Gold Medalist and Grand Prize-winner of the 2009 Fischoff competition, winner of the 2010 Concert Artists Guild Competition, laureates of the 9th Borciani competition, and currently the Graduate String Quartet-in-Residence at the Yale School of Music, the Linden String Quartet has been taking the chamber music world by storm and joins an illustrious tradition by becoming Caramoor’s
2011-2012 Ernst Stiefel String Quartet-in-Residence. They launch their residency with a wonderfully diverse program of masterpieces highlighting the quartet’s probing and infectious music making.
ABOUT THE MUSIC
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
Quartettsatz in C minor, D. 703 As a teenager—between his fourteenth and nineteenth years, to be precise—Schubert composed no fewer than seventeen string quartets, some of which are lost or incomplete. Still there are ten complete works from this early time. These were intended for use within the family circle, where string quartet playing was a favorite pastime, the composer himself taking the viola part. A perusal of these early works could not possibly prepare one for the breathtaking development in Schubert’s quartet writing between 1816 and December 1820, when he wrote the beginning of a quartet in C minor, which completely shatters the comfortable expectations of domestic music-making. Of this work, he completed only the first movement,
Allegro assai, and began a slow movement in A-flat, but never finished it and apparently never even attempted the two last movements. (The piece is often referred to by the German word
Quartettsatz, which means nothing more than “Quartet movement.”
Schubert left many works unfinished; he seems to have felt that if the composition as a whole was not going to his satisfaction, it was easier to begin entirely afresh than to try to salvage what he had. It is noteworthy, too, that the great majority of his unfinished works (like the present
Allegro assai) are in minor keys. We may reasonably speculate that he was concerned with the proper way of ending a quartet (or symphony or piano sonata) that began in the minor. The example of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony had set an example that made things difficult for later composers; no longer was it possible for a sensitive and imaginative composer simply to
end with a facile major-key movement. He had to work through to some sense of victory after struggle. Schubert apparently did not see his way clear to writing a satisfactory finale in the present instance, and seems simply to have dropped the piece. And unfortunately he never even finished the slow movement, which had started out as an incredibly rich and tragic
Andante.
But what he left—the completed first movement—is already light years ahead of anything else he had written for the medium. The character of the music is uncanny, suspenseful (an effect created partly by the almost constant use of tremolo, either in the themes themselves or the accompaniment). Here are none of Beethoven’s heaven-storming fireworks, but rather a hushed and pregnant tension. The opening pianissimo rustle of a 6/8 theme is ingeniously worked into the whole movement, either literally or as nearly constant rhythmic motive in melody or accompaniment. The so-called “second theme” consists of three sections: a tuneful melody in A-flat (which was destined to be the key of the unfinished second movement), a stormy passage in A-flat minor using the tremolo of the main theme, and a new idea in G Major. The development grows largely out of the tremolo figure of the first theme.
The recapitulation is quite extraordinary. We would expect to have the first theme (again in C minor), then the secondary material, transposed to end in the tonic key, which would make it C Major. But Schubert is clearly not ready to yield to the major so early in the composition (and this may have been at the heart of his compositional difficulty). He presents the recapitulation in reverse order—first the three segments of “second theme” in B-flat and E-flat Major, moving to E-flat minor for the stormy part, then to the relaxation of C Major. But it doesn’t end there: the opening theme comes back in a reminder of the hushed and pregnant C minor beginning.
Had Schubert seen his way clear to finishing a work built from such a premise, which was both striking and unusual for 1820, we can scarcely doubt that the result would have been epoch-making. As it is, we remain awe-struck by the intensity of the twenty-three-year-old composer’s music and by the complete mastery of the craft of string writing that the quartet movement reveals.
ALBAN BERG (1885-1935)
String Quartet Op. 3 Alban Berg was one of the two most famous pupils of Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he studied from the autumn of 1904 to 1910. During these years, Berg and his fellow pupil Anton Webern, shared with Schoenberg in the excitement and experimentation that led to a new musical language. Prior to undertaking lessons with Schoenberg, who became a kind of surrogate father to him (his own father had died when he was fifteen), Berg was almost entirely self-taught as a composer, and he concentrated on the composition of songs.
One of Schoenberg’s functions as a teacher was to direct Berg in the composition of purely instrumental music, composed without the framework of a poem to give it a priori shape. They began with the Piano Sonata, Opus 1. Berg’s Opus 2 was another set of songs which, like Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, gradually moved beyond the reach of tonal centers. Then came the String Quartet, Opus 3, Berg’s final composition written under Schoenberg’s direct tutelage, a work of such remarkable accomplishment that it astonished the teacher who had watched it take shape.
That Berg had already learned the art of motivic development is evident in the Piano Sonata, but the String Quartet raises these to a new level of complexity and thorough-going consistency. He cast the two movements of the work—the first “slow” (relatively speaking) and the second “fast”)—in a ground plan that suggests sonata form, though of course without the tensions of key that an earlier composer would have employed. Already Berg was shaping his music using harmonic and melodic devices that were to play an important role in later works: nearly complete collections of whole-tone material with an odd “misplaced” element (in the very opening gesture by the second violin); symmetrical expansion from a single note (the very next gesture of the second violin); wedge-like patterns between two lines, moving wider apart in a systematic way (the accompaniment in viola and cello to this opening gesture in the second violin). The opening motive functions melodically as a “first theme;” Berg intensifies this through repetition in richer and thicker texture and then relaxes to a single repeated note in the cello to provide the feeling of space for the introduction of the “secondary theme.” But this, too, is made up of harmonic materials consistent with and integrated into the opening ideas.
The second movement is more outgoing and dynamic, with stronger contrasts at high tension between the principal ideas. Both movements fuse the familiar formal patterns of the past with a richness of contrapuntal detail, constantly developing, evolving, reappearing in different combinations, ever richer. Berg wrote this quartet as a love song to Helene Nahowski, who became his wife and to whom it is dedicated. He was composing it during the most intense days of their courtship, and world premiere took place on April 24, 1911, only a week and a half before their wedding.
KELLY-MARIE MURPHY (b. 1964)
Dark Energy Canadian composer Kelly-Marie Murphy was born on a NATO base in Sardinia, Italy. She began her advanced musical studies in composition at the University of Calgary and later earned her Ph.D. in composition from the University of Leeds in England. For many years she lived in the Washington D.C. area, but she is now based in Ottawa.
She was awarded first prize and the People’s Choice Award at the CBC Young Composer’s Competition in 1994 (string quartet category) and has also received awards for her first orchestra piece,
From the Drum Comes a Thundering Beat (Paris, 1996), and won first prize in the Centara Corporation New Music Festival Composer’s Competition for her harp concerto.
Like many composers today she maintains a website (www.kellymariemurphy.com) that provides biographical information, lists of her works, and a schedule of upcoming events, but she is the only composer I know cool enough and witty enough to include a page quoting unfavorable reviews, along with a commentary by Groucho Marx!
Her string quartet
Dark Energy was composed in 2007 on a commission from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Banff International String Quartet Competition. The 10-minute work was premiered in Banff on August 31, 2007. The composer explains the title and its significance in her program note:
We live in a cosmologically interesting time. First, Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet reducing our solar system to 8 planets. Then, an ancient cosmic mystery came to light. Apparently five billion years ago, there was a sudden expansion of the cosmos. The galaxies started moving away from one another at a faster pace, as if repelled by some kind of antigravity. Recently, a group of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope observed that billions of years before this antigravity sent the galaxies flying apart, it was already present in space and affecting the evolution of the cosmos. This antigravity force is known as dark energy.
The existence of dark energy was first postulated by Einstein in 1917 as a way to explain why the universe doesn’t collapse. In November 2006, the
New York Times explained it this way: “Because it is a property of empty space, the overall force of Einstein’s constant grows in proportion to the expanding universe until it overwhelms everything.”
Dark Energy was commissioned by the Banff International String Quartet Competition and the CBC as the imposed piece for 2007. In a single movement, the quartet opens softly and simply. It is melodic and displays many different colors using various techniques. It gains momentum and is eventually consumed by its own propulsion. The piece is virtuosic in every way, yet there are flexible moments in which each performance can be different.
-Kelly-Marie Murphy MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)
String Quartet in F Major Like Debussy, Ravel composed only one string quartet; and like Debussy’s quartet, Ravel’s holds a unique position in his output (though the two works are quite different from one another, despite the casual ease with which we link the names of their composers). Ravel’s quartet, composed in 1903, was one of those works—along with the orchestral song-cycle
Shéhérazade and the brilliant piano showpiece
Jeux d’ Eau—that established his independence from the stuffy conservatives of the Conservatoire and, no doubt, had something to do with his being passed over repeatedly for the Prix de Rome. The quartet was performed in 1903, but Ravel withheld it from publication until undertaking some revisions, the exact extent of which we cannot know since the original version is lost. When he finally allowed it to appear in print in 1910, he inscribed the work to his “
cher Maître Gabriel Fauré.”
The entire work is conceived in a manner quite different from the normal, contrapuntal character of the string quartet tradition. Melodies or fragments of melodies pass back and forth from one instrument to another while the others provide a rich array of orchestral effects for color and harmony. The work is extraordinarily unified in its thematic material, which shows close links from movement to movement.
The opening idea (presented in the first violin at the outset over a serenely rising line in second violin and cello moving in parallel tenths) provides motivic material that generates offshoots throughout, especially when provided with a little triplet turn figure that arises not too long after. The first movement is in a ternary pattern that hints at sonata form (with two distinct themes, the second presented in first violin and viola playing in parallel two octaves apart) but lacks the kind of harmonic reconsideration in the “recapitulation” necessary for a true sonata form.
The scherzo plays on a rhythmic alternation between 3/4 and 6/8 time, sometimes presented simultaneously in different instruments. There is an imaginative interplay between the pizzicato motive that appears at the beginning and the
arco melody (related to ideas from the first movement) that comes in soon after.
The slow movement consists of a surprisingly disjunct conversation among the four instruments, changing character every few measures with different meters, tempos, scoring, and thematic ideas.
The energetic finale, beginning with an assertive ostinato on a 5/8 motive, moves on to reconsider both principal themes of the first movement, adapted now from 4/4 to 3/4 time and interspersed with returns to the forceful 5/8 of the opening.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com) Back to Top 
