BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Seiji Ozawa, Music Director Grant Llewellyn and Robert Spano, Assistant Conductors One Hundred and Twelfth Season, 1992-93 SUPPER CONCERT V Thursday, February 4, at 6 Saturday, February 6, at 6 AMICI STRING QUARTET BONNIE BEWICK, violin TATIANA DIMITRIADES, violin EDWARD GAZOULEAS, viola JOEL MOERSCHEL, cello BARBER String Quartet, Opus 11 Molto allegro e appassionato Molto adagio—Molto allegro BEETHOVEN String Quartet No. 7 in F, Opus 59, No. 1 Allegro Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando Adagio molto e mesto Allegro Tatiana Dimitriades plays first violin in the Barber quartet and Bonnie Bewick in the Beethoven quartet. Please exit to your left for supper following the concert. Week 13 Samuel Barber String Quartet, Opus 11 In the spring of 1935, the young Samuel Barber, having finished his studies at Curtis and already making his mark with works that had been broadcast on the radio and accepted for publication by the distinguished house of G. Schirmer, received the Prix de Rome of the American Academy in Rome, for a year of study in Europe. During his first winter abroad he composed his First Symphony. By the end of spring 1936 he was thinking of a string quartet, particularly for the Curtis Quartet, consisting of friends from his conservatory days, who, he hoped, would give a European tour and play the premiere. In May he joined his longtime friend, composer Gian Carlo Menotti, and the two men took a house in the highly picturesque environs of St. Wolfgang, a little town about an hour from Salzburg, nestled between glorious mountains and a beautiful lake. There he began seriously to work on his quartet. But it was slow going. He was painfully conscious of the great tradition of string quartet writing that went all the way back to Haydn. He wrote his teacher Rosario Scalero, exclaiming at the difficulty of the string quartet medium. "It seems to me that because we have so assiduously forced our personalities on Music—on Music, who never asked for them!—we have lost elegance; and if we cannot recapture elegance, the quartet-form has escaped us forever." But by September 19 he wrote to the cellist of the Curtis Quartet, "I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today—it is a knock-out!" And that enthusiastic reaction is, if anything, an understatement, when we realize that the slow movement of the quartet was to become world-famous in a string-orchestra version as "Barber's Adagio for Strings," without question the most successful piece he ever wrote. In the end, he barely finished the finale of the quartet in time for its first performance, in Rome on December 14, 1936, at the Villa Aurelia. Feeling that he had finished the work in too much haste, he reworked it for a performance at the Library of Congress on April 20, 1937, but then decided to rewrite the finale altogether for the Curtis Quartet's tour of the following spring. Still later, before the work was published, in 1943, Barber wrote a new ending to the first movement and transferred the original ending to the final close of the piece, thus bringing back a reference to the opening at the very end. As it stands, then, the quartet is cast in two movements, of which the second breaks up into two strikingly different moods. The first movement is cast as a sonata form with elements of development all through its layout. The slow movement—the famous "Adagio"—grows in a serenely elegiac mood out of silence, climbs gradually to an emphatic climax, then slowly dies away again. At its close, the last section is the original ending of the first movement, now rounding out the entire quartet. Ludwig van Beethoven String Quartet No. 7 in F, Opus 59, No. 1 By 1806, when Beethoven began to work out the final version of this quartet (he had apparently begun sketches as early as the rail of 1804), he had been away from the medium of the string quartet since completing the Opus 18 set, the works that earned him his spurs as a quartet composer, in 1800. In the few intervening years he had developed important new approaches in his style while composing his first — ' : : tt l*at.i£Wiif'^Sb > --S^ three symphonies, several piano sonatas, and the first version of his opera, ultimately called Fidelio. Of these works, it is especially the recently-completed Eroica Symphony that seems closest to the F major quartet in scope, grandeur, and palpable heroic qualities. The Opus 59 quartets were Beethoven's response to a commission from the Russian ambassador to Vienna, Count Andrei Razumovsky. It was apparently as a graceful gesture to him that Beethoven included popular Russian melodies, borrowed from a printed collection of folk tunes, in the first and second of the quartets. The very opening—a fragment of scale followed by a little turn figure appears in the cello under a pulsating rhythm, but does not come to rest before being taken over by the first violin, which leads it into ever higher spheres. So powerful an opening idea can only introduce a movement of mammoth proportions, and this is, by a comfortable margin, the longest quartet first movement Beethoven ever wrote. It is also a movement filled with surprises; for example, what sounds like a repeat of the exposition turns into the lengthy eventful development, which in turn is capped by a brief double fugue before winding down to the recapitulation. The second movement, with its famous opening solo cello theme on a single note, was for many years the object of derision. Part of the mystery may well have been Beethoven's original treatment of formal problems, for the movement combines elements of sonata form with the layout of a scherzo-and-Trio (in which both scherzo and Trio recur an extra time, a favorite Beethovenian device). The slow movement comes as a shock after the energy and verve of the two preceding movements, compressing all the devices of unrelieved pathos into its opening measures. At the head of this movement Beethoven wrote into his manuscript the words "A weeping willow or acadia tree over my brother's grave," a purely fictitious inspiration, since both his brothers were alive (psychoanalysts have had a good deal to say about it, though). At the end a soaring violin cadenza closing in a trill on the dominant links it directly with the final movement and the introduction of the Thbne russe for a final movement that borders at times on parody, for Beethoven has taken a tune that was originally in the minor mode and used it as the basis of a finale in the major. —Notes by Steven Ledbetter Formed in 1990 by four members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who wished to explore the rich heritage of string quartet literature, the Amici String Quartet was invited to make its debut appearance at the Chamber Music in Watertown series last year. The name is derived from the Italian word meaning "friends," in the hope that after the necessary rigors of rehearsing they would indeed be able to live up to their name and remain friends. Since its debut, the group has been featured on several concerts in the Boston area and in the Berkshires. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1963, violinist Bonnie Bewick joined the Boston * Symphony Orchestra in January 1987. Ms. Bewick performs frequently in the Boston area in recitals and chamber music concerts. Founder of the First Presbyterian Artists Series in Quincy, she teaches privately and has taught at the New England Conservatory Extension Division. Ms. Bewick studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and received her bachelor's degree in music from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Her teachers included Aaron Rosand and David Cerone at Curtis, Ruggiero Ricci and Paul Makanowitzky in Michigan, and Elizabeth Holborn in California. Ms. Bewick has made solo appearances with a number of west coast orchestras, and with the Boston Pops and the Cape Ann Symphony in New England. Her orchestral experience has included positions with the Colorado Philharmonic, the Lansing Symphony Orchestra, and the Peninsula Symphony Orchestra; she has appeared as concertmaster and soloist with the New England Philharmonic. She has also been a member of the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra and the orchestra of the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds. Born and raised in New York, Tatiana Dimitriades attended the Pre-College Division of the Juilliard School. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in music, and an Artist Diploma, from the Indiana University School of Music, where she was awarded the Performer's Certificate in recognition of outstanding musical performance. A recipient of the Lili Boulanger Memorial Award, Ms. Dimitriades has also won the Guido Chigi Saracini Prize presented by the Accademia Musicale Chigiana of Siena, Italy, on the occasion of the Paganini Centenary, and the Mischa Pelz Prize of the National Young Musicians Foundation Debut Competition in Los Angeles. Her solo performances have included a Carnegie Recital Hall appearance sponsored by the Associated Music Teachers of New York and concerts with the Pro Arte Chorale on tour in Great Britain and Scotland, as well as an appearance as soloist in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto at the Grand Teton Music Festival. An active chamber musician and a member of the Boston Artists' Ensemble, Ms. Dimitriades joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the beginning of the 1987-88 season. Violist Edward Gazouleas joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the beginning of the 1990-91 season. After viola studies with Raphael Hillyer and Steven Ansell at Yale University, he received his bachelor's degree from the Curtis Institute, where he studied viola with Michael Tree and Karen Turtle.