Danish String Quartet Frederik Øland, Violin Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, Violin Asbjørn Nørgaard, Viola Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, Cello
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Sunday, February 28, 2016, 3pm Hertz Hall Danish String Quartet Frederik Øland, violin Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violin Asbjørn Nørgaard, viola Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, cello PROGRAM Per NØRGÅRD (b. 1932) Quartetto Breve (1952) Leoš JANÁČEK (1854 –1928) String Quartet No. 1, “Kreutzer” (1923) Adagio; Con Moto Con Moto Con Moto; Vivo Con Moto INTERMISSION Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (1770 –1827) String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131 (1825-1826) Adagio, ma non troppo e molto espressivo Allegro molto vivace Allegro moderato Andante, ma non troppo e molto cantabile Presto Adagio quasi un poco andante Allegro Cal Performances’ – season is sponsored by Wells Fargo. 15 PROGRAM NOTES String Quartet No. 1, “Quartetto Breve” very nature of the strings — has always had a PER NØRGÅRD (B. 1932) central place in my output, demonstrated by the string quartets, concertos with string Composed in 1952. soloist, chamber, and solo works. The interest dates back to my school years, when I was for - Per Nørgård, Denmark’s leading musical tunate to be able to compose for a cello-playing modernist, was born on July 13, 1932 in the schoolmate and to accompany him on the Copenhagen suburb of Gentofte, began study - piano. I discovered then the innumerable nu - ing piano when he was eight and composition ances of sound and playing varieties offered by a few years later, and took his professional just one bow, four strings and five fingers.” The training at the Copenhagen Conservatory as Quartet No. 1 is in two sections played without a student of Vagn Holmboe. After graduating pause, the first ( Lento, poco rubato ) spacious in 1955, he studied with Nadia Boulanger in and intensely expressive, the second ( Allegro Paris before returning to Denmark in 1958 to resoluto ) agitated and intricately conversational. teach at the Odense Conservatory and write music criticism for the Copenhagen newspa - per Politiken . He joined the faculty of the String Quartet No. 1, “After Tolstoy’s The Copenhagen Conservatory in 1960, and five Kreutzer Sonata ” years later moved to the Århus Conservatory, LEOš JANÁČEK (1854 –1928) which he made the center of experimental composition in Denmark; he retired from the Composed in 1923. conservatory in 1994. Nørgård has been in - Premiered on October 17, 1924 in Prague by volved with several important Danish compe - the Bohemian Quartet. tition committees and composers’ societies, and won numerous awards for his works, In the summer of 1917, when he was 63, Leoš which include six operas, three ballets, inci - Janáček fell in love with Kamila Stösslová, the dental music and film scores (including di - 25-year-old wife of a Jewish antiques dealer rector Gabriel Axel’s Oscar-winning 1987 from Písek. They first met in a town in cen - Babette’s Feast ), eight symphonies, concertos tral Moravia during World War I, but, as he for cello, harp, piano, percussion and accor - lived in Brno with Zdenka, his wife of 37 dion, oratorios, and many choral, chamber, years, and she lived with her husband in Písek, piano, vocal, and tape compositions. they saw each other only infrequently there - Danish musicologist, conductor and com - after and remained in touch mostly by letter. poser Erling Kullberg, a specialist on the coun - The true passion seems to have been entirely try’s contemporary music and a leading on his side (“It is fortunate that only I am in - authority on Nørgård, characterized that com - fatuated,” he once wrote to her), but Kamila poser’s early works, from the 1950s, before he did not reject his company, apparently feeling turned to more avant-garde idioms, as imbued admiration rather than love for the man who, with “The Universe of the Nordic Mind.” The with the successful staging of his Jenůfa in seven-minute String Quartet No. 1 of 1952, the Prague in 1915, eleven years after its premiere first of Nørgård’s six works in the form, con - in Brno, was at that time acquiring an inter - firms both Kullberg’s stylistic contention and national reputation as a master composer. the work’s subtitle — “Quartetto Breve.” Whatever the details of their relationship, Nørgård wrote, “My first string quartet has firm Kamila’s role as an inspiring muse during the roots in the Nordic tradition and is strongly in - last decade of Janáček’s life was indisputable spired by Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) and my and beneficent — under the sway of his feel - teacher Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996). The spec - ings for her he wrote his greatest music, in - trum of sound, the gesticulation — in short, the cluding the operas Katya Kabanova , The PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES Cunning Little Vixen and The Makropoulos Man Who Disappeared (the true account of a Affair , the song cycle The Diary of the Young Brno lad who vanished from home to run Man Who Disappeared , the two string quar - away with a Gypsy girl), Janáček’s first quar - tets (the second of which he titled “Intimate tet broaches the subject of love outside Letters”), the Glagolitic Mass and the accepted societal bounds — all three works Sinfonietta for Orchestra. seem to have been pleas to Kamila to requite The first quartet was written in a blaze of his own passion for her. Jaroslav Vogel ob - creative inspiration in a single week — served that in these compositions “the hero - October 30-November 7, 1923 — just after ines could all be identified with Kamila. They Janáček had returned from the International gave Janáček — and this is a paradox of his Society for Contemporary Music Festival in one-sided love — the full possibility of show - Salzburg, where his Violin Sonata was per - ing the right of a woman to choose her love formed. For his subject (most of Janáček’s and happiness according to her own heart, compositions, whether for voices or instru - subjects through which he became also a ments, grew from some literary or program - spokesman for a moral revolution.” matic germ), he settled on Leo Tolstoy’s 1889 The quartet was not the first musical real - short story The Kreutzer Sonata , which was ization that Janáček had attempted of inspired by that author’s exposure to Tolstoy’s story. During a short period of study Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major, in Vienna in May and June 1880, he wrote Op. 47. Ian Horsbrugh summarized the tale three movements of a string quartet inspired in his biography of Janáček: “In Tolstoy’s story, by the tale, and late in 1908 he composed a the tragic events of the marriage are told by piano trio on the subject for a performance the husband to the author as they travel to - by the Friends of Art Club in Brno on April 2, gether on a rail journey. The man, 1909. Since both earlier pieces are lost, it is Pózdnyshev, is cynical about love and about impossible to compare them with the finished marriage. He recounts with passion his jeal - quartet, but the composer’s friend and biog - ousy of the violin-playing Trukhachévski, rapher Max Brod noted that “several of the whom, ironically, he had introduced to his ideas were employed.” The Quartet No. 1 was wife — ‘a strange, a fatal force led me not to premiered in Prague on October 17, 1924 by repulse him.’ One evening his wife and this the Bohemian Quartet (which had requested man perform Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata to the work from the composer and which re - a small gathering, and, in spite of ceived its dedication), and was later heard at Pózdnyshev’s forebodings, the concert was a the ISCM Festival in Venice in September success. But the first movement of the sonata 1925 and in New York two years later. had a ‘terrible effect’ on him. ‘It was as if quite Though it is possible to fit Janáček’s new feelings, new possibilities of which I had “Kreutzer” Quartet into traditional musical till then been unaware, had been revealed to forms, the power and progress of the work me,’ and, after the intense jealousy of the pre - may also be equated with the emotional un - vious weeks, ‘that music drew me into some folding of Tolstoy’s marital tragedy. The quar - world in which jealousy no longer had a place.’ tet opens with a terse, rising three-note motive However, Pózdnyshev goes away on a business (short–short–long), perhaps the symbol of the trip, but returns home unannounced, finds his heroine’s ultimate despair, which is immedi - wife in the company of the other man, and, ately juxtaposed with a folk-like ditty that may gripped by a terrifying frenzy, he stabs her reflect the story’s Russian setting. Contrast is with his ‘curved Damascus dagger.’” provided by a lyrical theme of ambiguous Like Katya Kabanova (in which the hero - rhythmic structure, evocative of the woman’s ine is also killed by her jealous husband for unsettled longing, and a darting figure of arch - her infidelity) and The Diary of the Young ing shape that is a super-heated variant of the PROGRAM NOTES opening despair motive. These elements are asking Beethoven for “one, two or three quar - played out to create a tonal picture of Tolstoy’s tets, for which labor I will be glad to pay you character, whom the composer described to whatever amount you think proper.” After a Kamila as “a pitiable woman who is maltreated, hiatus of a dozen years, Beethoven was eager beaten and murdered.” The second movement, to return to the medium of the string quartet, the quartet’s scherzo, is based on a theme, re - and he immediately accepted the commission ally not much more than a melodic fragment and set the fee of 50 ducats for each work, a frequently terminated by a sour dissonance, high price but one readily accepted by Galitzin.