Danish String Quartet Joseph Haydn
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Danish String Quartet Sunday, November 4, 2018 at 3:00pm This is the 877th concert in Koerner Hall Frederik Øland, violin Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violin Asbjørn Nørgaard, viola Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, cello PROGRAM Franz Joseph Haydn: String Quartet in C Major, Hob. III:32, op. 20, no. 2 I. Moderato II. Capriccio: Adagio III. Menuetto: Allegretto IV. Fuga a 4tro soggetti: Allegro Hans Abrahamsen: String Quartet No. 1, “Ten Preludes” INTERMISSION Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet No. 7 in F Major, op. 59, no. 1 I. Allegro II. Allegretto vivace sempre scherzando III. Adagio molto e mesto IV. Allegro Joseph Haydn Born in Rohrau, Austria, March 31, 1732; died in Vienna, Austria, May 31, 1809 String Quartet in C Major, Hob. III:32, op. 20, no. 2 (1772) When Haydn’s op. 20 quartet collection was issued in an unsanctioned printing in Amsterdam and Berlin in 1779, its publisher (Hummel) put an emblem of a full sun or sun god atop two neo-classical pillars on the front cover – and this is why the six quartets are still occasionally called the “Sun” quartets to the present day. Thanks to wide distribution through official and unofficial channels, the collection did much to popularize the medium of the string quartet during Haydn’s lifetime. When a new edition of the quartets was advertised in Vienna in 1801, its publisher (Artaria) described them as works with which ‘Haydn so decisively founded his fame.’ Mozart admired the collection. Beethoven copied them out to better understand their craft. And, at the end of the 19th century, Brahms owned the original autograph manuscripts, which he donated to the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, where they remain to this day. In these manuscripts, Haydn was still using the established catch-all title Divertimento a quattro rather than ‘string quartet.’ Despite the modest title, the C Major Quartet is no easy-going divertimento and the piece is in many ways the least conventional quartet of the set. The sonorous cello solos at the opening of its first two movements are not only a democratization in Haydn’s part-writing but also a striving for new harmonic effect. The first of these melodies introduces a passage of what amounts to triple invertible counterpoint, a kind of musical version of Sudoku, that is to permeate the entire quartet. The slow movement, too, strives for dramatic impact, with recitative-like passages that resolve into a melting arioso melody. This movement is straight out of the opera house and full of the gestures of the recitative and aria. It leads to a wonderful minuet, rich in allusions to folk dances. The finale bustles with fragments of themes busily passing from one voice to another. ‘Fuga a 4tro soggetti,’ Haydn proudly titles his fugue with four themes, which is softly played (sotto voce) until its concluding burst of exuberance. Hans Abrahamsen Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, December 23, 1952 String Quartet No. 1, “Ten Preludes” (1973) Until he wrote the song-cycle let me tell you in 2013, Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen had composed primarily instrumental music over a five-decade career. The song-cycle, written for Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, using only words spoken by Shakespeare’s Ophelia, won the prestigious 2016 Grawemeyer Award and brought the Dane to the attention of a wider audience. Exactly 50 years earlier, in 1973, while still in his early twenties, Abrahamsen completed his first string quartet, titled Ten Preludes. It is an extraordinarily prophetic work, which initially confronts complexity and gradually works its way to music of the utmost simplicity, much as Abrahamsen’s life journey as a composer was to do. Three more quartets followed, one per decade, culminating in the transparent, crystalline delicacy and precision of the Fourth (2012), a valuable addition to the contemporary repertoire. There was a gap during the nineties – a ‘fermata’ as Abrahamsen refers to it – when the Danish composer, “paralyzed by white paper,” confronted the many stylistic directions his music could take. Eventually, he pared them down to an individual synthesis of minimalism, contrapuntal craft, and a distilled expression of musical thought. Abrahamsen views Ten Preludes as a key work from his early period. Its ten movements span some 20 minutes and begin from a point of complex chromatic modernism, a sound that is representative of much that was going on in the more progressive musical centres of the early 1970s. No sooner is this established, however, than we hear a simplification process at play, with glimpses of tonal centres and rhythmic structures already emerging in the first Prelude, one of the longer movements. Abrahamsen’s Danish colleague Poul Ruders likens the score to a sequence of short stories, each ‘novella’ related and pointing forward to the next and evolving out of the preceding prelude – cumulatively “containing in all their brevity almost everything one could desire of musical expression within the relatively short interval of 20 minutes: wildness and joy, simplicity and necessity, contrasts and form.” Abrahamsen’s transparency of sound results in moments of great delicacy and beauty (No. 5), reflective, even meditative textures (No. 6) and a delight in laying bare the process of building up a structure of chords (No. 8). Much of his probing and drilling down to first principles derives from an association with the Danish New Simplicity movement, a term drawn from Danish literary criticism. Through this, Abrahamsen helps clarify a satisfying musical structure for the Ten Preludes and, at the same time, begins to forge a new relationship with musical styles of the past. In No. 9, he arrives at a solemn unison chant, twice repeated. In No. 10, Abrahamsen has admitted to both surprising and delighting himself by arriving at a C major solution. “Like Beethoven’s Fifth,” he says, “we come through to C major.” The resulting prelude, however, is a strikingly idiosyncratic conclusion to an exploratory journey from the present to the past via what Abrahamsen refers to as “a new simplistic (or minimalistic) and poly-stylistical style.” The sense of discovery continues to resonate through the music of this fascinating composer, not least in his rethinking of the Ten Preludes in 2010 as Ten Sinfonias for orchestra. Ludwig van Beethoven Born in Bonn, Germany, December 15 or 16, 1770; died in Vienna, Austria, March 26, 1827 String Quartet No. 7 in F Major, op. 59, no. 1 (1806) With his three “Razumovsky” quartets, Beethoven, to all intents and purposes, ends the tradition of writing for the Viennese amateur string quartet. While he had written his first six quartets, his op. 18, with the amateur quartet market in mind, Beethoven was at once a great consolidator and a great innovator and was soon ready to move on. He began to demand more from his performers. With the three “Razumovsky” quartets, composed mainly between April and November 1806, the classical quartet, comfortably established as a congenial exchange of thoughts and pleasantries between four friends, now begins to speak loudly and argumentatively in public. Think of the beginning of the first “Razumovsky” and the end of the last one, the Beethoven scholar Joseph Kerman argues: “there is not much conversation in evidence on either page. A better term might be determined ensemble shouting.” And shout they did, when the three “Razumovskys” were first performed. Even the Schuppanzigh Quartet, Vienna’s leading professional quartet and the earliest performers of the music, broke out in laughter when they saw the F major quartet. Beethoven held their leader, Ignaz Schuppanzigh, a cheerful, chubby man, in some esteem, nicknaming him ‘My Lord Falstaff.’ But it was to Schuppanzigh that he directed his famous remark: “Do you suppose that I am thinking about your wretched fiddle when the spirit moves me?” The verb ‘to compromise’ was no longer in Beethoven’s vocabulary. The opening movement is Beethoven’s longest quartet movement to date and it strains at the leash of the classical style. Among the broadest and deepest structures of Beethoven’s entire middle period, its majesty and energy have been compared with that of the “Eroica” and its serenity with that of the Violin Concerto. Its symphonic breadth is a characteristic of all the “Razumovskys” and other middle-period music by Beethoven. The second movement is a highly unusual scherzo, a constantly developing structure around a rhythmic kernel. The movement can be viewed as a prototype for the scherzos of Mahler. Its form is closer to sonata form than the usual scherzo-trio- scherzo pattern. Adagio molto e mesto is the performing indication that Beethoven asks for in the slow movement, introducing the unusual term, ‘slow and mournful.’ Both of its expansive and highly expressive themes are in the minor key. A cryptic remark pencilled into the margin of the slow movement points to its unusually restless, dark and desolate nature: ‘A weeping willow or acacia tree on my brother’s grave.’ The music dissolves into a brief, ethereal cadenza for the first violin. This gives way to the finale, which offers some consolation by employing Haydn’s technique of rounding off his quartets with a spirited finale. The cello introduces a lively theme marked Thème russe and this launches another large-scale movement. Beethoven found the theme in a collection of Russian folk songs that he owned. Its inclusion, transformed from the minor key to the major and bearing a family resemblance to earlier themes in the quartet, is believed to have been in tribute to Count Razumovsky, the Russian Ambassador to Vienna, one of Beethoven’s most important patrons and the dedicatee of this ground-breaking work. - Program notes © 2018 Keith Horner Danish String Quartet Embodying the quintessential elements of a fine chamber music ensemble, the Danish String Quartet has established a reputation for their integrated sound, impeccable intonation, and judicious balance.