EMERSON STRING QUARTET

EMERSON STRING QUARTET
Sunday, January 14, 2001 5:30 PM
A Concert Deditated to
the Shriver Hall Concert Series
by Gretchen V. and Samuel Feldman

Program

Program Notes

Eugene Drucker (Violin)

Philip Setzer (Violin)

Lawrence Dutton (Viola)

David Finckel (Cello)

Acclaimed for its insightful performances, brilliant artistry and technical mastery, the Emerson String Quartet is one of the world's foremost chamber ensembles.  The Quartet has amassed an impressive list of achievements: an exclusive Universal Classics/Deutsche Grammophon recording contract, four Grammy Awards, regular appearances with virtually every chamber music series, and an international reputation as a quartet that approaches both the classics and contemporary music with equal mastery and enthusiasm. 

            During the Quartet's 2000-2001 season, the Emerson is featured twice in Carnegie Hall's "Perspectives:  Maurizio Pollini" series and premieres a new work by William Bolcom in Washington, D.C. and Boston with Isaac Stern.  Other highlights of the Emerson's season include an engagement at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and concerts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Houston, Cleveland, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Mexico City. The Emerson performs in England, Germany, France, Belgium and Italy this season, and makes its debut in Hong Kong and Singapore.

            In 2000, the Emerson String Quartet celebrates its 20th year as faculty at the University of Hartford's Hartt School of Music.  This is also the 22nd season of the Emerson’s series at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.  This season, the ensemble will perform or give master classes at the Curtis Institute of Music, University of California at San Diego, Duke University, University of Texas at Austin, Middlebury College, Dartmouth College, SUNY Stony Brook and University of Washington in Seattle. 

The Quartet recently performed the complete cycle of Shostakovich quartets in New York and London, and recorded them live at the Aspen Music Festival.  The ensemble also collaborated with director Simon McBurney in "The Noise of Time," a theatrical piece which includes a live performance by the Emerson String Quartet of Shostakovich’s 15^th Quartet.  Future performances of the multimedia work are planned for London's Barbican Centre and at the Moscow Festival, Berliner Festspiele, Kennedy Center, Massachusetts International Festival, and the Krannert Center.

Exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artists, the Emerson has received four Grammy Awards:  two for its Bartok cycle, one for American Originals (works by Ives and Barber), and one for the complete quartets of Beethoven.  Among the group's extensive recordings (including several Grammy nominees) are works by Schubert, Schumann, Dvorák, Prokofiev, Webern, Shostakovich, Edgar Meyer and Ned Rorem. 

Formed in 1976, the Emerson String Quartet took its name from the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer alternate in the first chair position, and are joined by violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist David Finckel.  The Quartet is based in New York City.  This will be their eleventh appearance at Shriver Hall.

PROGRAM NOTES

Ludwig van Beethoven

String Quartet in F Minor, opus 95, "Serioso"

Like the famous "fate knocking at the door" opening movement of the Fifth Symphony, the composer's eleventh string quartet, known as the "Serioso," is a masterpiece of compression. In his earlier "Eroica" Symphony and three Rasumovsky Quartets, Beethoven had boldly expanded the forms he'd inherited from Mozart and Haydn to cosmic dimensions. But the Serioso, the shortest of his 16 quartets, is something like a musical black hole into which themes, harmonic schemes, and expressive gestures are packed so tightly that they exert an irresistible gravitational power. It is often seen as an experimental and transitional work, pointing the way to the visionary late quartets of the 1820s.

The Serioso was written in 1810, a difficult year for Beethoven in which he apparently experienced a creative crisis and produced few works. Certainly he was troubled by personal problems. Early in the year, he had made another of his doomed-to-failure attempts at marriage: proposing to Theresa Malfatti, a girl who'd shown no particular interest in him (he was 40, she only 19). Writing to a friend after she turned him down, he exclaimed: "So be it then: for you, poor B[eethoven], there is no happiness in the outer world, you must create it in yourself. Only in the ideal world can you find friends."

Far worse was his awareness of how much his deafness had increased. The year before, he had written the last of his piano concertos, the "Emperor," and realized that he would never be able to play it in public. In another letter written on May 2, 1810, he expressed his anguish: "Yet I should be happy, perhaps one of the happiest of mortals, if that fiend had not settled in my ears—If I had not read somewhere that a man should not voluntarily quit this life so long as he can still perform a good deed, I would have left this earth long ago—and, what is more, by my own hand. Oh, this life is indeed beautiful, but for me it is poisoned for ever!"

During the summer and fall, he turned to this quartet, which seems to reflect his anger, sorrow, and will to carry on his work, no matter what the obstacles. Commentator Basil Lam describes its Allegro con brio first movement in F minor as "a brief tragedy in one act." It opens with a savage sixteenth-note figure that ends where it began, like an animal caught in a trap. A pause, and the victim struggles again to extricate itself with leaping dotted-rhythm figures. After another pause, a plaintive idea in the first violin follows and eventually becomes the second subject in the strongly contrasted key of D-flat major: a song of sorrow mixed with acceptance. The movement is woven from these two ideas of struggle and acceptance, but the music of struggle predominates. A loud chord of F major signals the beginning of a brief but intense development in which the opening dotted-rhythm idea contends with the sixteenth-note trap. The movement finally dies out in exhaustion

In his sketchbook containing the Serioso, Beethoven wrote out passages from Bach's Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, and this seems a direct inspiration for the Allegretto non troppo second movement in D major, which includes a melancholy short fugue on a chromatically twisting subject. A downward creeping cello line presages the fugue subject, followed by flowing hymnlike music, whose serenity is disturbed by dissonant notes in the second violin. The viola then launches the fugue, which comes in two sections separated by a chromatic version of the creeping bass line. The reprise of the fugue is stranger than the first, broken by fast, nervous figures thrown from one instrument to another. Then the opening music returns, its poignance intensified by very high, flute-like writing for the cello and a final return of the fugue subject.

A diminished-seventh chord leads directly into the scherzo third movement, which Lam calls "a notable manifestation of controlled anger." It is from this movement's tempo designation, Allegro assai vivace ma serioso, that the quartet gets its nickname. Two false starts are made before the movement slides into its proper key of F minor. Jagged dotted rhythms dominate the scherzo, made spikier still by sharp accents. It alternates with a trio that is apparently all smoothness and flow—a rippling first violin over a grave, slow melody in the other instruments—yet harmonically restless.

 The finale opens with a brief, heartrending slow introduction. A little sixteenth-note sighing figure from that music then accelerates and changes direction to propel a quick and stormy rondo, another manifestation of "controlled anger." In a final enigmatic gesture, Beethoven adds a crazy, almost comical fast coda, as if laughing off the deep feelings expressed in his "serious" quartet.

Dmitri Shostakovich 

Quartet No. 13 in B-flat Minor

Dmitri Shostakovich's last works represent a triumph of artistic will over a failing body. In 1958 when he was only 52, his right hand began to weaken, making piano playing very difficult. Later when he was experiencing problems walking and especially climbing stairs, he was diagnosed as having an unusual form of polio. In 1966 he suffered a severe heart attack and for the remaining nine years of his life spent long periods in hospital. Just short of his 69th birthday in 1975, he died of the combined effects of cancer and his weak heart       

 Though often in considerable pain and with his physical abilities steadily eroding, Shostakovich never gave up. He tried one new doctor and treatment after another, always hoping for a cure. For, as he said to a friend, "I myself am not ready to die. I still have a lot of music to write." And he told another confidant, Isaak Glikman, that, while composing each new work, he experienced terrible anxiety that he would not live to complete it. Thus in his final decade he worked against the clock, composing prolifically and even creating new works during his hospital stays. Among them were his Fourteenth and Fifteenth Symphonies, the last three quartets (numbers 13–15),  and the Second Violin Concerto.

During this period, Shostakovich was also losing many of his closest friends and musical colleagues, including members of the Beethoven Quartet, which had premiered most of his quartets. Not surprisingly, many of his last works are obsessed with death, most explicitly his Fourteenth Symphony which sets eleven poems on the subject. Though it lacks words to confirm its message, his Thirteenth Quartet of 1970 also seems death-haunted. It is one movement in Adagio tempo that is a 20-minute expression of pain and sorrow, both physical and psychological.

In his quartets we hear Shostakovich's most personal voice speaking with virtually no concessions to what the Soviet State dictated. Especially in the last of them, he began experimenting with elements of twelve-tone technique and a markedly more austere, modernist, and dissonant language that certainly did not fit the mold of Soviet realism. While Shostakovich had in the past spoken out vehemently against dodecaphonic music, he now provisionally relented. In an interview before unveiling his Twelfth Quartet in 1968, he said: "As far as the use of strictly technical devises from such musical 'systems' as dodecaphony or aleatory is concerned . . . everything in good measure. . . . The use of elements from these complex systems is fully justified if it is dictated by the concept of the composition. . . . You know, to a certain extent I think the formula 'the end justifies the means' is valid in music. All means? All of them, if they contribute to the end objective." Nevertheless, like Bartók, Shostakovich never broke with tonality, and despite its dissonance the Thirteenth is solidly grounded in B-flat minor.

The Quartet is dedicated to violist Vadim Borisovsky, one of the Beethoven Quartet's founding members. And indeed the viola plays a leading role in this work. Borisovsky's successor, Fyodor Druzhinin, who played the premiere in Leningrad on December 13, 1970, called it "a hymn to the viola." The structure is arch-shaped or a palindrome (like Bartók's Fourth Quartet): moving from slow mournful music through faster angry music to a tormented central dance and then retracing its path back to the mournful music.

The viola opens with a sorrowing melody using all twelve pitches and prominently featuring drooping half steps. When the other instruments enter, they soon collide in a harsh sustained chord crunching C's again B-naturals. Eventually the tempo accelerates, and the first violin proposes an insistent idea of three nervous repeated notes, a motive the composer used in his 1948 film score The Young Guard. (This score was written at the time of Zhadanov's official denunciation of Shostakovich, a terrifying period that the composer may be recalling here.) As the viola takes up this idea more forcefully, this timid protest grows into an anguished shriek of brutally dissonant chords. Then an acidic little scherzo begins, one of the composer's mechanical marionette-on-a-string dances, accompanied by thumping cello pizzicato and hollow, percussive slaps on the bodies of other instruments. 

From this center, the music moves back to the three-note motive, this time including a ghostly pizzicato version by the first violin over a soft shudder of trills from the other instruments. The tempo returns to Adagio, and the viola reprises its mournful opening theme. Soaring to its highest B-flat, the viola carries the music to one of Shostakovich's most heartwrenching closes. 

Béla Bartók

String Quartet No. 4 (1928)

"Whoever met Bartók, thinking of the rhythmic strength of his work, was surprised by his slight, delicate figure. He had the outward appearance of a fine-nerved scholar. Possessed of fanatical will and pitiless severity, and propelled by an ardent spirit, he affected inaccessibility and was reservedly polite. . . . In the flash of his searching glance no falseness nor obscurity could endure."

The Swiss conductor and modern music enthusiast Paul Sacher wrote this vivid description of how Bartók struck him when they first met in 1929. At this time, Bartók, in his late forties, was at the top of his game. In the winter of 1927–28, he had undertaken an extensive tour of the United States, performing and talking about his music; a similar visit to the U.S.S.R. followed a year later. One American newspaper, not knowing what to make of his highly idiosyncratic musical voice, dubbed him a "musical heretic." A Los Angeles critic wrote: "Bartók and his friends speak little of what Beethoven might have called the moral or spiritual content and influence of music. Bartók's music of last night is 'amoral,' beyond good and evil . . ."

But, if in fact music can be discussed as having implicit "moral" content at all, certainly Bartók espoused as high ethical ideals for his work as Beethoven did. As the Fascists rose to power, he, too, began to speak out about the brotherhood of man being the highest ideal. And he refused to compromise the fierce integrity of his musical expression in order to make it more attractive to mass audiences and more lucrative for himself.

For many, Bartók's Fourth Quartet of 1928 stands at the summit of his work for its purist concentration on deriving musical richness from the tiniest motivic nuggets, its exploration of the variety of sound and expression that can be drawn from just four string instruments, and its overall vitality and emotional intensity. Its idiom is even more concentrated than Beethoven's Serioso. Like the Third Quartet of the previous year (performed by the Takas Quartet last season), it represents Bartók's most uncompromisingly dissonant and expressionistic style. However, he was never willing to abandon tonality as had Schoenberg and his followers. Here the music has a tonal center of, amazingly, C major. Yet the extreme chromaticism of Bartók's themes and the complex interaction of his individual instrumental lines certainly obscure this fact.

This is not first violin-dominated music; all four musicians are treated absolutely as equals. And Bartók's demands on their technical skills are enormous. Perhaps inspired by the string writing he'd recently heard in Berg's Lyric Suite Quartet (to be played by the Kronos Quartet at this season's final concert), he asked for a host of unusual coloristic effects. We hear wide-ranging glissando slides, the ghostly, glassy sound of sul ponticello playing (bowing at the bridge of the instrument), and—especially in the fourth movement—many types of pizzicato or plucked strings. The most dramatic is what became known as the "Bartók pizzicato," in which the string is made to rebound from the fingerboard, producing a percussive snap

Like Bach, Bartók was very concerned about the architecture of his music. In his Fourth and also his Fifth Quartets, he made use of a five-movement palindrome or arch shape in which, in his words, "the slow  movement [movement 3] is the kernel of the work; the other movements are . . . arranged in layers around it. Movement 4 is a free variation of 2, and 1 and 5 have the same thematic material."

Both the outer movements feature music that is harsh, densely contrapuntal, and driven hard at Allegro speeds. Movement one is generated from a little up-and-down chromatic motive, firmly articulated by the cello near the beginning. This motive is subsequently inverted and, in Bartók's favorite guise, stretched out to cover a broader range (first heard in the cello when the music diminishes to pianissimo). Fast stretto entrances, in which the instruments tread on each other's lines,  produce snarling dissonances. Strident bow attacks, thick chords, and explosive glissandos all contribute to the intensity.

Movement two is a phantasmagoric scherzo played at the highest possible speed. It is full of ghostly sounds since the instruments play with mutes throughout and make prominent use of eerie sul ponticello effects. We hear its principal theme immediately in the whirring up-and-down chromatic line played by cello and viola. In Bartók's tight construction, this theme is actually an expansion of movement one's motive.

The work's kernel around which the other movements are wrapped is the slow third movement. The cello sings a richly ornamented and highly expressive song in the style of táragató music (a Hungarian wind instrument). The other instruments accompany, alternating cool vibrato-less and warmer vibrato-rich tones. In the middle section—with its violin chirpings and mysterious pizzicato clicks and sul ponticello shudders—we hear a wonderful example of Bartók's signature "night music," inspired by evenings in the Hungarian countryside when he was on his folk-music expeditions. The cello then returns to its song, now in duet with the first violin. But the mysterious night music again casts its spell at the close.

The counterpart to movement two, the fourth movement is likewise fast and built on a new version of the second's whirring chromatic theme. But this variant is played entirely with plucked strings, using a number of different techniques including the snapping "Bartók pizzicato."

Dissonant chords à la Stravinsky are savagely attacked as the fifth movement returns to the aggressive style of the first. The first movement's motive also returns, but now transformed into a vivacious Hungarian dance theme led by the two violins. And throughout this vigorously rhythmic finale, Bartók keeps conjuring new folkish permutations. A less intense middle section has the rustic flavor of Eastern European bagpipe music, complete with cello drone. The cello and first violin then bring back the core motive in its original first-movement form. In a full-circle close, Bartók emphasizes this modest seedling out of which his tree of interlacing branches has grown.