Oct. 2016: Extended program notes for Telegraph Quartet concert, Nov. 4, 2016
The following program notes were provided to CMC by the Telegraph Quartet but were too long to be used in their entirety in the concert leaflet.
Joseph Haydn: Quartet in C major Op. 33 No. 3 "The Bird"
The glorious first movement of No 3 in C major ("The Bird") has one of the most magical openings in all Haydn. Against soft pulsations from second violin and viola, the first violin steals in with a soft sustained high G, grows increasingly animated (with a hint of birdsong) and then plunges down two octaves against an ardent rising cello line. C major seems firmly established. But Haydn then questions this certainty by repeating the same process in D minor before gliding back to the home key. The violin’s chirping acciaccaturas in bar three come to permeate much of the texture, not least in the second subject, where the motivic fragments finally coalesce into a more-or-less rounded tune. At the heart of the development these bird-calls suddenly become mysterious in a sequence of pianissimo clashing suspensions—one of the most haunting moments in all these quartets. Haydn wittily exploits the movement’s unstable opening in an oblique, off-key ‘recapitulation’, stealing in before we quite realize it, and in the reharmonization of the theme (with a feint towards G major) in the very last bars.
Contradicting its title of Scherzo—and the usually bright, ‘open’ key of C major—the tenderly veiled second movement transmutes a dance into a hymn or prayer, with the four instruments playing sotto voce on their lowest strings. With comical incongruity, the trio resumes the first movement’s avian associations with a twittering duet for the two violins on their high A and E strings. The serene, warmly textured Adagio, in condensed sonata form (with a brief transition instead of a central development), surely left its mark on the slow movement of Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ Quartet, K465, in the same key. Instead of literally repeating the first section, Haydn varies it with floridly expressive figuration for the first violin: a touchstone for the player’s ‘taste’ and imagination.
The rondo finale is Haydn at his most antic. Its manic refrain, oscillating obsessively between G and E, derives from a Slavonic folk dance. After the tune has tumbled down from first violin to cello, Haydn swerves into an impassioned episode in Hungarian gypsy style. But the mood is quickly punctured by the irrepressible, hyperactive folk tune. The coda is pure slapstick, with a fragment of the theme bandied about between upper and lower instruments before the music seems to disappear into thin air.
from notes by Richard Wigmore © 2013
Contradicting its title of Scherzo—and the usually bright, ‘open’ key of C major—the tenderly veiled second movement transmutes a dance into a hymn or prayer, with the four instruments playing sotto voce on their lowest strings. With comical incongruity, the trio resumes the first movement’s avian associations with a twittering duet for the two violins on their high A and E strings. The serene, warmly textured Adagio, in condensed sonata form (with a brief transition instead of a central development), surely left its mark on the slow movement of Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ Quartet, K465, in the same key. Instead of literally repeating the first section, Haydn varies it with floridly expressive figuration for the first violin: a touchstone for the player’s ‘taste’ and imagination.
The rondo finale is Haydn at his most antic. Its manic refrain, oscillating obsessively between G and E, derives from a Slavonic folk dance. After the tune has tumbled down from first violin to cello, Haydn swerves into an impassioned episode in Hungarian gypsy style. But the mood is quickly punctured by the irrepressible, hyperactive folk tune. The coda is pure slapstick, with a fragment of the theme bandied about between upper and lower instruments before the music seems to disappear into thin air.
from notes by Richard Wigmore © 2013
Brett Dean: Eclipse (String Quartet No. 1)
"...a voice of fertile imagination, originality and expressive subtlety." — Chicago Tribune
Following studies in Australia, Brett Dean moved to Germany in 1985 and became a violist in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In addition to his orchestral career, he gave performances as soloist including numerous premiers. He became established as a composer through worldwide performances of the ballet One of a Kind (Nederlands Dans Theater, choreographer Jiri Kylian) and by the clarinet concerto Ariel’s Music, which won an award from the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers. Dean returned to Australia in 2000 and has lived there ever since. Leading interpreters of Dean’s music include Sir Simon Rattle, Markus Stenz, Simone Young, Frank Peter Zimmermann and Daniel Harding
Eclipse was commissioned by the Cologne Philharmonie to be premiered by the Auryn Quartet in their 2003/04 concert season. It is in one uninterrupted movement comprising three clearly distinguishable sections.
The title refers not specifically to the astronomical significance of the word eclipse, but carries over into other usages of the word, especially in the sense of being overshadowed or surpassed. The piece was written as a personal response to the political and social consequences of the Tampa crisis which unfolded in the Indian Ocean in the August of 2001 and which was the focus of both Australian and international attention for several weeks. The crisis was a showdown between the Australian federal government’s increasingly hard-line stance against "boat people" arriving illegally in Australian waters and the humanitarian resolve of a Norwegian sea captain, Arne Rinnan, whose actions as captain of the freighter, saved the lives of hundreds of refugees when their boat was in trouble in the treacherous waters between Indonesia and Australia. In the ensuing diplomatic and political tussle in which Australian authorities steadfastly refused to give ground, defied the United Nations and openly lied about the character and behavior of those on board, the boat people themselves were increasingly demonized as undesirable illegals and queue jumpers. I felt that their very humanity and the enormity of their own personal struggles and fates was entirely eclipsed by the power games of a bigger political agenda. To further add to this sense of indignity, such compassionate sentiments, when expressed publicly, were ridiculed in the Australian press as being those of soft, bleeding hearts and apologists of terrorism. Most of the people on board the troubled vessel, the Palapa, were fleeing from Afghanistan and Iraq. The irony of a government turning their backs on the safety and claims of refugee status of people escaping these two countries’ repressive regimes, yet within the space of two years citing the violence, human rights abuses and terrorist threat of these said regimes to justify being party to coalition invasions to instigate regime change in both countries, seems almost to be the product of a bizarre and cynical fiction.
Despite its political gestation and subject matter, I don’t for a moment believe that a piece of music can change the political ways of the world, and Eclipse remains first and foremost a piece of chamber music and as such can hopefully be appreciated and understood on its own terms. The background does however go some way towards explaining its brooding, troubled and at times aggressive features. The first section, Slow and spacious, secretive, evolves as an exploration of sound and sonorities from which a motive of oscillating fifths emerges in the lowest cello range, eventually permeating all instruments which in turn respond with a series of overtone-rich flageolet tremoli. This builds into a pizzicato texture, at the outset vigorous and chaotic, then quickly subsiding into a period of vagueness and mystery, descending further and leading into the second section, Unlikely Flight, a nervous presto movement of constantly changing meter and jagged accents, the motor of which is still perpetuated by the oscillating fifths. The title refers to a quote from Tom Keneally’s Tyrant’s Novel in which he descibes with harrowing clarity the dangerous circumstances and desperate state of mind confronting someone fleeing a country such as Iraq. "The most piteous creature on earth" writes Keneally, "is the one contemplating unlikely flight, and without papers." There are startling parallels between Keneally's fictionalisation and the eye witness accounts of the souls aboard the engineless and doomed Palapa as it survived a violent storm at sea on the night before its ultimate rescue by the Tampa. If a solar eclipse represents a cusp of razor sharpness between light and dark, then these experiences were surely riding the cusp between life and death, between future and past, transcending any discussion based on politics of state and entering the realm of sheer existence. The drama of the middle section eventually dissipates into a more consolatory final Epilogue where much of the preceding material is reconsidered in a different, and altogether more sanguine light. Though not exactly a happy end, the ambivalent openness of the work’s final chords seemed to me to be the only viable way of viewing this unfinished saga.
© Brett Dean, 2003
Following studies in Australia, Brett Dean moved to Germany in 1985 and became a violist in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In addition to his orchestral career, he gave performances as soloist including numerous premiers. He became established as a composer through worldwide performances of the ballet One of a Kind (Nederlands Dans Theater, choreographer Jiri Kylian) and by the clarinet concerto Ariel’s Music, which won an award from the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers. Dean returned to Australia in 2000 and has lived there ever since. Leading interpreters of Dean’s music include Sir Simon Rattle, Markus Stenz, Simone Young, Frank Peter Zimmermann and Daniel Harding
Eclipse was commissioned by the Cologne Philharmonie to be premiered by the Auryn Quartet in their 2003/04 concert season. It is in one uninterrupted movement comprising three clearly distinguishable sections.
The title refers not specifically to the astronomical significance of the word eclipse, but carries over into other usages of the word, especially in the sense of being overshadowed or surpassed. The piece was written as a personal response to the political and social consequences of the Tampa crisis which unfolded in the Indian Ocean in the August of 2001 and which was the focus of both Australian and international attention for several weeks. The crisis was a showdown between the Australian federal government’s increasingly hard-line stance against "boat people" arriving illegally in Australian waters and the humanitarian resolve of a Norwegian sea captain, Arne Rinnan, whose actions as captain of the freighter, saved the lives of hundreds of refugees when their boat was in trouble in the treacherous waters between Indonesia and Australia. In the ensuing diplomatic and political tussle in which Australian authorities steadfastly refused to give ground, defied the United Nations and openly lied about the character and behavior of those on board, the boat people themselves were increasingly demonized as undesirable illegals and queue jumpers. I felt that their very humanity and the enormity of their own personal struggles and fates was entirely eclipsed by the power games of a bigger political agenda. To further add to this sense of indignity, such compassionate sentiments, when expressed publicly, were ridiculed in the Australian press as being those of soft, bleeding hearts and apologists of terrorism. Most of the people on board the troubled vessel, the Palapa, were fleeing from Afghanistan and Iraq. The irony of a government turning their backs on the safety and claims of refugee status of people escaping these two countries’ repressive regimes, yet within the space of two years citing the violence, human rights abuses and terrorist threat of these said regimes to justify being party to coalition invasions to instigate regime change in both countries, seems almost to be the product of a bizarre and cynical fiction.
Despite its political gestation and subject matter, I don’t for a moment believe that a piece of music can change the political ways of the world, and Eclipse remains first and foremost a piece of chamber music and as such can hopefully be appreciated and understood on its own terms. The background does however go some way towards explaining its brooding, troubled and at times aggressive features. The first section, Slow and spacious, secretive, evolves as an exploration of sound and sonorities from which a motive of oscillating fifths emerges in the lowest cello range, eventually permeating all instruments which in turn respond with a series of overtone-rich flageolet tremoli. This builds into a pizzicato texture, at the outset vigorous and chaotic, then quickly subsiding into a period of vagueness and mystery, descending further and leading into the second section, Unlikely Flight, a nervous presto movement of constantly changing meter and jagged accents, the motor of which is still perpetuated by the oscillating fifths. The title refers to a quote from Tom Keneally’s Tyrant’s Novel in which he descibes with harrowing clarity the dangerous circumstances and desperate state of mind confronting someone fleeing a country such as Iraq. "The most piteous creature on earth" writes Keneally, "is the one contemplating unlikely flight, and without papers." There are startling parallels between Keneally's fictionalisation and the eye witness accounts of the souls aboard the engineless and doomed Palapa as it survived a violent storm at sea on the night before its ultimate rescue by the Tampa. If a solar eclipse represents a cusp of razor sharpness between light and dark, then these experiences were surely riding the cusp between life and death, between future and past, transcending any discussion based on politics of state and entering the realm of sheer existence. The drama of the middle section eventually dissipates into a more consolatory final Epilogue where much of the preceding material is reconsidered in a different, and altogether more sanguine light. Though not exactly a happy end, the ambivalent openness of the work’s final chords seemed to me to be the only viable way of viewing this unfinished saga.
© Brett Dean, 2003
Robert Schumann: String Quartet No. 3 in A major, Op. 41, No. 3
Robert Schumann tended to compose in short, concentrated bursts, intensively focused on one genre at a time. 1842 became his “year of chamber music” where he miraculously produced three string quartets, the glorious piano quintet and the equally superb piano quartet. Schumann wrote his three string quartets, Op. 41, in a space of five weeks with the third dashed off in only a few days. His letters and journals demonstrate his methodical preparation by studying the quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven including the latter’s “late quartets” with which Schumann was particularly enthralled. The bulk of Mendelssohn’s quartets predate Op. 41 and Schumann was without a doubt familiar with them as well as quartets of lesser composers that he would have reviewed as a founding critic for the important journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Indeed, Schumann dedicated Op. 41 to his friend and contemporary, Felix Mendelssohn. History has since highlighted the first and third of the quartets with the String Quartet in A Major, Op. 41, No 3 becoming the favorite.
The opening movement in sonata form is rather delicate and subtle with tempo and character directions like “espressivo” and “molto moderato.” It begins with a short, dreamy introduction that establishes a signature motive heard at least four times: a falling perfect fifth like a sensuous sigh. Schumann clouds the key signature with expressive modulations leading to a pregnant pause full of dramatic tension. But the main exposition ensues with a gentle calmness, defying this opening feint with a grazioso character. The clear-cut form features two main themes with a floating sequential bridge passage in between. A short but turbulent development section concerns itself primarily with the first theme broken in half: the falling fifth and its scurrying counterpart juxtaposed. The movement ends quietly with a fully resolved final falling fifth in the cello.
Schumann supplies a theme and variations for the second movement, an alternative to the usual scherzo. The first three variations are terse, agitated and dark leading to the fourth variation, a much more lyrical canon between the violin and viola recalling Schubert. Some commentators suggest this is a novel arrangement comprising a theme preceded by three variations. The fifth variation resumes the turbulent thematic reduction while a coda changes the mood entirely with a shift to the major mode and a serene conclusion.
The third movement Adagio is the longest and most profound movement of the quartet revealing Schumann’s characteristic lyricism and rhapsodic romanticism. A heartwarming song-like theme is quickly confounded by a second, fragmentary and angst-ridden idea threatening to drown the song in the dramatic chaos of a plodding march. The intermittent surges and swells settle back into warm lyricism as the insistent march softens and fades into the third mild conclusion of the quartet.
Typical for Schumann, the finale sweeps away all that has gone before in a surge of kinetic vitality with a grand conclusion. A crisply delineated sectional form gives Schumann ample room for a variety of musical ideas in what Melvin Berger calls “the apotheosis of rondo form.” Several small episodes are arranged around the recurring refrain to make the symmetrical form characteristic of the classical rondo crowned with a coda expanding the realization of the finale refrain. One is reminded of Schumann’s penchant for pageantry exposing a gallery of contrasting characters including his famous literary duality of Florestan and Eusebius. So ends Schumann’s only set of string quartets, essentially the last word in the genre before Brahms.
—earsense.org
The opening movement in sonata form is rather delicate and subtle with tempo and character directions like “espressivo” and “molto moderato.” It begins with a short, dreamy introduction that establishes a signature motive heard at least four times: a falling perfect fifth like a sensuous sigh. Schumann clouds the key signature with expressive modulations leading to a pregnant pause full of dramatic tension. But the main exposition ensues with a gentle calmness, defying this opening feint with a grazioso character. The clear-cut form features two main themes with a floating sequential bridge passage in between. A short but turbulent development section concerns itself primarily with the first theme broken in half: the falling fifth and its scurrying counterpart juxtaposed. The movement ends quietly with a fully resolved final falling fifth in the cello.
Schumann supplies a theme and variations for the second movement, an alternative to the usual scherzo. The first three variations are terse, agitated and dark leading to the fourth variation, a much more lyrical canon between the violin and viola recalling Schubert. Some commentators suggest this is a novel arrangement comprising a theme preceded by three variations. The fifth variation resumes the turbulent thematic reduction while a coda changes the mood entirely with a shift to the major mode and a serene conclusion.
The third movement Adagio is the longest and most profound movement of the quartet revealing Schumann’s characteristic lyricism and rhapsodic romanticism. A heartwarming song-like theme is quickly confounded by a second, fragmentary and angst-ridden idea threatening to drown the song in the dramatic chaos of a plodding march. The intermittent surges and swells settle back into warm lyricism as the insistent march softens and fades into the third mild conclusion of the quartet.
Typical for Schumann, the finale sweeps away all that has gone before in a surge of kinetic vitality with a grand conclusion. A crisply delineated sectional form gives Schumann ample room for a variety of musical ideas in what Melvin Berger calls “the apotheosis of rondo form.” Several small episodes are arranged around the recurring refrain to make the symmetrical form characteristic of the classical rondo crowned with a coda expanding the realization of the finale refrain. One is reminded of Schumann’s penchant for pageantry exposing a gallery of contrasting characters including his famous literary duality of Florestan and Eusebius. So ends Schumann’s only set of string quartets, essentially the last word in the genre before Brahms.
—earsense.org