MENDELSSOHN AT 200: BRENTANO STRING QUARTET

ABOUT THE MUSIC
No composer-not even Mozart-ever wrote by the age of sixteen a work so perfect, so original, so utterly finished, as Mendelssohn's Octet for strings. And that was not simply a one-off. The next year he struck brilliant pay-dirt again with his overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream (written first for piano duet, then orchestrated with a touch of magic.)
 
Aside from his evident talent in music, Mendelssohn had every opportunity to develop his general culture in a family that procured the finest teachers in Berlin and moved in an intellectual circle of remarkable range and depth. Moreover Papa Mendelssohn encouraged Felix and his talented sister Fanny (also a remarkable composer) with regular Sunday musicales in the Mendelssohn house, engaging performers from the orchestra of the royal court. For these events the boy began to write music himself and to learn important lessons in musical structure and effect by hearing performances almost as soon as the ink was dry.

In addition to music, Felix received the best possible general education. He was bright, quick, and receptive, spoke several languages well, danced exquisitely, illustrated his letters and journals with pen and ink drawings of considerable flair, and translated one of Terence's comedies from the original Latin. His English was so good that he was able to improve on the draft translation made for Elijah by an English writer. He traveled widely and enjoyed a wide acquaintance of creative and intellectual leaders. Already by 1825-when he was sixteen-he had met Cherubini, Hummel, Moscheles, Rossini, Meyerbeer, and other leading musicians in Paris; his family was personally acquainted with Goethe.
  
In the last years of his short life, and for a few decades afterwards, Mendelssohn was one of the most highly fêted composers in the world. He was Queen Victoria's favorite composer. When Sir George Grove published the first edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1879, the three longest articles-by Grove himself-dealt with Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn.

But eventually many works fell out of public consciousness; his biography-as a solid bourgeois family man who happened to be a composer, conductor, and musical organizer-lacked "color" of the kind that appeared in the lives of Berlioz, or Liszt, or Wagner. While a handful of compositions never left the repertory (except in Nazi Germany), a very substantial part of his music either ceased to be performed regularly or-worse-seemed totally lost. Whether or not anti-Semitism played a role in this change (Wagner and his acolytes have often been accused of most of the responsibility), certainly the Nazis did their best to stop performances of his music. The fact of his having been baptized certainly did not change their view. Mendelssohn came to be rather patronized as the "classic romantic"-implying old-fashioned qualities in an era that began celebrating novelty especially, and with it a feeling that he was simply not as "important" as the innovative modernists.

Yet from the beginning, Mendelssohn's music-in addition to being fresh and lively, colorful, and delightful-often found novel approaches, such as his utterly original treatment of the cadenza in his Violin Concerto, a unique solution to the age-old problem of the concerto form. The string quartets, though growing out of the tradition of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, continue the genre with the same elevated level of refinement and offer new ideas. He helped create the amateur or community chorus tradition that became a vital part of music-making in the 19th and 20th centuries with works like Die erste Walpurgisnacht or his two oratorios generally modeled on Bach (St. Paul) and Handel (Elijah), whose music he was so instrumental in bringing back to life in the concert hall.

Today Mendelssohn's work is returning to our musical life more extensively than ever. His works for chorus, songs, piano pieces, organ sonatas, are heard with greater frequency and performed both by professionals and by the skilled amateurs for whom he wrote. The orchestral favorites have never left, but newly discovered or once-disregarded pieces (like the early Violin Concerto in D minor or the duo concertos for two violins, or for violin and piano) can be heard again. The chamber music has expanded beyond the string quartets and the two piano trios to include quintets, sonatas, and works for less common instrumental combinations are once again being investigated.

And as if all that weren't enough, recent discoveries of long lost or hidden manuscripts (many of them put away to avoid their destruction by the Nazis) have resurfaced, promising a whole new repertory of works that will surely include remarkably fine pieces held back by a composer whose self-critical faculty would never let him believe that the Italian Symphony-of all works!-was somehow not ready for public release. What unheard gems do we have in store for us?
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FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847) - String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13
This is an astonishing work to show up in the output of a boy of eighteen. To be sure, Mendelssohn had produced the string Octet, one of his most brilliant and fully achieved works, already at the age of sixteen. (Though this quartet is listed as number 2 in the publication, Mendelssohn actually composed it two years before the so-called ANo. 1", Opus 12.) As with the Octet, the quartet shows off a contrapuntal skill that is completely assured, but never paraded for its own sake. And the harmonic richness draws from late Beethoven (quite probably from his Opus 132 quartet in the same key) and achieves at times an urgency that Mendelssohn rarely recaptured.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in this score is its derivation from one of Mendelssohn's songs-not the simple fact of derivation, but the manner. Chamber music works employing song melodies are almost always in a theme and variations form (the most famous example being Schubert's "Trout" Quintet). But Mendelssohn, drawing upon his short song Frage ("Question"), transformed it almost beyond recognition through wide-ranging paraphrases in each of the four movements.

The quartet as a whole is framed by a passage in A Major that opens the first movement and closes the last with explicit references: "Ist est wahr?" ("Is it true? Is it true that you are always waiting for me in the arbored walk?") The dotted "Ist es wahr" pattern and a lyrical turn of legato phrase from the song permeate the intense, contrapuntal opening movement, the emotionally charged slow movement, the folksong like intermezzo, and the dramatic finale.

Mendelssohn told a story on himself that illustrates how unusual this work is among his compositions. When the quartet was being performed in a Paris salon with the composer present, the man next to Mendelssohn nudged him during the last movement and whispered knowingly, "He does that in one of his symphonies." The composer, rather nonplused, asked, "Who?" The stranger replied, "Beethoven, the composer of this quartet." Mendelssohn's comment: "This was bitter sweet!"

As the hectic fugato of the last movement yields to a vigorous unison passage, the final page of the score bids farewell, one by one, to themes from earlier sections, and a recitative for solo violin ushers in for the first time a literal quotation of the song, from which we have been hearing so many motives, as if to make explicit the emotions hinted at in so many ways.
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ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856) - String Quartet No. 3 in A Major, Op. 41, No. 3
During the spring of 1842 the Schumanns were on tour. That is, Clara Schumann was touring as a piano virtuoso, and making a great impression everywhere; Robert came along to be present at performances of some of his works. The feeling that he was nothing more than his wife's shadow, along with pressing editorial responsibilities for his journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, induced him to return alone to Leipzig in mid March. He tried drowning his depression in "beer and champagne." Finding himself unable to compose, he resorted to his customary medication: a course of exercises in counterpoint and fugue, designed to keep the notes flowing, even if they had no immediate artistic aim. At they same time he undertook a concentrated study of the string quartets of Haydn and Mozart.

Clara's return on April 26 naturally brightened his spirits, and both studied and played through (at the piano) the quartets of the great tradition. This exercise revived his old hopes of composing a string quartet himself. Clara, eager that he should earn a reputation as a great composer of abstract music, gave him enthusiastic support. At the beginning of June he made a few "quartet essays," drafting both the A-minor and the F-Major quartets (Nos. 1 and 2) before returning to flesh them out in full, taking roughly a week for each one. Then by early July he turned to a third quartet in A Major, completing in on July 22. Three complete string quartets in about six weeks!

Schumann had set forth specific ideas about the true nature of the string quartet in his reviews of quartets by lesser composers. He felt that the string quartet should remain chamber music and not aim for symphonic grandiosity. It should give every participant something worthwhile to play, particularly through the use of contrapuntal devices to spread the good parts around. And he felt that a composer of string quartets should know and appreciate the masterpieces of the genre, and even respond to them, but without simple copying of approaches.

He managed all of this in his own three quartets, which attracted favorable attention from the true professionals like Mendelssohn, who hitherto had tended to patronize the work of the largely self-taught Schumann. (In return, Schumann dedicated the opus "to his friend Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.")

It is odd that Schumann should never have returned to the medium of the string quartet after this early and fluent outpouring, but he always composed at the piano and felt more at home with that instrument. In the months that followed, he composed his great piano quintet, Opus 44, and piano quartet, Opus 47 to cap off the "chamber music year." And all the chamber music that came from him in the later years included the piano, too.

The first movement begins with seven measures of slow introduction in which Schumann introduces a figure that enters obliquely off the tonic of the home key and repeats three times before turning into the main Allegro theme-still approaching the chord of A major from somewhere off to the side. The first two notes of the figure make a descending fifth, and this motive is central not only at the head of the main theme, but also internally within the second theme, first heard in a high register of the cello over staccato off-beat notes in the upper strings. It is unusual to begin the development section with exactly the same music as the opening of the exposition-but since Schumann had begun the exposition away from the tonic, this is not a simple falling back to the home key, but rather a new start moving in a different direction, though it sounds for a moment as if he is about to present the exposition for a third time.

Structural novelty is a feature of the second movement as well. It seems to be in variation form with a nervous sighing figure as the theme.  But as the movement unfolds, the variations are strikingly varied, and not until we have heard three of them (including a vigorous fugato that is a reflection of Schumann’s study of Bach's counterpoint in the spring) do we come to a simple, songful "variation" that is quite evidently the actual theme. It is followed by one more version, extended and energetic, to close the movement.

The slow movement is an expressive high point in all three quartets of Opus 41, cast as strophic variations of alternating musical ideas, texturally enriched at each return.

The finale is a kind of sonata form built out of mosaics of diverse ideas (like some of Schumann's piano works of the 1830s.) The driving energy of the last movement is a reminder of the fact that chamber music at this time was gradually moving out of "chambers" (with audiences that were very intimate, barely more than the players themselves) into concert halls with audiences of perhaps a hundred or more. This naturally motivated an expansiveness of approach to project the music to the furthest listener. Schumann's last movement leaves no doubt that all present will be able to take in the dynamic close.
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FELIX MENDELSSOHN - String Quintet No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 87
Felix Mendelssohn's astonishing flair with chamber music for stringed instruments was already evident from his Octet, composed when he was still in his mid-teens. The B-flat Quintet, composed almost at the end of his life, has never enjoyed the same unchanging popularity as the Octet, though it has not lacked for warm adherents and persuasive proponents. In the years immediately after its completion (1845), the considered opinion was that this work was at the very pinnacle of Mendelssohn's chamber music. Its evaluation has wavered somewhat, even as Mendelssohn's own reputation has gone up and down. In recent years it has been considered (in some circles) almost improper for a composer to have the sheer skill and flair that Mendelssohn displayed in everything he put his hand to; works without "rough edges" were somehow "not sincere."

Certainly in one respect the opening movement is unusual for a chamber work by someone of Mendelssohn's outlook: the first violin part predominates to such an extent that the movement seems to be almost a virtuoso solo-even a kind of concerto-with four accompanying parts.  The second movement is without question prime Mendelssohn, cast into the scherzo-like moods that he controlled so well (though it is less of a breakneck rush than some of his other scherzo movements). The scoring plays off the various effects of strings (bowed versus plucked for example) with wonderful variety and color, and there are some delicious harmonic subtleties too.

The slow movement has a certain kinship to the "processional" movement of the Italian Symphony, one of the Mendelssohn's best-loved works, and here, too, the first violin has a part of special importance, filled with the virtuosic style of a coloratura soprano, while the remaining instruments provide a really operatic kind of accompaniment, with sudden wide changes of dynamics, strong chords to punctuate the phrases, and strong, dramatic accents. After reaching a climactic high point, the "soprano" reaches it one final time serenely, and falls into a hushed few bars of closing. The closing movement is all bustle and rush, with busy sixteenths and lively syncopations, to bring this, one of the Mendelssohn's last chamber works, to a wildly energetic close.                                                  -program notes © Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Brentano String Quartet
Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim.  "Passionate, uninhibited and spellbinding," raves the London Independent; the New York Times extols its "luxuriously warm sound [and] yearning lyricism"; the Philadelphia Inquirer praises its "seemingly infallible instincts for finding the center of gravity in every phrase and musical gesture;" and the Times (London) opines, "the Brentanos are a magnificent string quartet... This was wonderful, selfless music-making."  Within a few years of its formation, the Quartet garnered the first Cleveland Quartet Award and the Naumburg Chamber Music Award; and in 1996 the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center invited them to be the inaugural members of Chamber Music Society Two, a program which has become a coveted distinction for chamber groups and individuals ever since.  The Quartet had its first European tour in 1997 and was honored in the U.K. with the Royal Philharmonic Award for Most Outstanding Debut.  That début recital was at London's Wigmore Hall, and the Quartet has continued its warm relationship with Wigmore, appearing there regularly and serving as the hall's Quartet-in-residence in the 2000-01 season.

In recent seasons the Quartet has traveled widely, appearing all over the United States and Canada, in Europe, Japan and Australia.  It has performed in the world's most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York; the Library of Congress in Washington; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the Konzerthaus in Vienna; Suntory Hall in Tokyo; and the Sydney Opera House.  The Quartet has participated in summer festivals such as Aspen, the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, the Edinburgh Festival, the Kuhmo Festival in Finland, the Taos School of Music and the Caramoor Festival.

In addition to performing the entire two-century range of the standard quartet repertoire, the Brentano Quartet has a strong interest in both very old and very new music.  It has performed many musical works pre-dating the string quartet as a medium, among them Madrigals of Gesualdo, Fantasias of Purcell and secular vocal works of Josquin.  Also, the quartet has worked closely with some of the most important composers of our time, among them Elliot Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Chou Wen-chung, Steven Mackey, Bruce Adolphe and György Kurtág.  The Quartet has commissioned works from Wuorinen, Adolphe, Mackey, David Horne and Gabriela Frank.  The Quartet celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2002 by commissioning ten composers to write companion pieces for selections from Bach's Art of Fugue, the result of which was an electrifying and wide-ranging single concert program.  The Quartet has also worked with the celebrated poet Mark Strand, commissioning poetry from him to accompany works of Haydn and Webern.

The Quartet has been privileged to collaborate with such artists as soprano Jessye Norman, pianist Richard Goode and pianist Mitsuko Uchida. The Quartet enjoys an especially close relationship with Ms. Uchida, appearing with her on stages in the United States, Europe and Japan.

The Quartet has recorded the Opus 71 Quartets of Haydn, and has also recorded a Mozart disc for Aeon Records, consisting of the K. 464 Quartet and the K. 593 Quintet, with violist Hsin-Yun Huang.  In the area of newer music, the Quartet has released a disc of the music of Steven Mackey on Albany Records, and has also recorded the music of Bruce Adolphe, Chou Wen-chung and Charles Wuorinen.

In 1998, cellist Nina Lee joined the Quartet, succeeding founding member Michael Kannen. The following season the Quartet became the first Resident String Quartet at Princeton University.  The Quartet's duties at the University are wide-ranging, including performances at least once a semester, as well as workshops with graduate composers, coaching undergraduates in chamber music and assisting in other classes at the Music Department.

The Quartet is named for Antonie Brentano, whom many scholars consider to be Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved," the intended recipient of his famous love confession.    

The Brentano String Quartet last performed at Caramoor in October of 2007; they return this summer during the International Music Festival, on July 12, 2009.
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Hsin-Yun Huang, viola
Violist Hsin-Yun Huang, recognized as one of the leading violists of her generation, came to international prominence in 1993 when she was winner of the top prize of the ARD International Music Competition in Munich and the Bunkamura Orchard Hall Award.  In 1988, Ms. Huang was the youngest-ever Gold Medalist of the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition on the Isle of Man.  These and other honors have propelled a career as soloist and chamber musician on stages of major concert halls throughout North America, Europe, and the Far East.

Solo performances have included concerto appearances with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra in Munich, the Zagreb Soloists in Paris, the Tokyo Philharmonic in Tokyo, the Berlin Radio Symphony, the Russian State Philharmonic, and the Naumburg Orchestra in New York City's Central Park.  Ms. Huang is in constant demand in her native Taiwan, appearing annually with the National Symphony of Taiwan, and has also been soloist with the Evergreen Symphony Orchestra.  Ms. Huang has appeared in a nationally televised solo recital for President Chen Shui-Bian.

Hsin-Yun Huang has performed at prominent music festivals throughout the world.  In North America, these include the Spoleto Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, the Marlboro Music Festival, the El Paso Chamber Music Festival, the Vancouver Chamber Music Festival, the Appalachian Festival, the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, the Newport Festival, and the Mount Desert Festival.  European festivals have included Prussia Cove (England), the St. Nazaire and Festival de Divonne (France), and the Moritzburg Festival (Germany).

Ms. Huang has collaborated with many distinguished artists, including Yo-Yo Ma, Jaime Laredo, Joshua Bell, Joseph Suk, Menahem Pressler, Joseph Silverstein, Gary Hoffman, and Michael Tree.  Recent performances include collaborations with the Guarneri Quartet and a tour with the Orion String Quartet and the Bill T. Jones Dance Company under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.  She has collaborated extensively with the Brentano String Quartet, including the recording and performance of the complete Mozart string quintets, with the first set of recitals presented by Carnegie Hall in Zankel Hall.  She performed George Benjamin's "Viola Viola" with violist Misha Amory for Carnegie Hall's "Making Music" series at Zankel Hall in March 2007.

Ms. Huang has recently embarked on a series of major commissioning projects for solo viola and chamber ensemble.  In July 2006 she premiered a new work from Houston-based Taiwanese composer Shih-Hui Chen, Shu Shon Key (Remembrance) with the Broyhill Chamber Ensemble at An Appalachian Summer Festival in North Carolina.  The work was co-commissioned by the festival along with Chinese Performing Arts, which will present a performance of the work at Boston's Jordan Hall in January 2007, and Da Camera of Houston, which presented a performance later that season.  The Evergreen Symphony Orchestra commissioned a version of the work for solo viola and orchestra; Ms. Huang performed the world premiere with the orchestra in 2008.

A new work from Steven Mackey, Groundswell, also for solo viola and chamber ensemble, received its premiere at the Aspen Music Festival in the summer of 2007.  Subsequent performances have included presentations by the Fulcrum Point New Music Project in Chicago and the La Jolla Summerfest.

Ms. Huang was a member of the Borromeo String Quartet from 1994-2000. With the Quartet, she performed in such prominent venues as New York City's Alice Tully Hall, London's Wigmore Hall, Berlin's Philharmonie, and Japan's Casals Hall.  In 1998 the Borromeo String Quartet was awarded the prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award, chosen by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center to be members of Chamber Music Society Two, and featured in a "Live from Lincoln Center" telecast.

She recently founded the Variation String Trio with violinist Jennifer Koh and cellist Wilhelmina Smith.

Hsin-Yun Huang came to England at the age of fourteen to study at the Yehudi Menuhin School with David Takeno.  She continued her studies at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with Michael Tree, where she earned her Bachelor of Music degree, and at the Juilliard School with Samuel Rhodes, where she earned a Master of Music degree.  Currently residing in New York City, she is a dedicated teacher, serving on the faculties of The Juilliard School and the Mannes College of Music.
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