Danish String Quartet Frederik Øland, Violin Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, Violin Asbjørn Nørgaard, Viola Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, Cello
Sunday, November 10, 2019, 3pm Hertz Hall Danish String Quartet Frederik Øland, violin Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violin Asbjørn Nørgaard, viola Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, cello
PROGRAM
Johann Sebastian BACH (1685 –1750) Fugue No. 24 in B minor, BWV 869, (arr. Emanuel Aloys Förster) from e Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I
Alfred SCHNITTKE (1934 –1998) String Quartet No. 3 Andante Agitato Pesante
INTERMISSION
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (1770 –1827) String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, Op. 130, with Grosse Fuge , Op. 133 Adagio ma non troppo – Allegro Presto Andante con moto ma non troppo Alla danza tedesca. Allegro assai Cavatina. Adagio molto espressivo Finale. Allegro
e Danish String Quartet is currently exclusive with ECM Records and has previously recorded for DaCapo and Cavi-Music/BR Klassik.
This performance is made possible, in part, by Patron Sponsors Kathleen Henschel and John Dewes, and Lance and Dalia Nagel. Major support provided by The Bernard Osher Foundation. Cal Performances’ 2019 –20 season is sponsored by Wells Fargo.
PROGRAM NOTES
deally, each work on a concert program Emanuel Aloys Förster (1748 –1823), Prus - will provide a context for the others. e sian-born, settled in Vienna around 1780. ere Imembers of the Danish String Quartet he composed and taught music, became friends have conceived a five-concert series of such with Mozart and Haydn, and earned the admir- pro grams, each including a Bach fugue, one of ation of Beethoven. To make string tran scrip- Beethoven’s last string quartets, and music by a tions of Bach fugues was not an idea original later composer ( Mendelssohn, Webern , Bartók, with Förster. Mozart had already done so and Shostakovich, and Schnittke ). In every pro - had even supplied new preludes of his own. In gram, Beethoven provides what the DSQ calls Förster’s elegant transcription of Bach’s B minor a prism through which to experience the other Fugue, the lines fall naturally into the four works. Prism is what the DSQ musicians call channels of the string quartet, and Bach’s tex- their project. is aernoon’s performance is tures emerge in relief. e pace is steady, the part of it. themes simple and pristine, a reasoned music Bach’s fugues fascinated Beethoven and surely whose pensive opening is soon countered with formed his own concept of fugue, however far the entry of a new major-mode voice that in - he may have strayed from Bach—and his Grosse jects just a touch of optimism before all parties Fuge strays. In the later 20th century, Alfred continue, advancing their intelligent contribu - Schnittke brought the Grosse Fuge into his tions in supremely civil conversation. String Quartet No. 3. ese three works look ahead to and back on each other, yet each is Alfred Schnittke strongly profiled and individual, created by a String Quartet No. 3 supersized artistic personality. If this quartet from 1983 is your first encounter with Alfred Schnittke, you may believe its Johann Sebastian Bach opening prepares you for a soothing medita - Fugue No. 24 in B minor, BWV 869, from tion. A few more seconds will shatter your e Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I (arranged expectations and tell you a few things about for string quartet by Emanuel Aloys Förster) this man: that he was a polystylist, and that he Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier wrote the kind of music you’d guess the Soviet includes two “books,” or two sets each of 24 authorities would have hated. (For the most preludes and fugues, in all major and minor part, they did.) keys. He completed the first set in 1722. Schnittke was born to a German father and a Bach intended these preludes and fugues as Volga-Deutsch mother in Engels, an industrial pedagogical devices, and with them he pro - city about 450 miles southeast of Moscow. At vided examples of a tuning system that would 12, he began to study music in Vienna, where work well in any key. While most scholars be - his journalist father had been transferred. lieve Bach meant to exhibit the benefits of Schnittke completed his studies at the Moscow equal temperament, a system proposed only 30 Conservatory and taught there until 1972, years before he published Book I of e Well- when he began supporting himself by com - Tempered Clavier, researchers now leave some posing for film. He scored 60-odd movies, and wiggle room since Bach tuned his own key - that work, demanding quick responses to the board instruments to his preferences, and not ever-changing emotional twists of plot, con - much is known about those. But no abstruse ditioned the style of his concert music. His discussion of tuning systems need interfere enormous output included nine symphonies, with enjoyment of music so filled with passion three operas, four string quartets, and many, and reflection. Beethoven was just one of the many concertos. many who revered these preludes and fugues, With the international honors his music was not only for the technique they exhibited, but receiving, and in a Soviet Union beginning to as examples of how technique supports expres - relax its strictures on artists, Schnittke was siveness. spared the indignities and bullying heaped on
PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES earlier Soviet composers. But no bureaucrat You don’t need to know where Schnittke could have been happy with something as found his themes, although awareness of his deeply strange as the composer’s Symphony sources will undoubtedly help read extra-musical No. 1, a love-it-or-loathe-it hour of dissonance meaning into the work, if you’re so inclined. that sounds like the work of a Russian Charles (Some listeners have interpreted the conglom - Ives and that demands so much patience and eration and wrenching apart of snippets old and serious listening, it practically begged the Com- new to suggest integration, or breakdown, or posers Union to ban it (the Composers Union both.) Schnittke maintained his goal was to obliged). Schnittke so displeased the authori ties unite serious and light music, by which he had that in 1980 he was prohibited from travel ing to have meant something beyond what many outside the country. In 1990, a year aer the other composers have done, composers such as Berlin Wall fell, he settled in Hamburg, where in Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák, Stravinsky, Cop - 1998 he died at 63. land, Adams. “It’s not surprising,” writes Solo - e String Quartet No. 3 is the kind of mon Volkov, “that Schnittke’s music irritates emotion-laden work you might expect from a many who feel that the composer has set out composer so closely attuned to film. Very to confuse them by combining obviously dis- simplistically, you can take polystylism to mean jointed and incongruous elements.” All that the incorporation and refashioning of found aside, music works better as music than as objects into your own work. e quartet begins philosophical statement. As music, this quartet with a quotation from the Stabat mater by stands on its own. the 16th-century Flemish composer Orlando di Lasso, establishing a serenity immediately Ludwig van Beethoven dispatched by a drone that grows louder and String Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 130, tighter under the second violin’s plucked with Grosse Fuge, Op. 133 strings. In a film, this ominous figure might By the mid-1820s, when Beethoven wrote his accompany careful steps into a dark room; last string quartets, he had long since made in musical terms, it recalls the opening of deafness work in his favor. Without the reality Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge . e melodic gesture of sound to confine his imagination, a new from Beethoven is not so far from Shosta - world of musical possibilities opened. Uncon - kovich’s signature DSCH motif, and that too ven tional his late works may be, but the chal - is submerged in the texture (the names German lenges they present to a listener are their own assigns to musical tones enabled Shostako - reward. And while Beethoven’s contemporaries vich to notate his initials; translated into English, may have found his late works odd, the 200 they are D/E-flat/C/B). A disintegration morphs years between then and now have been filled into languid siren-like lines. While apparently with so many wonders and horrors that rhyth - quoting Lasso, Beethoven, and Shostakovich, mic displacements and unexpected harmonies, Schnittke transforms their themes—you might far from being alien to the world we know, seem say he views them through a prism—and builds to mirror it. a tight structure all his own. Beethoven ridiculed the quartet’s first audi - e second movement begins as a kind of ence, those cattle and asses (his words) unable waltz, but again Lasso intrudes. Roughly half - to get their ears around the great serious fugue way through, the mood reverts to the mysteri - with which he capped the first five movements, ous atmosphere of the quartet’s opening. e all of them immediately appealing in their own tempo shis into overdrive and, as in Beetho - way. But in fact he was not sure his finale was ven’s fugue, verges toward chaos. e final right, and when his publisher asked for an al - movement, following with no break, opens with ternate ending, he very uncharacteristically a grand Grosse Fuge- like gesture. Lasso returns, consented. (e fugue was published separately and Beethoven, in an extended meditative pas - as his Opus 133.) ese days, string players tend sage, subdued and tense to the end. to favor the fugue over Beethoven’s alternate
PROGRAM NOTES
ending. To call the Grosse Fuge a tour de force is of them. Set to words and sung on Broadway, to give it short shri. It retains all its power to this would be a show-stopper. shake and disturb. Beethoven hoped his con - A cavatina is a song or aria; the word is re - temporaries could come to terms with it, and lated to the now obsolete cavation, a hollowing while such hope may seem clueless, perhaps he out, as in excavation . In this darkly voiced felt he had provided enough audience-pleasing music, Beethoven indeed mines a vein of emo - music in the first five movements for his listen - tion. Aer stately reflection from the ensemble, ers to cut him some slack at the end. He seems the second violin introduces a song-without- at last to have admitted he had gone too far, and words that is one of Beethoven’s most beautiful in his new finale he offered something short creations, a soulful cousin to the preceding and sunny, more in keeping with the spirit of move ment’s show-stopping dance. Against a the earlier movements and, because it is in pro - pulsing figure, the first violin utters anguished, portion to them, transferring the work’s center broken phrases that fade at last into tranquility. of gravity to the Cavatina. e alternate ending Now comes the epic finale, so different from is worth hearing, and adopting it arguably what has preceded it. Aer a brief introduction makes for a more balanced, structurally sound of themes, the slashing fugue interrupts and string quartet. But also one less interesting. continues with increasing ferocity. In great jabs, At first hearing the individual movements first and second themes are torn apart, fused, have little apparent in common, but from so transformed. Watch the players. See what effort careful a builder as Beethoven we expect rela - this brutal music demands. Aer an interlude tionships and correspondences between move - of calm, the dynamic level rises abruptly. Bee - ments. e grave unison opening, for one tho ven taunts us, then throws us back into example, will find its counterpart in the first rough water growing rougher. Casting off all measures of the fugal finale. Although this first restraint, the music threatens to spin out of con - movement is tightly knit, it seems bipolar, shi - trol. Only concentration and muscle can hold ing constantly between a somber adagio and an it together. Suddenly it seems to exhaust itself upbeat (even ecstatic) allegro. and for a moment grows almost giddy. Again e brief presto that follows is a magical dis - momentum gathers, subsides, bursts out in one play of perpetual motion, not a measure too more recall of the slashing figure that initi - many or too few. ated the fugue. en Beethoven reconciles his e Andante picks up where the Presto le themes, then closes. Triumphantly. off, and a similar sense of endless movement in - —Larry Rothe habits the flowing melody, rippled with gestures that seem continually to repeat but which, like the swells that wrinkle a river’s surface, are Larry Rothe, who writes about music for Cal never exactly the same. e first violin yearns Performances and the San Francisco Opera, has his opening line, an anticipation of the great written for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, tune at the heart of the Cavatina. New York Philharmonic, and San Francisco is quartet is a fusion of the exalted and the Symphony. His books include For the Love of popular. e German dance movement proves Music and Music for a City, Music for the that Beethoven could write a tune with the best World.
PLAYBILL ABOUT THE ARTISTS
“One of the best quartets before the public tinguished guest artists. In 2016, the group in - today” ( e Washington Post ), the Grammy- augurated a new music festival, Series of Four, nominated Danish String Quartet astonishes which finds its home at the venerable Danish audiences with its “nimble charisma, stylish Radio Concert Hall. repertoire, and the way [its] light and grainy e Danish String Quartet has received shading can turn on a dime” ( e Guardian ). numerous citations and prizes, including First Beyond even its impeccable musicianship and Prize in the Vagn Homboe String Quartet sophisticated artistry, the quartet’s playing re - Com pe tition, the Charles Hennen International flects an expressivity and joyful spontaneity that animates repertoire from Haydn to Shostako vich to contemporary scores. e recipient of many awards and prestigious appoint - ments, including Musical America ’s 2020 Ensemble of the Year and the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, the Danish String Quartet was named in 2013 as BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists and appointed to the Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two). Chamber Music Competition, and the 11th In the 2019 –20 season, the Danish String London International String Quartet Compe- Quartet returns to North America in three tition. In 2011, the quartet received the Carl tours that celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birth an - Nielsen Prize, the highest cultural honor in niversary. Along with Berkeley, the quartet ap - Denmark. Last Leaf , the ensemble’s album of pears in Min neapolis, Vancouver, Portland, traditional Scandinavian folk music recorded Seattle, Rohnert Park, Santa Barbara, Irvine, for ECM, was named one of the top classical al - Montreal, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Boston, bums of 2017 by NPR, Spotify, the New York and Iowa City, and brings a concert series to Times , and others. La Jolla Music Society this month as part of Violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tons - a three-year residency there. In February 2020, gaard Sørensen and violist Asbjørn Nørgaard the group returns to Chamber Music Society of met as children at a music summer camp, Lincoln Center to perform the entire Beethoven where they played soccer and made music to - cycle, and, in May, the musicians present that gether. As teenagers, they began studying clas - program in St. Paul (MN) as the Schubert Club’s sical chamber music under Tim Frederiksen of 2019 –20 Featured Ensemble. European en - Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Music. gagements include Lon don’s Wigmore Hall, In 2008, the three Danes were joined by Nor - Amsterdam’s Concertge bouw, and multiple wegian cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin. For more dates in Denmark, as well as tours of Germany, information, visit www.danishquartet.com. Brussels, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain. Committed to reaching new audiences Exclusive Representation through special projects, the quartet in 2007 es - Kirshbaum Associates, Inc. tablished the DSQ Festival, which takes place at 711 West End Avenue, Suite 5KN Copenhagen’s Bygningskulturens Hus and fea - New York, NY 10025 tures meticulously curated programs with dis - www.kirshbaumassociates.com