Artemis Quartet

Artemis Quartet Vineta Sareika / Violin Anthea Kreston / Violin Gregor Sigl / Viola Eckart Runge / Cello Sunday Afternoon, April 8, 2018 at 4:00 Rackham Auditorium Ann Arbor 83rd Performance of the 139th Annual Season 55th Annual Chamber Arts Series Media partnership provided by WGTE 91.3 FM and WRCJ 90.9 FM. The Artemis Quartet appears by arrangement with Arts Management Group. The Artemis Quartet’s recordings are available on the Erato label. In consideration of the artists and the audience, please refrain from the use of electronic devices during the performance. The photography, sound recording, or videotaping of this performance is prohibited. PROGRAM Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart String Quartet in F Major, K. 590 Allegro moderato Andante — Allegretto Menuetto: Allegretto Allegro Béla Bartók String Quartet No. 2, Op. 17, Sz. 67 Moderato Allegro molto capriccioso Lento Intermission Robert Schumann String Quartet in a minor, Op. 41, No. 1 Andante espressivo — Allegro Scherzo: Presto Adagio Presto 3 STRING QUARTET IN F MAJOR, K. 590 (1790) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Born January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, Austria Died December 5, 1791 in Vienna UMS premiere: Budapest String Quartet; January 1946 in Rackham Auditorium. Snapshots of History…In 1790: · The Supreme Court of the US convenes for the first time · Peking Opera is introduced in China · The US patent system is established The present quartet is the last Mozart evidently unsuccessful. He certainly ever wrote. Saying farewell to the never delivered any quartets to the genre was of course the farthest King, and chances are that none thing from his mind — he was 34 were expected of him at Potsdam. years old, at the height of his creative In his biography of Mozart, Maynard powers, and in good health. No one Solomon suggests that the composer could have predicted that he had simply made up this commission in only a year and a half to live when letters to his wife, to justify a long he finished the F-Major Quartet in and expensive journey (during which, Vienna in June 1790. moreover, he even seems to have had Quartets were usually written in an affair.) sets of six in those days, and the Unconfirmed rumors aside, writing F-Major work was only the third in string quartets was a difficult task the series begun the previous year even for a Mozart. The composer, with the quartets in D and B-flat whose ease and speed in composing (K. 575 and 589). It is traditionally were legendary, had toiled long believed that Mozart had received and hard on his six earlier quartets a commission for six quartets from dedicated to Haydn, and the new set King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, did not seem to come any more easily. an avid cello player. But there is In a letter written in June 1790, Mozart no actual evidence that such a called his work on the quartets commission was ever given. Mozart “exhausting labor.” The artistic did visit Prussia in the spring of difficulties were soon compounded 1789, but he never got an audience by financial ones, and Mozart had to with the King. A court document sell his existing three quartets to the dated April 26 speaks of “one named Viennese publisher Artaria for quick Mozart who at his ingress declared cash. Afterwards, he returned to the himself to be a Kapellmeister from form of string chamber music, which Vienna” — hardly a very encouraging he clearly preferred in his later years, introduction. Mozart’s attempts to namely the quintet with two violas. He get work at the Prussian court were produced two splendid works in that 4 genre in 1790–91 (K. 593 and 614), two notes alone. but wrote no more quartets. In his autograph score, Mozart The first so-called “Prussian” called the second movement an Quartet (K. 575) featured many “Andante”; the first edition, printed exposed cello solos, and Mozart’s just after Mozart’s death, changed catalog of his own works confirms this to “Allegretto.” Somewhat that he wrote it for the King of Prussia unusually for a Mozart slow (which doesn’t necessarily mean a movement, it is dominated by its commission). For K. 589 and 590, the basic rhythmic pattern more than its catalog says nothing about Friedrich melodic line. There are also some Wilhelm, and the cello does not highly unexpected harmonies, and a predominate quite as much as it did delicious new rhythmic figure added in the earlier piece. Instead, as one in the recapitulation. As in the first commentator writes, Mozart “gave movement, the ending is extremely all four instruments featured roles; soft, though here all four instruments they shift constantly between playing participate and a very wide range is the melody and collaborating in the involved. accompaniment” — an innovation The minuet and trio are curiously that amounts to a “complete understated, though Mozart plays rethinking of a quartet’s instrumental some sophisticated games with balance.” asymmetrical phrase structures and, The F-Major Quartet opens in the trio, seems to recall the playful very unconventionally, with sharp figure from the second movement. By contrasts in rhythm (long opening contrast, he pulls out all the stops in notes followed by a rapid descending the virtuosic finale, which contains scale), dynamics (soft immediately several elements more readily followed by loud), and texture (unison associated with Haydn than with followed by four-part harmony). Mozart, such as sudden slowdowns, Moreover, the three-measure phrases jumps into new keys, and hints at are at odds with the standard Hungarian Gypsy style (though the four-bar units on which so much Haydn movement it sounds closest to, classical music is based. All these the rondo of the G-Major Piano Trio, contrasts are fully exploited in a was written several years later than sparkling movement, full of energy this quartet). The conclusion of this and vitality. The lyrical flow of the brilliant and witty movement is, once melodies is interrupted, time and more, soft and delicate, as if one left time again, by the wildly cascading a party inconspicuously, through the descending scales from the work’s back door. opening. Particularly noteworthy is the way Mozart “re-orchestrates” the recapitulation, giving the cello’s melodic phrases to the viola the second time around. At the end, the music simply vanishes into thin air, with the first violin playing the last 5 STRING QUARTET NO. 2, OP. 17, SZ. 67 (1917) Béla Bartók Born March 25, 1881 in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sânnicolau Mare, Romania) Died September 26, 1945 in New York City UMS premiere: Budapest String Quartet; February 1941 in Rackham Auditorium. Snapshots of History…In 1917: · Jeannette Rankin of Montana becomes the first woman member of the US House of Representatives · The US declares war on Germany · The first Pulitzer Prizes are awarded A decade after the First Quartet’s opening theme (a languid melody “return to life,” we find Bartók in the with ever-widening intervals) and throes of a new crisis in his String a second, “bittersweet” idea that Quartet No. 2. This time, the crisis had appears only twice, harmonized in to do with the hardships of World War a much more consonant way. The I, and with the vehement opposition contrast of these two themes could to Bartók’s music on the part of the correspond to an imagined contrast Hungarian critics, an opposition that between a melancholy state of in 1912 had caused the composer mind and the world of ideal dreams. to withdraw from the musical life of Powerful surges and desperate Budapest and to move to a relatively climaxes punctuate this movement distant suburb. A mood of pessimism which — roughly — follows the took hold of Bartók during these outlines of sonata form. One of the years — witness the tragic endings most memorable moments occurs of the Four Pieces for Orchestra and shortly before the end: a five-note the Suite for Piano, Op. 14, and the two motif, played by all four instruments in dark song cycles of Opp. 15 and 16, all a menacing, fortissimo unison, turns from the years immediately preceding out to be identical to the beginning String Quartet No. 2. of the “bittersweet” theme, which The Quartet, too, ends with a immediately follows, ushering in desolate slow movement, preceded a coda in which both themes are by a “Moderato” filled with nostalgic united in a farewell gesture of great longing and an extended, ferocious tenderness. dance. The three movements For most of its duration, the second represent wide emotional extremes, movement has a single interval — even more polarized than is the case the minor third — for its theme. It in String Quartet No. 1. is hammered home in a relentless The first movement contains its ostinato (continually repeated own inner polarity, between the phrase) in which Bartók scholar János 6 Kárpáti sees a reflection of the Arabic lament of folk song — reinforce one drumming Bartók had heard during another as the music moves through his visit to Biskra, Algeria in 1913. successive stages of anxiety and On the other hand, as Kárpáti also despair. The final sonority of the work notes, a very similar ostinato can be is the same minor third that figured so found in Bartók’s piano piece, Allegro prominently in the second movement barbaro, from 1911 — that is, two — now played twice, pizzicato years before the Biskra trip. It should (plucked) by the viola and cello, come as no surprise that Bartók was muffled and austere. most receptive to external impulses that confirmed what he was already exploring in his own creative work. In the central movement of the Second Quartet, this ostinato theme is developed in spectacular ways, in turn serious and comic.

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