JUNE 26 HUGO WOLF QUARTETT
Thursday, 7:30pm
Spanish Courtyard
Tickets: $25.00, $15.00
Sebastian Gürtler, violin; Régis Bringolf, violin;
Gertrud Weinmeister, viola; Florian Berner, cello
Recently celebrating its tenth anniversary, The Hugo Wolf Quartett represents Austria's next generation within a long tradition of distinctive music making. For its Caramoor debut, the Hugo Wolf Quartett presented an exploration of three centuries of Viennese string quartet repertoire.
Click here for more information on the Soirée Tribute to the Rosens in the House Museum at 5:30pm.
ABOUT THE MUSIC
Franz Joseph Haydn
1732-1809
String Quartet in C Major, Op. 33, No. 3 ("The Bird")
In 1781, when Haydn finished the quartets that were to be published as Opus 33, he had not written any string quartets for nearly a decade. The intervening period had been a time of extraordinary activity and fertile composition, including nearly thirty symphonies, over a dozen keyboard sonatas, and a half dozen operas and marionette plays for the theater at Eszterháza.
Before offering the new quartets to a publisher, Haydn decided to sell them privately in manuscript to patrons and "amateurs" (that word, in the 18th century, still maintained its root connotation of "lovers" of music, implying that they were highly proficient at the art, though not professionals). To that end, he wrote to acquaintances in various places (three of the letters survive, to Zurich, Baden, and Vienna; there were probably many more) asking the recipient to serve as a kind of agent to find willing purchasers. As part of his sales pitch, Haydn noted that the works "are written in a new and special way." There has been extensive discussion by Haydn scholars as to whether this comment was more than a simple advertising slogan.
Certainly something new happened in the string quartets between the previous Opus 20 and the current set. For one thing, Haydn found a way to introduce a popular style into works of remarkable inward complexity. This factor also plays a major role in his later symphonies (though he was developing it all through the 1770s). The fusion of the learned and the popular brought about a confluence between artist and audience that has probably been unique in the history of music: audiences most loved the music that was the newest and most original.
This popular element comes in part from the air of conversation that runs through the quartet, of the equality of participation. The cello is no longer just a bass line, and the inner voices are no mere fillers. Each takes part in the motivic development, and small motives are shot through the whole texture, bringing life, and variety, and the chance to turn on a dime and move in a totally different direction expressively. Sometimes Haydn does this for sheer surprise, sometimes for contrast.
The great Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon also suggests the possibility that Haydn's evident good humor at the time of writing these six string quartets might have been related in part to the fact of his affair with the Italian singer Luigia Polzelli, who was clearly his mistress by 1781. The Italian mezzo-soprano was not a major singer, and it seems evident that the only reason she was kept on at Eszterháza after a first appointment was at the intercession of Haydn, for she was providing him relief from a thoroughly unhappy marriage. Even a decade later, when he was on London, he wrote to her, "Perhaps I shall never regain the good humor that I used to have when I was with you!" At all events these quartets overflow with good humor.
The first movement's Allegro moderato suggests in the first violin's opening gesture why this quartet was given the nickname, "The Bird." Over a gentle pulsing in the second violin and viola, the first violin sings its part with a series of appoggiatura “chirps” that lead on to rapid 16th-note “warbles.” Both of these gestures dominate the movement, most often in the first violin, though the other players get their chance as well.
In the first four quartets of Opus 33, Haydn chooses to put the dance movement in second position, and it is not always the expected Menuetto of classical tradition. Here, for example, the movement is already on the way to becoming a scherzo, by designation (Scherzando), by tempo (Allegretto), and by its witty play of expectations, particularly surprises extensions at points where the musical sentence seems about to end.
The Adagio, which comes next, is largely a cantabile passage for the first violin supported by the other three instruments, but the expressiveness of the movement is heightened by Haydn’s careful attention to dynamics, especially the sforzandi that create intense sighs in the ongoing musical line, set off for great contrast to the dolce passages, especially for the first violin.
The finale is brilliant and witty, taking a little tune—evidently a "gypsy" tune extending an extremely simple repetitive figure into a high-spirited theme—that races all over the map, and from instrument to instrument unpredictably. Here Haydn is clearly in the best possible good humor.
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Anton von Webern
1883-1945
5 Sätze, Op. 5
The massive, lengthy symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler sometimes give listeners pause: how is it possible to comprehend the musical structure of a work on such a grand scale that a single movement may require nearly a half hour in performance? The music of Anton Webern makes great demands on listeners for the opposite reason, its extraordinary brevity. The Five Movements for String Quartet, Opus 5, last, in all, about eight minutes, and the third movement of the set scarcely thirty-five seconds! The listener barely settles down and begins to recognize a few motivic ideas, and the piece is over. Webern found that in choosing to write atonally he had to abandon many of the techniques of older music, such as the elaboration of thematic ideas, since they were fundamentally based on the idea of repetition and tonal modulation, which he now wanted to avoid. These tiny works must have come as a great shock to their first audiences (they were, after all, composed in 1909, the year before the first performance of Mahler's Eighth Symphony and two before Strauss's Rosenkavalier). Webern used the tiniest musical materials—as little as a two-note motive—for his main themes, but he made lavish use of special effects, since the timbre of the sound became as important as the pitch and melody in shaping a work.
The five short pieces of Opus 5 are consciously varied between the frenzied and the delicate. The compression of thought requires repeated careful hearing before the motivic relations begin to explain themselves. But one thing that is evident from the very first is the intensely romantic sensibility that lies behind these five pieces. Expression is, if not quite all, then at least a very great deal here. Virtually every note is provided with tempo, dynamics, and descriptive markings to suggest mood and feeling ("as tenderly as possible," "scarcely perceptible"), while the special articulations such as tremolo, pizzicato, col legno, and playing on the bridge, enlarges the spectrum of sound possible with four stringed instruments. The music is full of incident, as if an entire novel had been compressed into a page or two. Such music can only be listened to with the most concentrated attention, but it amply repays the effort.
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Franz Schubert
1797-1828
String Quartet in G Major, D. 887
This is the last of Schubert's fifteen string quartets, and among the greatest of his works for strings. It may lack some of the songful lyricism of the A-minor quartet and parts of the D-minor ("Death and the Maiden"), but it makes up for these in its drive, harmonic surprise (starting right from the unexpected change from G major to G minor in the opening gesture), and structural inventiveness. It took him only ten days of feverish activity—June 10 to 20, 1826—to complete this heroic score, and he played viola in the premiere, a private performance given for friends, on March 7, 1827. More than a year passed before Schubert introduced the first movement only in a public concert on March 26, 1828. After that it was not heard again until 1850, twenty-two years after its creator’s death.
The opening gesture foreshadows much that will happen later in the work: A long-held G-major chord suddenly turns to the minor before it drives on to another harmony. The easy way Schubert maneuvers between major and minor, sometimes equating them, sometimes using them for powerful emotional contrasts, is one of the most characteristic elements of his style. This is followed at once by a crisp, jerky response that creates the rhythmic world for the melodic material of the movement. The unfolding of these ideas runs the full range of intensities from softly plush to driven and vehement. A dynamic full stop brings in the second theme, a gentler version of the earlier jerky response. Each of the four players gets a crack at it, while the other three create varied accompaniments. The addition of a triplet countermelody to one of these statements introduces the triplet figure that reappears with driving force that motivates the spacious course of the movement.
The slow movement opens with a serene melody in the cello, singing in its pensive melancholy. But suddenly the mood is shattered by a passage of exceptional, almost operative violence, with roaring turns and shrieks from the violin. Almost as suddenly as it started, the tempest dies away and the violin takes over the gentle song as if it has completely forgotten what has just happened. But the fierce outburst recurs, at even greater length and violence. It passes again, leaving a quiet coda that rumbles with threatened new outbursts.
The first figure of the Scherzo, heard in the unaccompanied viola, dominates the entire section as it skips from one instrument to another; the Trio suggests the countrified mood of the Ländler and the ease of a peasant dance before returning to the vigor of the Scherzo.
Just as the opening movement played with an idea that was G major at one movement and suddenly turned to G minor, the main theme of the last movement was invented to demonstrate a constant variability of mode: minor as the tune moves downward at the opening, major immediately after as it turns back up again. And with this start, Schubert moves with amazing freedom and imagination through many keys and hints of keys at a high speed like a tightrope walker whose act has been carefully calculated to make the audience think he’s made a misstep that will cause him to fall when that is, in fact, the most stunning movement of the outline. The atmosphere is that of the comic opera, as Schubert learned it from the works of Mozart. From beginning to end the movement is full of delectable surprises.
©Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Hugo Wolf Quartett ~ Within just a few short years the Hugo Wolf Quartett has developed from a chamber music lover's insider tip to one of the most sought after string quartets of its generation. Critics the world over have provided testimony to its rapid development: "New stars in the quartet heaven" (Der Standard, Vienna); "Urgent and impassioned, but with an absolute commitment to the ideal values of every note" (Los Angeles Times); "One hears in these players, embryonically and in miniature, the qualities that make the Vienna Philharmonic special" (New York Times).
The Hugo Wolf Quartett was founded at the Vienna University of Music. Shortly thereafter, the four young musicians won the Fifth International String Quartet Competition in Cremona and took first prize at the 45th International G.B. Viotti Chamber Music Competition, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra Special Prize, and the European Cultural Award for Chamber Music and made their debut at the Vienna Konzerthaus, a moment that was celebrated by public and press alike.
The Hugo Wolf Quartett has concertized for over ten years in the most prominent concert halls and renowned festivals such as the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Philharmonie Berlin & Cologne, the Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels, Symphony Hall Birmingham, Wigmore Hall London, Carnegie Hall New York, Suntory Hall, Tokyo, Herkulessaal Munich, Tonhalle Zurich, Rudolfinum Prague, Mozarteum Salzburg, Musikverein and Konzerthaus Vienna, Edinburgh Festival, Gidon Kremer's Lockenhaus Festival, Schubertiade Feldkirch, Carinthian Summer, L'été musical dans la vallée du Lot, Colmar Festival and many others. Extensive concert tours regularly take the ensemble to South America, Mexico, Japan, the USA and elsewhere.
For the tenth anniversary, the Hugo Wolf Quartett established its own cycle at the Konzerthaus in Vienna. Composers Zbigniew Bargielski, Friedrich Cerha and Erich Urbanner wrote and dedicated these works especially for this occasion. The quartet's repertoire spans across the two Viennese Schools and has performed a number or world premiers which received high critical acclaim. In addition they have ventured into including the attractive Jazz work by Kenny Wheeler into their programs.
In 2007, Gidon Kremer invited the quartet to his Festival Lockenhaus and chose the Bartók's Quartet #4 to be performed again on the season finale concert. CPO will release Franz Mittler's two string quartets this fall and a CAM Jazz production with Kenny Wheeler and John Taylor can be heard on the CD Other People. The Hugo Wolf Quartett has recorded for the Gramola, Atlantis Art and Extraplatte Labels and appeared on numerous radio and television productions, such as the BBC, Radio Berlin, KBS, ORF. The were awarded the ORF-Pasticcio Prize for Beethoven’s op. 18/4 and op. 132.
The name was granted to the quartet by the International Hugo Wolf Society of Vienna. The late Romantic composer Hugo Wolf was situated between the great Viennese music tradition and its departure into the modern period; his name is thus used as a symbol for a performing repertoire stretching from the Western Classical Period and far beyond the Second Viennese School.
The violin by Gioffredo Cappa, the viola by P. Mantegazza and the cello by Niccolo Gagliano are loan instruments generously provided by the Fazenda Ipiranga. The Ipiranga Estate in Brazil produces its premium coffee "Blue de Brasil" without the use of any chemicals and purely organically.
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