces the traditional slow second movement of this quartet with a lively and rhythmic Allegretto vivace which focuses incessantly on the pitch B-flat. Next, the third movement takes on the typical character of the second, with a doleful minor mode march that seems to be starkly opposed to the capricious string quartet of the past. That fanciful character only emerges in the finale, which recognizes Count Razumovsky’s request for the use of a Russian theme in each of the quartets he commissioned. Still, the overall effect of the work is one of profound complexification and deepening of a genre that Beethoven would continue to explore for many more years to come.
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