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BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Seiji Ozawa, Music Director Grant Llewellyn and Robert Spano, Assistant Conductors One Hundred and Twelfth Season, 1992-93 SUPPER CONCERT I Saturday, November 7, at 6 Tuesday, November 10, at 6 HAWTHORNE STRING QUARTET RONAN LEFKOWITZ, violin SI-JING HUANG, violin MARK LUDWIG, viola SATO KNUDSEN, cello THOMAS MARTIN, clarinet HINDEMITH String Quartet No. 3, Opus 22 Fugato. Very slow quarter-note Fast eighth-note. Very energetic Calm quarter-note. Always flowing Moderately quick quarter-note Rondo. Easygoing and with grace MOZART Quintet in A for clarinet and strings, K.581 Allegro Larghetto Menuetto; Trio I; Trio II Allegretto con Variationi Please exit to your left for supper following the concert. The performers appreciate your not smoking during the concert. Week 4 Paul Hindemith String Quartet No. 3, Opus 22 Hindemith was a superb performer on the violin and viola, and he had a great deal of experience as a string quartet player. It is only natural, then, that he should have composed string quartets very early in his career (and, eventually, formed a distinguished ensemble to play them, when others declared that his modern music—and that of some other composer—was "unplayable"). His earliest mature quartet, in F minor, published as Opus 10 in 1918 (an earlier work in C was shelved), leaned on classic models in its style and structure, with indications that he had studied Brahms and Reger closely. But even here Hindemith was far more adventurous in his harmonies and clearly aiming for new sonorities. The Quartet No. 2, Opus 16 (1921), is filled with overheated, expressionistic gestures learned from Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony—themes of wide melodic span, clashes of major-minor chords, harmonic tensions caused by appoggiaturas that never resolve (or do so too late to be heard as consonances), and chords built up in fourths rather than thirds. The Third Quartet, Op. 22, came in the year 1922, when the rapidly developing Hindemith had put behind him some of the wilder expressionistic elements of his earlier music or the mad eclecticisms of Kammermusik No. 1, composed very shortly before, and turned to the cooler neo-Baroque sonorities of the popular Kleine Kammermusik for wind quintet, Op. 24, No. 1. Its mastery of string sonorities reveals Hindemith's control of the medium, even as his language is moving from the heated drive of an expressionist aesthetic to the more dispassionate vigor of a neo-Baroque quality. The opening movement is a Fugato that builds to a central climax, while the ostinato-filled second movement shows clearly the influence of another young up-and-coming composer, Bela Bartok, in its use of ostinato and exotic Hungarian coloration. The third movement employs polytonal effects (that is, music in two or more different keys at the same time) to create clashes of major and minor. The fourth contains cadenzas for the viola and cello; it is essentially a prelude to the finale, where the cello and viola take off in a two-part invention that invokes the style of the past in modern terms. Wolfgang Amade Mozart Quintet in A for clarinet and strings, K.581 Clarinet: the very name of the instrument tells us that its earliest proponents considered it a "little clarino," a substitute in some sense for the brilliant high trumpets (clarini) of the Baroque era; and for most of its early history (extending through virtually the entire eighteenth century), players tended to specialize in either the high or low end of the instrument, known as the clarinet and chalumeau registers respectively. No modern instrument owes more to the imagination of a single composer than the clarinet does to Mozart, who wrote for his friend, clarinetist Anton Stadler, music that exploits both registers of the instrument and at the same time gives it a real personality. From the time he composed Idomeneo in 1 780, clarinets became an essential and memorable part of his opera orchestra, and they contribute to the special color of Symphony No. 39. But most of all Mozart wrote three works in which the clarinet is especially featured: the Kegelstatt Trio, K.498, in 1786, the present quintet, in 1789, and the Clarinet Concerto, K.622, not quite two months before his death in 1791. \r] his earlier chamber works matching flute or oboe with stringed instruments, the color of the wcxxJwind instrument virtually forced Mozart to write in a concertatlte style, i.e., the wind instrument (jjnpo'j'.d to the strings. But he had learned in the trio, K.498, how elegantly the clarinet could blend with a viola in the middle of its range, and this evidently suggested a rather different treatment of the wind instrument when he came to write the Clarinet Quintet three years later. The quintet, which Mozart himself called "Stadler's Quintet," was completed on September 29, 1 789. Stadler, of course, played the first public performance, on December 22 that year, with Mozart taking part on the viola, the occasion was a concert given in Vienna by the Society of Musicians for the benefit of widows and orphans. From beginning to end the quintet celebrates that particular passion for sheerly beautiful sound that Mozart cultivated in his last years. At the same time he- exploits with rare efficacy the special characteristics of the clarinet, from its shimmering arpeggios in the development section of the first movement to the large skips in the first variation of the fmale. At the same time, although the clarinet prominently characterizes the piece, Mozart does not let it dominate the proceedings entirely. The first Trio in the third movement is for strings alone in a pure quartet character, strikingly varied then by the dialogue between first violin and clarinet in the second Trio. This work, like the Clarinet Concerto that followed, is one of Mozart's autumnal scores, and it exercised (especially in the Larghetto movement) a Strong influence on a similarly elegiac clarinet quintet by a later master— Johannes Brahms. —Notes by Steven Ledbetter Formed in 1986, the Hawthorne String Quartet includes Boston Symphony violinists Ronan Lefkowitz and Si-Jing I luang, BSO violist Mark Ludwig, and BSO cellist Sato Knudsen. The group has performed in Europe, South America, and the United States; recent appearances have included Tanglewood, a second appearance at the Ravinia Festival, concerts in Sao Paulo and Caracas during the BSO's recent tour of South America, and the U.S. Department of Education Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony in Washington, D.C. The quartet has recorded chamber music by Gideon Klein and Viktor Ullmann for Channel Classics Records; at the request of Gideon Klein's sister, the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation (a non-profit organization whose mission is to develop an appreciation and understanding of the music written by Czech Jewish composers incarcerated in the concentration camp Theresienstadt) featured the J lawthorne String Quartet in recording the composer's chamber music. The quartet's latest CD, entitled "Silenced Voices" and due this fall, includes music of Jewish composers persecuted during World War l\; the group is joined by BSO flutist Fenwick Smith and assistant principal bass Lawrence Wolfe. The quartet has also recorded chamber music by Arthur Foote and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor for the Koch International label, with BSO principal clarinet Harold Wright and pianist Virginia Eskin. Born in Oxford, England, Ronan Lefkowitz joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1976. Mr. Lefkowitz is a graduate of Brookline I figh School and I larvard College; among his teachers were Gerald Gelbloom, Max Rostal, Luise Vosgerchian, Joseph Silverstein, and Szymon Goldberg. In 1972 he won the Gingold-Silverstein Prize at the Tanglewood Music Center, where he now coaches chamber music. In 1986 he joined the contemporary music group Collage. That summer he performed the American premiere of Witold Lutoslawski's Chain 2 for violinist and chamber orchestra as part of the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, leading to performances of the piece in its Boston Symphony premiere under the composer's direction in October 1990. Other recent concert engagements have included performances with Yo-Yo Ma. Violinist Si-Jing Huang joined the BSO at the beginning of the 1989-90 season, having graduated from the Juilliard School of Music in New York in May 1989. Mr. Huang's numerous scholarships and awards included the Lincoln Center Scholarship; he was also a winner of the Young Concert Artists Auditions held in Hawaii. Mr. Huang's teachers included Glenn Dicterow and Dorothy DeLay, as well as his father, Da-Ying Huang. A former member of the Juilliard Orchestra, he has participated in the chamber music festivals at Aspen and Taos, and in a concert tour of the United States with the Classical String Players. Originally from Philadelphia, violist Mark Ludwig joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the fall of 1982. He received his bachelor of music degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with Joseph de Pasquale and Raphael Bronstein. His teachers also included his father, Irving Ludwig, a violinist in the Philadelphia Orchestra. Before joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Ludwig was co-principal violist of the Kansas City Philharmonic. He currently teaches privately in the Boston and Cambridge area, and he is on the faculty of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. Mr. Ludwig is founder and artistic director of the Richmond Performance Series, a chamber music series in the Berkshires initiated in 1985, and director of the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation. Born in Baltimore in 1955, cellist Sato Knudsen joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1983. His teachers included David Soyer at Bowdoin College and Stephen Geber, Robert Ripley, and Madeleine Foley at the New England Conservatory of Music.

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