St. Lawrence String Quartet Geoff Nuttall, Violin Owen Dalby, Violin Lesley Robertson, Viola Christopher Costanza, Cello

Sunday, February 18, 2018, 3pm Hertz Hall St. Lawrence String Quartet Geoff Nuttall, violin Owen Dalby, violin Lesley Robertson, viola Christopher Costanza, cello PROGRAM John ADAMS (b. 1947) First Quartet (2008) Movement I Movement II Second Quartet (2014) Allegro molto Andantino – Energico INTERMISSION Samuel Carl ADAMS (b. 1985) String Quartet in Five Movements (2013) I. fluid II. quiet, rocking III. quiet, austere IV. fluid V. metronomic, brittle St. Lawrence String Quartet recordings can be heard on EMI Classics and ArtistShare (www.artistshare.com). The St. Lawrence String Quartet is Ensemble-in-Residence at Stanford University. Cal Performances’ 2017 –18 season is sponsored by Wells Fargo. 8 PROGRAM NOTES John Adams first movement starts in a very ticking, ener - First Quartet (2008) gized way and then lyrical shapes start filtering “String quartet writing is one of the most in and out. That basic sense of pulsation— difficult challenges a composer can take on,” a regular ticking—is present throughout the American composer John Adams once said. piece.” The opening movement is essentially Adams is not a string player and views the three movements in one, played without a medium of quartet writing “a matter of very break. In the central slow section, recitative-like long-term ‘work in progress. ’” His ongoing declamations from solo instruments are juxta - collaboration with the SLSQ has resulted in posed with more reflective ensemble passages. three substantial, half-hour works that occupy This leads to a spiky scherzo (“a crazy little a significant corner of a large catalog. The two scherzo”) that soon fades away into wisps of most recent were both completed in 2014 after sound and a tranquil close. The energy and mo - a long gestation: a Second Quartet and Absolute mentum of the work’s opening is played out in Jest , for quartet and orchestra, based on frag - the pulsing finale. ments of two of Beethoven’s late quartets and “This piece was inspired by this wonderful commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony quartet, the SLSQ,” Adams says. “I was reminded to celebrate its centennial season. The 28-minute how much the sound of the string quartet is First Quartet was the earliest, in 2008. Origi - like elevated human discourse. It’s like speech nally the only work with a generic title in Adams’ brought to the highest, most sublime level in the catalog, it’s an intriguingly direct, no-nonsense hands of a great composer. So I wanted to at - header from a composer known for evocative tempt to express my own voice in the medium titles that invite immediate investigation. It fol - of the quartet.” lows an earlier string quartet titled John’s Book —2017 Keith Horner of Alleged Dances (1994), written for Kronos ([email protected]) Quartet and for performance with the pre- recorded sounds of a prepared piano. A five- Second Quartet (2014) minute second string quartet, Fellow Traveler “I play risky because I use late Beethoven,” (2007), was a 50th birthday present for director smiles John Adams, as he confesses a com - Peter Sellars, with whom Adams has collabo - poser’s desire to inhabit familiar music from the rated on several major—often controversial, past. Where Brahms makes variations out of a often hugely successful—stage works over the theme by Haydn or Handel, where Liszt tran - past three decades. It was a characteristically scribes Mozart arias or Schubert songs, or where compelling SLSQ performance of Alleged Dances Schoenberg crafts a compelling orchestral and Beethoven’s Op. 132 that led to the com - soundscape out of a Brahms piano quartet, mission for this string quartet. “I’ve got about Adams turns to the piano music of late Beet - 10 other things that I should be doing, but I hoven as the starting point for his Second dove right in,” Adams said. Quartet. It’s his third collaboration with the Given its premiere at the Juilliard School on St. Lawrence String Quartet, written for the January 31, 2009, Adams’ First Quartet is in two group’s 25th anniversary in 2014. Its predeces - movements, the first more than twice the length sor, Absolute Jest (2012), a 35-minute piece for of the second. It opens in a rhythmically driven, quartet and orchestra, also reworked fragments pulsing manner, as fragments of a theme are of Beethoven, primarily from the scherzo passed from one instrument to another, creat - move ments from two of the late quartets. ing a constantly shifting texture. “I started out Adams came upon the idea after hearing how as a young composer very influenced by Ameri - Stravinsky successfully marries the music of can minimalism and you can still hear vestiges Pergolesi and his contemporaries with his own of this in the quartet,” Adams said at the Cana - distinctive musical voice in his ballet Pulcinella. dian premiere of the piece at the Banff Centre. Adams now further develops his homage to “You can hear a very strong sense of beat. The Beethoven in his Second Quartet (2014), where 8B PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES he takes even shorter fragments of Beethoven— Again, the music heads off in unexpected di - ”fractals” as he refers to them—drawn from his rections, with extreme mood changes. Adams penultimate piano sonata, Op. 110, and, more once referred to it as “emotionally bi-polar” and, elusively, from the Diabelli Variations. The he adds, “it finally leads into a wild finale in longest fragment is just eight bars in duration. “I which you may hear the Diabelli Variations.” throw them into a petri dish and let them grow —2018 Keith Horner in whatever way they want to,” he says. “Some - times they get out of hand and I have to reel Samuel Adams them back in.” String Quartet in Five Movements (2013) The collaboration between composer and About two months prior to starting work on string quartet was by no means inevitable. this quartet, I read a series of lectures by the Speaking of the difficulty of writing for string Italian author Italo Calvino on the topic of light - quartet, Adams has said, “Unless one is an ac - ness in poetry. An idea of his that stuck—and complished string player and writes in that one that was very important for me to under - medium all the time—and I don’t know many stand at the time—is that art need not indulge these days who do—the demands of handling in the weight of the world to be serious. Rather, this extremely volatile and transparent instru - art can deflect its weight without necessarily mental medium can easily be humbling, if not evading its presence. downright humiliating. What I appreciate about Calvino wrote: “The only hero able to cut my friends in the St. Lawrence is their willing - off Medusa’s head is Perseus, who flies with ness to let me literally ‘improvise’ on them as if winged sandals; Perseus, who does not turn they were a piano or a drum and I a crazy man his gaze upon the face of the Gorgon but only beating away with only the roughest outlines of upon her image reflected in his bronze what I want. They will go the distance with me, shield… When ever humanity seems con - allow me to try and fail, and they will indulge demned to heaviness, I think I should fly my seizures of doubt, frustration, and indeci - like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean sion, all the while providing intuitions and fre - escaping into dreams or into the irrational. quently brilliant suggestions of their own. It is I mean that I have to change my approach, no surprise then for me to reveal that both the look at the world from a different perspec - First Quartet and Absolute Jest went through tive ” (Calvino, from Six Memos for the Next radical revision stages both before and after Millen nium ). each piece’s premiere.” I found this image striking and meaning - The process was repeated in the Second ful—timely, too, since it provided an approach Quartet. The piece is structured in two parts. to writing my first string quartet (a daunting The first begins by refracting a descending six- task!). It also seemed appropriate given the note figure from the second movement of character of the St. Lawrence: a very serious Beethoven’s Op. 110 through the prism of group of musicians who do not take themselves Adams’ imagination. A second motif from the too seriously. same movement later emerges. “The familiar So this string quartet is a kind of thought Beethoven cadences and half-cadences reappear experiment, one that takes inspiration from throughout the movement like a homing mech - Calvino’s stance. And although it references its anism,” Adams says. “Each apparition is fol - historical predecessors (Joseph Haydn, John lowed by a departure to an increasingly remote Cage, Helmut Lachenmann) through allusion key and textural region.” In the process, the and quotation, it does so as Perseus might have: shape of the phrase, its harmony, pitch, texture, with winged feet. The five movements function and dynamics are in a constant state of flux. The independently, and only occasionally do they “sampling” continues in the Andantino, which directly refer to one another. opens with a reflective melody and dialogue The first movement, fluid , is constructed of drawn from the first movement of Op. 110. a series of winding melodies and out-of-context PROGRAM NOTES cadences. The music is gentle and to be played ics that transform as the players gradually move without vibrato or heavy bow pressure. towards (and away from) the bridges of their The second and most substantial movement instruments.

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