|
 |
|
CARAMOOR CLASSICS
Presented in the Music Room of the House Museum, but less formal than other concerts, Caramoor
Classics are appropriate for families and will include comments from the artists about the program. Because good music requires good listeners, these concerts are recommended for children 8 and above.
APRIL 6
2007-08 Ernst Stiefel Quartet-in-Residence
Sunday, 4:00pm
Single ticket: $25.00 order online
Adam Barnett-Hart, violin; Wu Jie, violin;
Pierre Lapointe, viola; Andrew Janss, cello
A new force in the world of chamber music, the Escher String Quartet continues its exploration of the quartets by late Romantic Alexander von Zemlinsky. Setting the scene with two early, Romantic works by Webern, the Eschers delve into Zemlinsky's final quartet. The jazz influences of the time and the syncopations of Zemlinsky's work are set in relief by Gruenberg's Four Diversions: an unknown and unexpected delight. The Eschers finish with Ravel's first masterpiece and a central work in the string quartet repertoire.
ABOUT THE MUSIC
ANTON WEBERN
(1883-1945)
Langsamer Satz for String Quartet (1905)
Anton Webern’s tragic death in 1945, when he was accidentally shot by a nervous American soldier detailed to arrest a suspected black-marketeer, brought to an end the career of a composer of extraordinary refinement and idealism ? a composer whose entire recognized life work of thirty-one short opus numbers could be contained on a couple of compact discs.
For nearly 20 years after his death, it was impossible to find out how Webern developed the extraordinary craft that was revealed in his Opus 1 Passacaglia for Orchestra, which he wrote under the direction of his teacher, Schoenberg. But in 1965 the musicologist Hans Moldenhauer, while working on a biography of Webern, met the composer’s daughter-in-law. During the horrible last days of World War II, she had managed to save a pile of the composer’s papers from the marauding Russian soldiers who had stormed into his house in Vienna (he himself was not there) and smashed his cello and his bust of Mahler.
These papers were stored in a barn at her family’s home in a village a few miles from Vienna, where they remained untouched for years. (After the composer’s death, the mere sight of these materials had caused such anguish to his widow and daughter that no one ever sorted through them again.) Thus it was, on October 26, 1965, that Moldenhauer, rummaging eagerly through the cartons of books from Webern’s library, found a treasure-trove of manuscripts, ranging from the fifteen-year-old composer’s first efforts in 1899 to sketches and complete unpublished pieces from as late as 1925.
The Langsamer Satz (the title simply means “slow movement”) for String Quartet is one of the works Webern composed during his period of study with Schoenberg. It dates from June 1905. This preceded his still longer String Quartet, written at the end of the summer. It is a work of a pronounced romantic spirit, both because it clearly shows a young composer who has studied the chamber music for strings of his teacher (especially the ecstasties of Verklärte Nacht), and because the evident impetus for this particular work was a summertime walk in the Austrian woods with Wilhelmine Mörtl, his cousin and future wife. “Two drunken souls!” was the phrase he confided to his diary, and we have no great difficulty in hearing both tenderness and ecstasy in this nine-minute score.
ANTON WEBERN
Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5 (1909)
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.
ALEXANDER VON ZEMLINSKY
(1871-1942)
String Quartet No. 4, Op. 25 (1936)
For some years Alexander Zemlinsky remained completely unknown or else cast into the shadows by the dominance of his sometime pupil, Arnold Schoenberg. But performances and recordings have begun to bring to light this imaginative and expressive composer of the last years of Vienna’s musical hegemony. A native Viennese, Zemlinsky showed his musical talents early, and by age thirteen he had entered the conservatory at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. By 1890 he finished his piano studies, officially ranked as “the best pianist at the Conservatory,” and continued work in composition for two more years. He attained renown in Vienna, then in Prague, where he was the director of the opera company from 1911 to 1927, following that with directorship of the Kroll Opera in Berlin until 1933, when he fled home to Vienna. In 1938 he fled once again, via Prague, to the United States; there he lived out his last few years. He died in 1942 virtually penniless and unknown. Yet the accidents of his political fortunes had one lucky result: Zemlinsky’s manuscripts ended up not in Vienna (where they might have been destroyed by the Nazis before the war was over) but in the Library of Congress.
Zemlinsky wrote in virtually every musical form from small songs and chamber pieces to operas and symphonies. In a Vienna that was sharply divided between the “Wagnerians” and the “Brahmsians,” Zemlinsky followed his piano teacher Anton Door into the Brahms camp. Door had founded the “Wiener Tonkünstlerverein” (Viennese Musicians’ Society) with Brahms as honorary president. Zemlinsky joined the society in 1893 and began to make his mark as composer and pianist. This is where a number of his chamber music works had their first performance. When, in 1896, the Hellmesberger Quartet played a string quartet of Zemlinsky’s, the young composer had a chance to become much well acquainted with Brahms. The following year his Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano took third prize in a competition for new chamber works with wind instruments. Brahms wrote to his publisher Simrock, commenting, “I can equally recommend the man and his talent.”
If the First Quartet shows the influence of Brahms, Zemlinsky’s fourth and last contribution to the genre reflects his friendship with Alban Berg, in whose memory it was conceived. Berg had died on Christmas Eve 1935, shortly before Zemlinsky began the Fourth Quartet. In his manuscript (though not in the printed score), Zemlinsky called this composition a “suite,”a title that inevitably recalls Berg’s Lyric Suite for string quartet, which—like Zemlinsky’s work—is made up of six movements grouped in three pairs and linked by thematic allusions. (Berg, in fact, had quoted a theme from Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony in his own Lyric Suite.) Zemlinsky’s quartet contains three pairs of movements in a slow-fast relationship, with contrasting moods and effects, building to the climactic energy of the fugal finale.
LOUIS GRUENBERG
(1884-1964)
Four Diversions for String Quartet, Op. 32 (1930)
Brought to the United States as an infant from his native Russia, Louis Gruenberg grew up in New York City, where his father played violin in the Yiddish theater. He took piano lessons at the National Conservatory of Music at a time when Dvorák was director (though, at the age of eight, Gruenberg had no real contact with him). After a youth making his living mostly playing catch-as-catch-can in New York, he was eventually able to join Busoni’s composition class in Vienna, where they developed a close teacher-pupil relationship that lasted until Busoni’s death. Busoni even wrote the libretto for an opera by Gruenberg, The Bride of the Gods, in 1913.
He returned to New York at the outbreak of World War I and made his living for some years concertizing (including a stint as Caruso’s accompanist). But in 1919 he won the $1000 Flagler Prize for his Hill of Dreams, and he determined to become a full-time composer. He helped found the League of Composers and later conducted the first performance in New York of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. But in his own work, he had decided to write what he decided was “real” American music, and for that he began to draw on elements especially from jazz.
His Four Diversions for String Quartet were premiered by the League of Composers Quartet at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York on April 13, 1932, where it received the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge prize. In the years immediately before composing it, Gruenberg recognized the rich variety of musics that were prevalent in the United States. He called the works in the set “Diversions,” probably to avoid appearing pretentious in these remarkable little pieces—yet they are remarkable for their expert fusion of a relatively dissonant language that would have been recognized by the avant-garde composers of the day with a more populist musical style. This kind of interplay was rare at the time, when composers felt the need to stay in one camp or the other, but it enlivens Gruenberg’s short pieces (the entire set lasts only eight minutes) in a wonderful way, allowing the listener to imagine gloriously unlikely pairings of different musical styles, yet doing this smoothly, as if they had always belonged together.
MAURICE RAVEL
(1875-1937)
String Quartet (1903)
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.
- Program notes © Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
ABOUT THE ESCHER STRING QUARTET
Formed in 2005, the Escher String Quartet has attracted the attention of several esteemed artists who immediately admired the young ensemble’s individual sound, inspired artistic decisions, and unique cohesiveness. Within months of its inception, the Escher was invited by both Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman to be the quartet-in-residence at each artist’s summer festival, the Young Artists Programme at Canada’s National Arts Centre and the Perlman Chamber Music Program on Shelter Island, N.Y., respectively. The following winter, the Escher Quartet made its Washington, D.C. debut, representing the Manhattan School of Music for the Kennedy Center’s Conservatory Project.
In only two years, the group has established a reputation as a world-class string quartet. In September, the Escher began its Chamber Music Society Two Residency with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The ensemble’s season was inaugurated with performances at the Ravinia, Green, Great Lakes, Music @ Menlo, and La Jolla Festivals. Additional 2007-2008 appearances include the 92nd Street Y, Symphony Space, and the Schneider concerts at the New School in New York; Boston’s Gardner Museum; Rhinebeck Chamber Music Society; Concordia College; University of Idaho; and the Ravinia Festival. The Quartet also joins the faculty of Stony Brook University as Visiting Artist-in-Residence in a unique relationship with the world-renowned Emerson String Quartet.
Recently the Escher joined guitar luminary Pepe Romero for a New Year’s Eve performance at the 92nd Street Y and pianist Wu Han at the Greenwich Library Concert Series. Nightclub engagements at Tonic and Union Hall — an eclectic club in Brooklyn — featured the Escher in joint concerts with pop-folk singer-songwriter Luke Temple.
The Escher String Quartet takes its name from Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, whose method of interplay between individual components working together to form a whole has been a source of inspiration for the Quartet.
“[The Escher’s] sound is golden-ripe, and its performance was technically almost infallible, cool-edged, yet pulsing like the engine of a luxury car…the night’s biggest pleasure.”
- San Jose Mercury News
|
