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Tuesday, October 7, 2008, 8:00 PM |
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Min-Young Kim, violin The Daedalus Quartet was the recipient of the 2007 Martin Segal Award from Lincoln Center as well as the 2007 Guarneri String Quartet Award from Chamber Music America. Founded in 2000, the quartet comprises Min-Young Kim, violin; Kyu-Young Kim, violin; Jessica Thompson, viola; and Raman Ramakrishnan, cello. |
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Awadagin Pratt, piano
Awadagin Pratt is Associate Professor of Piano and Artist-in-Residence at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. Winner of the 1992 Naumburg Competition and recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1994, Mr. Pratt is an internationally acclaimed pianist, conductor, chamber musician and recording artist. His most recent CD is an all-Bach disc with the St. Lawrence String Quartet on the Angel/EMI label. |
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Program
Franz Joseph Haydn: String Quartet, Op. 20, No. 5
David Horne: Flight from the Labyrinth intermission
Intermission
Johannes Brahms: Quintet for Piano and Strings, Op. 34
Join us at 7:00 PM for a pre-concert talk with musicologist Eftychia Papanikolaou.
PROGRAM NOTES
By Members of the Daedalus Quartet
F.J. Haydn String Quartet in F minor, Op. 20, No. 5
The year 1772 found Haydn in the middle of his third compositional period, often referred to as his “Romantic Crisis” or his “Sturm und Drang” (Storm and Stress) period. It seems odd that such tormented and passionate works should emanate from him at this time, for he was in the sixth year of a luxurious residency as kapellmeister at the Esterhazy castle, summer home of Prince Nicolaus the Magnificent. Perhaps, in being deprived of so much emotional anxiety in real life, Haydn was compelled to put it into his music. In his six Opus 20 string quartets of 1772, we can see both sides: on the one hand, they are exquisite, aristocratic, and beautifully wrought; on the other hand, they often venture into strange, dark territory, and are capable of bringing us to tears.
The F minor quartet wears these latter qualities to the hilt. It seems to be about pain. The first violin starts out on a melody that is tortured and dramatic, to be sure, but what makes the first movement unique is the downbeat-less, pulsating, homophonic accompaniment of the three lower voices. This opening texture makes the piece feel unsettled and stormy. Tragedy is implied by the way in which optimistic experiments with major tonalities are inevitably vanquished by minor keys, often with the aid of painful suspensions.
The second movement continues in the same vein. While it is labeled a minuet, one would be hard pressed to dance to it gracefully. Its phrases are often of unconventional lengths, and sudden alternations between loud and soft make for jarring effects. The trio, which embraces us a bar earlier than expected, attempts to assuage our pain by shifting to the parallel major key. In its quirkiness it is like the invalid's visitor who, while smoothing down the sheets, fills the awkward silences with gentle jokes.
We are released from suffering in the Adagio, which is a sweet and tender “siciliano” in the parallel major key. The melody brings to mind a Christmas carol, and the first violin’s fanciful ornaments are like joyful caresses. Christian imagery continues into the last movement, a fugue whose subject is taken from Handel’s Messiah (among other Baroque works). Marked “sempre sotto voce,” the movement is mostly hushed throughout … mostly. It is in F minor, but no third is notated in the final chord. With resonance, however, the major third will ring. Thus does the clarity of Baroque counterpoint deliver us from the pain of the Romantic Crisis, and thus does sympathetic vibration deliver us from the clutches of minor modes.
David Horne Flight from the Labyrinth (String Quartet No. 3)
David Horne is widely regarded as one of the most talented Scottish musicians of his generation. When still a teenager he established his name both as a pianist, making his BBC Proms concerto debut in 1990, and as a composer, with a prize-winning work at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. His composition studies took him to the USA, first at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and then at Harvard University, and he has since returned to the UK and is based in Manchester.
Horne’s music can be viewed both as a response, and as a reaction, to modernism. His language has evolved naturally from the classically-orientatated modernist masters, exploring essentially abstract musical ideas. Yet Horne deploys these with an attractive lyricism, an impressionistic ear for instrumentation, and with invigorating energy. Such communicative qualities have drawn leading virtuoso performers on both sides of the Atlantic to premiere his works, including violist Nobuko Imai (Stilled Voices), percussionist Evelyn Glennie (Reaching Out and Ignition) and pianist Boris Berezovsky (Liszt). David Horne’s ensemble scores such as Out of the Air and the Concerto for Six Players have been performed internationally by the London Sinfonietta, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the California EAR Unit, the Ensemble für neue Musik Zürich, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Recent ensemble works by David Horne include Flex for piano and ensemble, performed in Boston and London with the composer as soloist, and the mirror-pair of Blunt Instruments which received its first performance at the Huddersfield Festival in 2000 and Broken Instruments premiered by the London Sinfonietta in 2001. His chamber works include string quartets composed for the Daedalus, Mendelssohn, Yggdrasil, and Brentano Quartets.
His large-scale output includes a Piano Concerto premiered in 1993 and recently performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra with the composer as soloist, two chamber operas Jason Field and Travellers, the music theatre work Beyond the Blue Horizon, and the full-length opera Friend of the People, premiered by Scottish Opera in 1999. As Composer in Association with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (2000-04) he created a series of orchestral and ensemble works, including The Year’s Midnight for soloists, chorus and orchestra, the percussion concerto, Ignition, premiered by Evelyn Glennie, and a Concerto for Orchestra.
Alongside Liverpool activities his recent works have included three arrangements of electronic music by Warp artists, Disintegrations, premiered by the London Sinfonietta at the Ether Festival in London in 2003 and toured internationally. In 2005 the Nash Ensemble performed Splintered Instruments at the Wigmore Hall and the BBC Proms, and Horne has written a new work for the ensemble and tenor James Gilchrist for premiere at the Wigmore Hall in March 2007. Plans include an all-Horne orchestral program by the BBC Symphony Orchestra for Radio 3’s Hear and Now, to be recorded at the Maida Vale studios in April 2007.
David Horne is published by Boosey & Hawkes. Biography courtesy Boosey & Hawkes.
The composer writes of Flight from the Labyrinth:
Although I write essentially abstract music, I often start out with a particular extra-musical idea that might suggest a musical theme or structure. Flight from the Labyrinth takes as its inspiration the myth of Daedalus and his escape, along with his infamous son Icarus, from the Labyrinth on Crete. However, the string quartet is not programmatic in any formal way; indeed the eventual fate of Icarus is purposely not dealt with at all. Instead, contrasting ideas of a maze and imprisonment, juxtaposed with flight and escape are stylised into particular musical elements that reverberate throughout the work. The “conflict” of these musical ideas is apparent from the opening. Tense and oppressive clusters of notes, around which the instruments swirl aggressively are contrasted with a tranquil major second drone in cello harmonics. This foreshadows much of the musical argument in the piece, where there are almost always two similar ideas competing simultaneously throughout the work’s tightly packed structure.
The string quartet amplifies these contrasts through using a large variety of colors, and certain extended playing techniques, such as bowing behind the bridge and tapping on the instrument. In addition, there is significant use of both natural and artificial harmonics, even plucked harmonics, which are used not just for color but for their unique expressive qualities. There is also a conscious contrast between employing the natural characteristics of the instruments and then subverting them. For example, there is much use of open strings in certain virtuosic multiple-stop passages to give added resonance and brightness, compared with writing passages unnaturally high on particular strings to create more tension. In addition, the string quartet’s range is sometimes treated in a contrary fashion so, for example, the cello is often playing the highest notes in a texture with the violins below. This also helps to create an aural tension in the string quartet’s sound world.
The idea of escape and flight is depicted by themes that want to reach upwards and outwards, and they are typically more expansive than the labyrinthine ideas which are usually densely packed with interlocking musical motives. While there are moments of repose in the piece, the music is almost always set on edge with a nervous energy that doesn’t begin to fizzle out until the very end. Rather than hearing the piece’s structure as a gradual move towards escape and flight, it might be more useful for the listener to imagine that this is a series a stops and starts. That is, whenever a musical theme seems about to become airborne, it is often violently constrained by the cluster idea heard at the outset. In addition, the relationship between the ideas of constraint and flight become increasingly blurred, as musical ideas from one element seep into another. However, the contrast between the two moods should be apparent to the listener, and this friction creates much of the musical tension. As the extremely vigorous energy that permeated so much of the work eventually dies down, there is an almost resigned quality to the chords heard near the end, finishing with one last whimsical gesture. Whether or not there is an eventual “escape” in the piece is for the listener to decide!
Johannes Brahms Quintet for Piano & Strings in F minor, Op. 34
In the summer of 1862, at the age of twenty-nine, Johannes Brahms left Hamburg, his birthplace, for Vienna, the city of his dreams. He wrote to his lifelong friend Albert Dietrich that he was “looking forward to it like a child.” In the same letter, he wrote, “A string quintet (two cellos) in F minor is finished. I should like to send it to you and hear what you have to say about it, and yet I prefer to take it with me.” The piece’s instrumentation, and its creation on the eve of a much-anticipated journey to Vienna, lead us to believe that it was written partly as an homage to Franz Schubert, whose manuscripts Brahms hunted down, collected, and revered to the point of saving the writing sand (an ink-blotting device) he scraped from them in a small box. And yet Brahms seemed to know that the piece had problems: he was reluctant to part with it even though it was “finished.”
The violinist and composer Joseph Joachim corroborated Brahms’s fears. Upon seeing the cello quintet, he declared it too difficult to be effective. So in the next year, Brahms reworked the piece as a duet for two pianos. Performances of this version were successful, and the piece’s problems seemed to have been solved. But Clara Schumann eventually persuaded Brahms to return to the work; he completed the piano quintet version in 1864 at her mansion near the spa town of Baden-Baden. We are all very thankful that Clara intervened. The piece’s power derives from the dark and stormy textures that the strings and piano create together — coupled, of course, with its extreme intervallic and motivic rigor.
The interval of the half step is of huge importance in the quintet. This is not surprising, since Schubert’s cello quintet also deals extensively with that interval; in fact, the scherzo of Brahms’s quintet and the finale of Schubert’s end with the same D-flat-C in frenzied unison. The half step functions as a lynchpin in almost every theme of the piece. It is first heard in the opening melody, which flirts with D-flat before settling on C; it is last heard in the furious final gesture which, in incorporating the melodic minor mode with its augmented second, passes through D-flat to C on its way to F. So important is the half step to this piece that key relationships are affected: thus the C-sharp minor episode in the first movement and the C-sharp minor coda to the last movement, which are a half step above the dominant, C.
The amazing thing about the quintet is that, despite its length, complexity and many moods, the entire piece is grown from the seeds sown by the first violin, cello, and piano in the opening melody. The oscillating motive which explores the half step and continues in a sequence to the dominant is ubiquitous, and it assumes many different disguises. It is contracted to form the piano outburst that immediately follows the opening melody. It is incorporated in the second subject, a soft, expressive melody introduced by the first violin. It is mulled over obsessively in the beat-shifted development, which eventually breaks it down into hushed imitative fragments. The coda employs the motive in canon, and gives us a taste of what the original string quintet might have sounded like, since the piano only contributes sustained F’s at first, and then nothing for a while.
The scherzo, which spends a few bars tricking us into thinking that we are still in A-flat major, the key of the Andante second movement, soon brings back the oscillating motive in hushed, nervous octaves between the first violin and viola. Then it is immediately restated by everyone, this time expanded into a raucous (and yet slightly pompous) chorale. Later on, it is further dissected in a tense fugato section which explodes eventually into hammered exchanges between strings and piano. The Trio section is constructed, again, from the same thing, but now the motive has an autumnal, pastoral quality, especially in the final statement of the theme.
The Finale begins with half step murmurs and cries which serve to introduce the Allegro non troppo theme, first stated in the cello. This theme, with its jaunty grace and elegant turns, seems to refer back to another Viennese great, Franz Joseph Haydn. It is new, and yet there is something oddly familiar about it. On closer inspection, we discover that, although the oscillating motive is not initially present in the cello line (though it does creep in later), the melody runs closely parallel to the opening melody of the first movement. On still closer inspection, we discover that the piano accompaniment is nothing but oscillating motives in the right hand.
The movement which seems the most removed from this Beethovenian economy of material is the Andante, which has the feeling of a Schubert song. But even here the half step invades; it is felt most strongly at the very end, in the viola’s slow trill between F-flat and E-flat. The oscillating motive even makes a brief appearance in the impassioned middle section, but it is quickly dispatched. The movement as a whole is bittersweet and exquisite, especially when compared to its tormented neighbors.
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