Danish String Quartet Frederik Øland, Violin Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, Violin Asbjørn Nørgaard, Viola Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, Cello
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Sunday, February 17, 2019, 3pm Hertz Hall Danish String Quartet Frederik Øland, violin Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violin Asbjørn Nørgaard, viola Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, cello PROGRAM Franz Joseph HAYDN (1732 –1809) String Quartet No. 25 in C Major, Op. 20, No. 2, (H.III:32) Moderato Capriccio Menuet: Allegretto Fuga Allegro Anton WEBERN (1883 –1945) String Quartet (1905) INTERMISSION Ludwig van BEETHOVEN(1770 –1827) String Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135 Allegretto Vivace Lento assai e cantante tranquillo Grave ma non troppo tratto – Allegro e Danish String Quartet currently records exclusively with ECM Records and has previously recorded for Dacapo Records and CAvi-Music/BR Klassik. This performance is made possible, in part, by Patron Sponsors Kathleen G. Henschel and John W. Dewes. Major support provided by The Bernard Osher Foundation. Additional support provided by generous donors to the Matías Tarnopolsky Fund for Cal Performances. Cal Performances’ 2018 –19 season is sponsored by Wells Fargo. PROGRAM NOTES Franz Joseph Haydn grave conversation that unfolds in an almost String Quartet in C Major, Op. 20, No. 2 operatic scene. As relief, the first violin sings a (H.III:32) sweetly consoling song that fails to keep the Accustomed to the breadth and expressiveness music from finally disintegrating. of string quartets by those who followed Franz e third-movement minuet captures the Joseph Haydn, we may not recognize his own spirit of a country dance. Here the central quartets as groundbreaking. ey were. Haydn section, where we oen expect contrastingly defined what a quartet could be—giving com - lighter music, is made of sterner stuff. Nowhere posers new ways of thinking about the genre, is the new equality among the instrumental demonstrating strategies that enabled them to members more evident than in the concluding communicate. fugue. e chattering continues sotto voce until Haydn composed the six quartets of his the final outburst, each member proclaiming Opus 20 in 1772, while serving Prince Nikolaus proudly in his own voice—another display of Esterhazy as palace music director, a secure po - how much four string instruments can do. sition that allowed him the leisure and freedom to experiment. Around this time, the extrava - Anton Webern gant postures of the European Baroque gave String Quartet (1905) way to Sturm und Drang, a movement that Anton Webern, with Arnold Schoenberg and would morph into Romanticism, with its eleva - Alban Berg, is one of the composers identified tion of human feelings and instabilities, and as part of the Second Viennese School—as a love of dark forests and craggy mountain compared to tonalists like Mozart, Beethoven, ranges. In two years, Goethe would publish e and Brahms, who presumably made up a first Sorrows of Young Werther, which in Western “school.” While Webern’s early works reveal a literary history ruptured past from future as Romantic sensibility, he admired his teacher surely as Haydn’s Opus 20 bade farewell to the Schoenberg and adopted that composer’s 12- style of earlier quartets. tone system of composition, going on to write Before Opus 20, string quartets had starred music you might imagine plotted on a spread - the violins. Here Haydn puts the players on sheet, dauntingly abstract and sometimes so equal footing. He starts with the cello, which brief that it spans seconds rather than minutes. outlines the elegant opening theme, accompa - “e impact of these works on the general pub - nied by second violin and viola. Only aer the lic and on the critics,” wrote Nicolas Slonimsky, cello finishes his statement does the first violin “was usually disconcerting.” enter to repeat it. roughout the exposition, Despite the hostility or indifference of audi - the four instruments intertwine. Haydn con - ences, Webern continued to write the music he trols the music’s flow through light and shade, believed in. Stravinsky, who knew how to please like a painter capturing the same scene at dawn listeners, offered a touching tribute to his older and noon and dusk. As the exposition ends, the colleague: “Doomed to total failure in a deaf dynamic level subsides and the mood dark - world of ignorance and indifference, he inex - ens—to be dispelled by the bright initial theme orably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his as the exposition repeat begins. e develop - dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a ment explores what has come before, but from perfect knowledge.” Ill fortune followed Webern. the point of view of the minor mode. Even in One September evening in 1945, unaware of the his recapitulation, Haydn continues to unearth curfew set by occupying troops, the composer new facets in his material. Finally the opening stepped outside his home near Salzburg. A US theme reappears, then the voices hush. Army MP shot and killed him. For a sense of the emotion Haydn could pack Webern’s String Quartet of 1905 reveals into a quartet, look no further than the oddly someone deeply interested in connecting with named Capriccio. It opens in declamatory ges - his audience, in communicating a sense of inner tures touched by a hint of lament, leading to a splendor. Discovered aer his death, it received PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES its first performance only in 1962. Sixty years be - section. Placid music occupies the second sec - fore that, Webern saw a triptych of Alpine land - tion. e touch of anxious agitation that opens scapes by the Italian painter Giovanni Segantini. the third section becomes a keening that re - Something in Webern responded to the moun - solves at last in serenity. tainous country the painter depicts, and the pastoral scenes influenced him as he wrote the Ludwig van Beethoven quartet. To his diary Webern confided: “I long String Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135 for an artist in music such as Segantini was in Grandeur intimidates. Commentators have painting. His music would have to be a music cloaked the late string quartets of Ludwig van that a man writes in solitude, far away from all Beethoven in so much majesty that many lis - the turmoil of the world, in contemplation of the teners fear they will never grasp these works, so glaciers, of eternal ice and snow….” at rever - why bother trying. But of all Bee tho ven’s music, ent wonder is also reflected in lines with which the late quartets strike me as most comprehen - the composer prefaced his quartet, from the sible to a 21st-century sensibility. eir intro - 17th-century German philosopher and mystic spection, sometimes odd harmonies, aspiration, Jakob Böhme: and a humor that has more in common with I cannot describe the spiritual triumph I felt. barroom jokes than drawing room bon mots —all I can compare it to nothing other than life this gives them immediate presence. born in the midst of death. It is like the res - Even by Beethoven’s standards, Opus 135, urrection of the dead. from 1826—16th and last of his string quartets— In this light my spirit sees the essence of all is urgent and affirming music. e opening things and sees God in all creatures, even in movement at first hearing seems constructed weeds and grass—who he is and what he is with fragments of tunes, yet the leaping figure and what his will is. that launches the work is heard in variants and e quartet is inward and contemplative and different rhythmic guises throughout, and is filled with spiritual optimism. It derives much repeated literally at the end. is movement may of its power from the tonal ambiguity that per - feel improvisatory. It’s not. meates the work, evoking a sense of uncertainty, e Vivace , a rolling ball that darts from implying a kind of search—extra-musical qual - corner to corner and which you’ll never catch, ities suggested by Webern’s comments on Segan - illustrates what composer John Adams calls tini, and in the epigraph from Böhme. Webern Beethoven’s “ecstatic energy.” Adams assigns this delivers an emotional experience far out of pro - music a major role in Absolute Jest, his orchestral portion to the quartet’s 15-minute length, me - riff on Beethoven scherzos—those tours de force andering through thickets of indeterminate into which Beethoven poured, as Adams says, harmony, resolving with the clarity of conven - an “inspired sense of movement and happiness.” tional tonal music in a sudden peak of exalta - Now the forward thrust stops and aims in - tion, and again in a final reverie of deep calm. ward. Grave, searching, penetrating—we heard e work unfolds in three roughly differenti - such music in the Webern Quartet—the Lento ated parts, played with no break. Time stands explores stasis. A sense of timelessness, a mood still at the outset, but scarcely more than a voiced in the full-throated opening song, satu - minute passes before a twisting figure intrudes, rates this enveloping music. Even when it re - the first music that bears a melodic contour eas - cedes and we no longer hear the song, we sense ily negotiated by ears tuned to tonal music. is its presence and welcome it as it re-emerges, to is developed, grows impassioned, and crests tri - be completed, as the movement concludes. umphantly. A pause follows, then a passage slow Beethoven titles the finale “Der schwehr and subdued, its gossamer textures leading into gefasste Entschluss .” English offers no elegant the by-now-familiar twisting figure. Pensive at equivalent; “the difficult decision seized upon” its reappearance, the figure again rises to an ex - conveys the sense literally, but with a heavy ultant apex, ending the quartet’s first and longest German accent. At the head of the movement PROGRAM NOTES Beethoven notates two figures, each made of e answer: “It must be.” “Beethoven was so three notes.