Philharmonia Quartett Berlin

the music alliance series
Philharmonia Quartett Berlin
Friday, October 10
White Recital Hall - UMKC
7:30 pm
Daniel Stabrawa
Christian Stadelmann
Neithard Resa
Dietmar Schwalke
violin
violin
viola
cello
MOZART
String Quartet in C Major, K. 465, “Dissonance”
Adagio; Allegro
Andante cantabile
Menuetto: Allegro
Allegro molto
BARTÓK
String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7
Lento; attaka
Poco a poco accelerando all’allegretto;
Introduzione: Allegro; attaka
Allegro vivace
INTERMISSION
BRAHMS
String Quartet No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 51 No. 1
Allegro
Romanze: Poco adagio
Allegretto molto moderato e comodo;
Un poco più animato; attaka
Allegro
Music Alliance: A co-presentation of The Friends of Chamber Music and UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance
This concert is underwritten by the James and Vera Olson Fund for the Arts
The International Chamber Music Series is underwritten, in part, by the William T. Kemper Foundation
Additional support is also provided by:
the friends of chamber music | Live Performance. Be There.
program notes
String Quartet in C Major, K. 465, "Dissonance"
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart (1756-1791)
Mozart moved from Salzburg to Vienna in 1781.
Initially still in service to the Archbishop of Salzburg, he
soon dissociated himself from the Archbishop’s entourage
and embarked upon a career as an independent
musician. The following few years proved to be his
happiest and most successful. It seems very likely that the
historic meeting between Haydn and Mozart took place
during the winter of 1781. The older master encouraged
Mozart, and the warm friendship and musical
stimulation each provided to the other enriched the
creative output of both composers.
For his part, Mozart returned to the string
quartet, a medium he had neglected for some ten years.
Between 1782 and 1785 he completed six quartets,
which the Viennese firm of Artaria published in 1785.
Collectively, they are known as the ‘Haydn Quartets’
because of their dedication to the older master, who had
become Mozart’s mentor and friend. They are an unusual
example of Mozart freeing himself for a while from the
restrictions, real or imagined, of commissioned music.
Mozart appears to have made a conscious effort
to emulate Haydn’s innovative Op. 33 quartets (1781).
During the early 1780’s, there is no denying the
significant contact between the two composers and the
strong mutual influence between them. Yet these
quartets are highly individual, born of Mozart’s
innermost soul. They are also the pivotal chamber music
of Mozart’s first few years in Vienna. Though he
described them in his dedication as the “fruit of a long
and laborious endeavor,” all six quartets glow with the
effortless polish of genius.
K. 465 was the last of the six to be completed;
the composer seems to have cast it as the musical climax
of the set. It earned its nickname from the extraordinary
opening measures, the only slow introduction in any of
the Mozart string quartets. Mozart used the chromatic
scale liberally throughout the so-called Haydn quartets,
but this opening is unlike anything else in the Mozart
canon, and indeed has been the subject of great
controversy since it was written. What is its mood:
tragedy? mystery? mournfulness or perhaps regret? It
is music that probes the heart, demanding entrance to
emotional corners, secret places one doesn’t always admit
to.
The Adagio introduction of the first movement
is grounded in the key of C Major only tenuously, by the
opening cello notes. The same measure also establishes,
albeit ambiguously, a slow pulse of triple time. Other
than that initial bass line, we would have no clue to a
tonality of C Major until the 16th measure. Mozart
swims through the circle of fifths, flirting with an
impossible number of keys along the way, seemingly
leaving no tonal implication untouched in the sinuous
chromaticism of his contrapuntal fabric. It makes for
dizzying listening.
The familiar brightness of sunny C Major is a
relief when we arrive at the Allegro of this remarkable
opening movement. A highly imitative texture
dominates. Mozart had learned a great deal from Papa
Haydn about sharing the development of musical ideas
equally among his four players; throughout the
movement and the entire quartet, the cello is an
important and integral part of the texture. C is the lowest
note on both the cello and the viola, a note which
provides additional resonance in this C Major work.
Without compromising the integrity of his bass line,
Mozart imparts much imagination to the lower voices.
String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7
Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
The six string quartets of Béla Bartók are among the
twentieth century’s greatest achievements in the realm
of chamber music. For depth, consummate artistry, and
musical drama they are rivaled only by the Shostakovich
quartets. Because Bartók’s six essays in the genre span
three decades, they also constitute an overview of his
artistic development.
The First Quartet has received somewhat less
attention than the others, probably because it is more
derivative. Although this piece followed Bartók’s first
ethnomusicological work in his native Hungary, his
efforts to distill an authentic Hungarian style were still
in the formative stage. Viennese taste reigned supreme
when Bartók was learning music, thus it is no real
surprise to hear echoes of Strauss, Brahms, Reger, and
even Wagner, in his early works. Bartók was also
becoming acquainted with the music of Claude Debussy.
Occasional hints of whole-tone scales in the String
Quartet Op. 7 may plausibly be traced to Debussy.
39th season 2014-15
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program notes
This quartet was one of the first important
compositions that Bartók published, a sure mark of
his own high regard for it. Partly because of its free
approach to tonality (this music may sound conservative
to us, but it was quite adventurous for its time), the
First Quartet was not performed until two years after its
composition. A newly-formed ensemble, the
Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet, played the premiere.
Bartók repaid their loyalty by dedicating the Second
Quartet to them in 1920. But emotionally, his first
published quartet is associated with the same woman for
whom he composed the First Violin Concerto: violinist
Stefi Geyer. His unrequited passion for her found
expression in the mournful lamentation of the Quartet’s
opening movement. That personal stamp was eminently
clear to his contemporaries, though they could not have
known the circumstances. Reminiscing in 1955, French
composer Darius Milhaud wrote:
As far back as 1909 I was going to the publishers Eschig, on Rue Lafitte in those days, to study their
scores of Bartók, brought out in Hungary, and those
of Schoenberg, published in Vienna, for which
Eschig was the agent. It was there that I bought
Bartók’s first quartet. My Conservatoire friends and
I were regularly performing quartets at my place and
we had become passionately fond of this work, so
full of life and such personal lyricism.
The First Quartet consists of three large movements
played without pause. Bartók opens with a slow
movement in imitative counterpoint that is melodically
related to the Violin Concerto written for Geyer. The
movement reaches its most feverish intensity on clear
triads, oddly exacerbating the subdued anxiety of the
otherwise expressionist language. The second and
third movements are progressively faster and often
more folklike in character, hinting at his mature style.
Bartók’s lifelong predilection for contrapuntal techniques
manifests itself here in the finale’s scherzo-like fugue.
Master Class
Philharmonia
Quartett Berlin
Saturday, October 11
10 AM – 12 PM
White Recital Hall
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Béla Bartók
works. What this quartet shares unmistakably with
its five siblings is a powerful sense of rhythmic drive,
particularly in the last movement, and a steady increase
of energy that assists in driving the narrative to its
dramatic conclusion.
String Quartet No. 1 in C Minor, Opus 51, No. 1
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Johannes Brahms left no excess baggage behind
when he died in April 1897. Unlike Beethoven, who
hoarded all of his musical sketches and conversation
notebooks, Brahms left no record of his creative thought
processes. If a composition did not satisfy him after
revision, he destroyed it. Occasionally he reworked one
composition into another; the Piano Concerto in D
Minor, Op. 15, for example, was originally conceived as
a symphony. But Brahms took the legacy of Beethoven
very seriously, and it is not without reason that his
Symphony No.1 in C Minor, Op. 68, was hailed as “the
Other than the absence of unusual string techniques, Beethoven Tenth” when it was premiered in 1876. The
the principal difference between this early quartet
composer had waited until the age of 43 to contribute to
and Bartók’s later ones is the comparative lack of
the symphonic canon.
compression. A sense of spaciousness bordering on
Brahms held the genre of the string quartet in
romantic abandon characterizes this music. The
much the same reverence, for many of the same reasons.
composer takes exactly as much time as he needs -- a
Beethoven’s monumental contribution to the string
solid half-hour, in this case -- to state and develop his
quartet literature remains unparalleled in the history
ideas. Further, the musical ideas are less explicitly
of western music. It must have been a formidable
governed by the folk tunes that constitute such an
psychological obstacle to the young Brahms.
integral part of Bartók’s musical vocabulary in later
the friends of chamber music | Live Performance. Be There.
biography
One powerful indication of this preoccupation is the
fact that Brahms wrote more than 20 string quartets.
Only three survive: the two quartets of Opus 51, and
Opus 67 in B-flat Major. None of the others met the
exceptionally high standards he set for himself, hence he
destroyed them.
The first of these repudiated works was one he had
brought to Robert Schumann, who had approved the
work enthusiastically and encouraged his protégé to
publish it. In spite of the older composer’s endorsement,
Brahms withdrew the quartet and its music is lost,
presumably burnt by the composer. The loss to music
posterity of that quartet and its successors is incalculable:
at once tantalizing to the imagination and tragic for the
music lover. Certainly the three quartets that do survive
are doubly precious because of the paucity of companion
pieces.
Brahms worked on the Opus 51 quartets from the
mid-1860s, periodically setting them aside in favor of a
series of choral pieces culminating in A German Requiem.
He finally completed the two quartets in summer 1873,
shortly after turning 40. The opus bears a dedication to
Dr. Theodor Billroth, a prominent surgeon and amateur
musician who had become one of the composer’s closest
friends.
The C Minor quartet is the more aggressive of the
pair. Extensive double stops in the inner voices – second
violin and viola – suggest that Brahms was still grappling
with the textural issues presented by chamber music
without piano. His harmonies often required more than
four voices. Still, the movements cohere, sharing a sense
of thematic and spiritual unity that make this quartet an
admirable first-published effort in the genre.
Brahms was emulating the Beethoven of the
three Rasumovsky Quartets, Op. 59, rather than his
late quartets. In scale, structure, and developmental
technique, the C minor quartet cleaves to Beethoven’s
Opus 59 model. The minor mode prevails in all
four movements. The surging first theme, in the
unusual and expansive meter of 3/2, sets forth in the
opening measures the basis for the entire work. Subtle
relationships link the themes throughout the quartet.
Indeed, the piece may be argued as the extended
consideration of a single musical idea.
Program Notes by Laurie Shulman ©2014
PHilharmonia Quartett Berlin
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changed. Cellist Dietmar Schwalke continues the tradition of superb
Scandinavian composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s piano
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concerto Plateaux pour Piano et Orchestre with the Danish National
Symphony Orchestra and a solo piano piece For Piano. His
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For more information
visit: www.philharmonia-quartett-berlin.de/en
to a recording
for the Music@Menlo
Live 2010 series entitled Maps
Philharmonia
Quartett
and
Legends: Disc
8. Berlin appears courtesy of Alliance Arts Management
For more information visit www.juhopohjonen.com
Juho Pohjonen appears courtesy of Kirshbaum Demler and Associates
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39th season 2014-15
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