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About the Program
The
Artemis Quartet, with a record of distinguished performances for Chamber
Music Cincinnati, played a key role in making possible this evening's
very special program. Thomas Larcher's new Quartet No. 3,
Mandares,
is the first music ever commissioned by our 78-year-old organization,
and the Artemis Quartet were invited to select the composer. Initial
impetus came from a sociology class at Northern Kentucky University,
which provided a seed-money grant to CMC for a project involving global
outreach. CMC proposed commissioning a string quartet from a composer
in another country, and then obtained a further grant from the Argosy
Foundation while the Mozarteum International Foundation, in Salzburg,
Austria, joined in a co-commission. The world premiere was in Salzburg
on January 29, 2008, while the American premiere is at NKU, with
follow-up performances in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus and
Louisville.
The Artemis Quartet has earned a fine reputation for their performances
of Beethoven. That master's Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4 is the
most popular of his half-dozen early quartets, yet it is something of an
odd-man-out among this group. It is the only minor-key work in Opus 18
and indeed the only C-minor quartet among Beethoven's entire sixteen.
It is known that the order of the Opus 18 quartets as published in 1801
is not the order of their composition, but was "No.4" written first,
fifth or last? Unlike its companions in the set, no sketches for this
work have survived, so the date of composition has been in dispute.
Almost without exception Beethoven indicates Allegro con brio as the
tempo for his C-minor first movements, but not in this quartet. Instead
we have a noticeably more moderate Allegro ma non tanto direction, fully
in keeping with the generally lyrical flow. Nevertheless there are
contrasting dramatic interjections of fortissimo chords, triple-stopped
in the violins. The second movement is titled Scherzo, but it's a
rather slow-motion scherzo in C major and in sonata form rather than the
usual ABA structure of a scherzo. There are similarities with the slow
movement of the roughly contemporaneous First Symphony in its
light-textured, faux-contrapuntal 3/8 motion. C minor returns in the
gruff Menuetto, marked by pervasive third-beat accents. Unusually, the
second part of the trio section is not repeated, while the repeat of the
minuet proper is directed to be played at a faster pace. The quartet
concludes with a lively rondo much indebted to Haydn; its coda flies off
Prestissimo.
With its imaginative approach to form, musical texture and instrumental
techniques breaking a new path, Thomas Larcher's String Quartet No. 3,
Mandares,
written in 2006-07, qualifies as a truly 21st Century composition. Born
in Innsbruck, Austria in 1963, the composer developed a successful
career as a concert pianist before turning more and more toward creating
music as well as performing it. "My music is communicative," Larcher
writes, "It challenges the attentive listener but is meant to be readily
intelligible in concert." He also says, "I write for classical
musicians who like being challenged," which goes far to explain why the
Artemis Quartet was attracted to his work.
Mandares,
while brilliantly attractive, makes formidable technical demands of its
performers. Larcher wrote the quartet in a remote corner of the
Mediterranean island of Crete, an area suffused with the aura and
mystery of the past. The names of villages, past and present, enchanted
him as he explored the area, and one, Mandares, inspired the title for
the quartet as well as its first movement. The piece begins very
quietly with a shimmering sound made by stroking a coin against the
string. Very gradually the spectral sounds rise to a great climax only
to die away beneath a suggestion of a melody in the first violin. The
second movement,
Honey from Anopolis,
is a profound contrast. In a sort of updated Schubertian musical moment
the composer recalls his ramble from Finix to Anopolis, where he bought
honey. Without a break, though, he is
sleepless,
with sections of loud, nervous and swift figures leading to contrasting
sections in which the players are independent, improvising individual
dynamics and rhythms for specific lines of notes. Graphic sleeplessness
indeed! The fourth movement, again following without pause, gives us
another rhythmically complex take on
sleepless
before returning to the soundscape of
Mandares.
The last movement -
a song from ?
- is like a half-remembered folk song which also echoes some of the
earlier music of the quartet before rising to the heights of pitch as it
disappears. Rainer Lepuschitz, who analyzed the quartet for the
venerable journal
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik,
summed it up as he wrote to Thomas Larcher, "You have composed an
extraordinary string quartet, which truly enriches this genre..."
Chamber music is not as familiar a part of Tchaikovsky's work as his
symphonies, concertos or ballets. There are only five pieces, including
three string quartets. The String Quartet No.2 dates from 1874, and the
composer wrote of it, "No other work of mine flowed from me so simply
and so easily." At the first performance, however, the quartet was
severely criticized by the famed pianist Anton Rubinstein. While the
quartet was modified, Tchaikovsky made no changes to his famous First
Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto when they too received savage
comment from well-known performers of the day. Quartet No. 2 opens with
a tonally ambiguous, rhapsodic Adagio introduction. The principal
section of the first movement (Moderato assai) is built around two
characteristically Russian melodies, the second more lively than the
first. Ostensibly now in F major, the music in this movement shows more
of a progression toward this key rather than a bedrock foundation on the
key, which does, however, emerge clearly at the end. Tchaikovsky was a
master in handling unusual rhythms, and the scherzo, in D-flat, is a
splendid example. Two measures of quick 6/8 meter (two triplet beats to
the measure) followed by one in 9/8 (three triplet beats) provide a
slower seven-beat pulse found in Russian folk music. The trio reverts
to a 3/4 rhythm for another facet of folk music. The
third movement has an elegiac theme in F minor, with a more animated
middle section in the distant key of E major. The finale gives us one
of Tchaikovsky's infectiously lively rhythmic themes, and a much
broadened variant serves as a stirring climax toward the end.
Edwin Daley
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