Program Notes - April 1, 2008
The Belcea String Quartet
Quartet in D major, op. 20 no. 4
Haydn
This piece is one of a set of six quartets written by Haydn in 1772. The six works are notable in general for going somewhat beyond the idea of elegant, charming entertainments that we tend to think of as “Haydnesque” and dealing instead in rather deeper and more musically complex musical procedures.
That we are here confronting a stylistic departure for Haydn is evident in the expressive and tempo markings for the D major quartet’s four movements. The slow movement, a set of variations, is marked affettuoso , a term not often found in Haydn’s output. The folk-influenced minuet movement bears the direction alla zingarese (in gypsy style) and the truly amusing finale is marked Presto: Scherzando (very fast and “jokingly”), a rare use of the scherzo term before Beethoven.
The first two movements of the D major quartet are fairly serious in tone. The first movement is harmonically adventurous and contains one surprise that those with sharp ears will appreciate: The development sections ends with five beats of silence, and when the opening theme reappears, it is in the “wrong” key! Having had his little musical joke, Haydn proceeds with a proper, though shortened, recapitulation section. The second (variation) movement has an unusual touch in the second variation, where the high melody line is given to the cello and the viola takes the bass part. The “gypsy-style” minuet makes considerable use of cross-accents. The finale has been described as the “funniest” movement in the six-quartet set, with its bouncy good humor and occasional bits of instrumental recitative.
String Quartet no. 3
Bartók
What makes a piece of music “modern?” Certainly not the date of its composition, as the third of Bela Bartók’s six string quartets, written in 1927, convincingly demonstrates.
This extraordinary quartet is now 80 years old – but it sounds just as “new” and experimental in both form and harmonic language as it did 80 years ago. Bartók entered it in a prize contest for new quartet and wound up sharing first prize of $6,000 with the Italian composer Alfredo Casella.
The third is both the shortest and the least often performed of Bartók’s quartets. It is in a single movement about 14 minutes long, but the composer did indicate four subdivisions in his score – First Part, Second Part, Recapitulation of the First Part and Coda The piece is full of densely woven polyphony, a goodly quotient of dissonance, allusions to the rhythms of Hungarian folk dance and the sort of eerie-sounding “special effects” peculiar to stringed instruments -- e.g. ponticello (playing on the instrument’s bridge), glissando (sliding from note to note) and col legno (playing with the wooden part of the bow rather than the hair).
After a murmurous opening the first section concerns itself with a three-note motif made up of a rising fourth and a falling third; this germ cell is treated to many contrapuntal variations interwoven with brief harsh outbursts that give the piece a terse, epigrammatic flavor. The Second Part is moré animated, with an air of fantastic mystery created by the use of trills and pizzicato, and a sense of whirling rhythmic energy in a kind of fantastic three-legged dance. The music is full of tension and rhythmic verve as it works up to the very brief section labeled “Recapitualation of the First Part.” The Coda brings a sudden turn toward a reflective quieter mood with prominent glissando effects. The somewhat eerie mood is broken up by occasional rough interjections, but then the music gathers speed and hurtles along toward an energetic ending.
A lot of musical “information” is packed into the few minutes of this quartet. It may seem that Bartók is constantly shifting gears, that nothing is long-sustained – but the more familiar one becomes with this fairly thorny music, the more one sees the musical logic and technical skill with which it has been put together.
String Quartet no. 3
Britten
This was one of Benjamin Britten’s very last works, completed during a visit to Venice shortly before his death in 1976. The world premiere took place just 15 days after his death in Aldeburgh, site of the music festival he had founded.
The quartet is in five movements. It marks Britten’s return to the string quartet genre after a lapse of some 30 years. The piece makes explicit reference in its remarkable final movement to Britten’s final opera Death in Venice.
There is certainly an elegiac character to this work, a sense of nostalgia and farewell. The endings of several of its five movements – notably the last of all – are oddly inconclusive, as if the composer had more to say but lacked the strength to say it.
The gentle rocking motion that begins the first movement sets an introspective mood. The two faster movements – the second and fourth – frame the extraordinary central slow movement, a calm, almost static meditation in the violin’s highest register that will remind some listeners of the slow movements of Britten’s friend Dmitri Shostakovitch. The other instruments make several attempts to disturb the contemplative mood but they cannot do so and the piece ends softly with a high-lying and luminous major triad.
The final movement, much the longest, begins with a series of tentative gestures that make musical references to Death in Venice. The passacaglia that follows is based on a repetitive figure in the cello. An extended elegy, perhaps a farewell, develops, growing in intensity and polyphonic complexity. The mesmerizing piece at length falters and dies away with an ambiguous ending that hovers inconclusively between two keys.
Program Notes by Robert Finn