Program Notes
String Quartet in D major, op. 76 no. 5
Haydn
Scholars have dubbed Haydn (1732-1809) the “father of the string quartet.” If that is so, he certainly had a lot of “children,” having written no fewer than 83 string quartets!
This work is one of a set of six that Haydn wrote on commission for a nobleman, Count Erdody, in 1796 and 1797. It is full of robust humor as well as the grace, elegance and plentiful melody that we associate with Haydn’s name. Like most of Haydn’s quartets it is not built on a large scale, the four movements taking only about 18 minutes to perform -- but in that short time span it manages to say many varied and delightful things.
The first movement is for all intents and purposes monothematic (based on a single melody rather than on the more common device of contrasting two or more melodies in a single movement). Both the gentle, beguiling theme that begins the movement and its accompaniment are subjected to some ingenious decorations throughout. There are brief bursts of energy and a sudden accelleration at the end, but the listener never really loses sight of the opening theme.
The slow second movement has become famous in its own right. I recall hearing it played at the funeral service for the great conductor Serge Koussevitzky in Boston in 1951. Haydn marks it “cantabile e mesto” (songful and sad), but this noble music is not really sad, except for a few fleeting touches. Lyrical, reflective, reverent perhaps, but not truly sad.
The brief minuet has some delightful touches of humor – accents in unexpected places, and especially the comical rumble of the cello in the middle section. The last movement begins with a splendid joke – a series of cadences that sound like the end of the piece rather than the beginning! Having thus thrown his listeners off balance, Haydn proceeds to a breathlessly fast quicksilver movement brimming with high-spirited fun. And yes, he ends the movement with the same emphatic chords he had used to open it.
String Quartet (1995)
Pierre Jalbert
Pierre Jalbert (b. 1967) currently teaches at Rice University in Houston. He has served as composer in residence for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the California Symphony.
His string quartet was written for the Maia Quartet on a Guggenheim Fellowship and was premiered by that group in New York in 1996. Jalbert has described it as influenced by “the driving rhythms of rock and jazz music” – to which one might perhaps add the influence of Bartok’s string quartets.
The three movements are full of glissando and pizzicato effects, sudden alternations between loud, pulsing rhythms and meditative passages that come (on a recording at least) close to the threshold of inaudibility. The interval of the descending minor second is prominent in all three movements (touch any black key on the piano and then the white key immediately below it to experience a minor second).
After a brief but arresting call to attention the opening movement presents a kind of hushed recitative that soon becomes music of urgent intensity. Glissando effects are prominent.
The second movement suggests Bartók with its repetitive irregular rhythmic pulse and the high energy it radiates even in soft passages. Later in the movement there are striking sudden shifts from insistent rhythmic energy to music that seems to verge on total silence before dying away. The last movement –- longest of the three -- carries this contrast even further, juxtaposing slow, dreamlike meditative chords with outbursts of energy and passages that seems to recall the quartet’s earlier movements.
String Quartet in B flat major, op. 130/133
Beethoven
The double opus number is required because Beethoven, at the request of his publisher, discarded this quartet’s original finale (known as the “Grosse Fuge” or “Great Fugue”) and replaced it with a shorter and less complex movement. The Grosse Fuge was later published as an independent piece with its own opus number. Tonight’s performance, like most performances of op. 130 nowadays, restores the “Grosse Fuge” to its original place as the final movement The publisher, Matthias Artaria, feared that, coming at the close of an already long and highly unconventional quartet, this lengthy and complicated movement would be too much for audiences of the day to digest.
The six-movement work begins with an elaborate movement that vacillates back and forth between philosophical reflection (the introduction) and high-spirited jollity, with a few passages of lyrical reflection added for good measure. The reflective music of the opening reappears several times, notably toward the end.
Then comes a very short but restless and agitated presto movement, followed by a movement marked by Beethoven “poco scherzoso” – a bit jokingly. It has the air of a courtly dance but also a feeling of tentativeness about it. The fourth movement is a graceful dance-like piece “in German style.” Then comes one of the most heartfelt and uplifting slow movements Beethoven ever wrote, entitled “cavatina” (short aria), an extended meditation of unearthly beauty and intensity.
We then reach the granitic “Great Fugue,” a huge contrapuntal construction in several sections that strains the fingers of the players as much as it does the ears of their audience. It is a kind of one-movement symphony in itself, a series of fugues and other episodes of extraordinary intensity. Beethoven himself added a warning note to his title: “Sometimes free, sometimes refined”). Igor Stravinsky summed the piece up as “contemporary music that will be contemporary forever.”