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Levon's Introduction
Levon Chilingirian introduces the 2011 Festival 2011 Music Programme 3rd - 9th July
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GROUP 1
String Quartet in D minor, K.173 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
Allegro ma molto moderato
Andantino grazioso
Menuetto
Allegro
The last of the set, K.173, was left without tempo markings by Mozart, so our listing of movement names represents an editor's guess. The opening gesture can be tracked in various guises throughout the first movement's generally sombre discourse, to which the charming slow movement is an effective foil. This quartet's special movement is the self-consciously scientific finale: fugal texture dominates throughout, including exercises in invertible counterpoint ('if you go first, I'll play what you played but upside-down') and stretto (it starts like a fugue we've just heard but the voices tumble in quicker than expected). Such technical brilliance represents the end of Mozart's apprenticeship, and no wonder he soon tired of a servant's life.
String Quartet in F major, Op. 18 No. 1 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827)
Allegro con brio
Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato
Scherzo: Allegro molto
Allegro
As Beethoven approached thirty, he attacked the string quartet form and over a period of three years he prepared a set of six for publication. The first in the set, which was composed in about 1798 during his early period of composition, is probably the most important and, as you'd expect, it seeks to expand the form and impose Beethoven's characteristics from the very first note. You might like to count the appearances of the opening gesture - there isn't a run of half a dozen bars anywhere in the first movement without it. The triple-time movement placed third is a Scherzo for the first time in the quartet repertoire - a kind of minuet with attitude, alluding to the Italian for a joke, always boisterous for Beethoven; while the last movement bounds into all sorts of keys with an abandon that may have alarmed his former teacher. The most powerful movement is the second, a richly-scored operatic aria in his favourite key of D minor, which, its first performers testify, was inspired by the crypt scene from Romeo and Juliet: Beethoven seems not to have anticipated our contemporary animated retelling (Gnomeo and Juliet) which corrects the double suicide of the star-crossed lovers to a happy ending, I'm told.
String Quintet in C major, Op. 29 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827)
Allegro moderato
Adagio molto expressivo
Scherzo: Allegro
Presto
The String Quintet Op. 29, written in 1801, is the only work Beethoven conceived in this form, though there are two arrangements of earlier works, a way of recycling work that Mozart also tried, as we will see this week. Perhaps Beethoven appreciated the extra depth which another viola can give, for there is a more symphonic quality to the texture than in the Op. 18 quartets. As in the quartet the opening gesture is appropriated at many points in the musical argument, though this first movement has a slightly self-consciously beautiful lyrical theme. Another fine slow movement and another passionate scherzo make this an ideal companion piece to the quartet. The most unusual movement in the quintet is the last, whose opening thunder and lightning have occasioned the nickname 'The Storm'- and yet the really peculiar invention occurs just before the return of the opening music. Here the discourse is halted by a fragment of a slow movement, marked 'jokily', and this unsettling interruption occurs again very near the end. Is there some programmatic reason for this? A topical allusion, or a private joke?
GROUP 2
String Quintet in C minor, K.406 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
Allegro
Andante
Menuetto in canone: Trio al rovescio
Allegro
Mozart completed the first of his six quintets directly after he finished his K.173, and this week we will hear the second in this series. This music is first mentioned by the composer in a letter to his father reporting the success of his opera Il Seraglio in 1782. Mozart refers to a work intended as 'Nacht-Musique', and though this serenade is scored for a group of eight wind players, it is as tightly organised in its four movements as a sonata. Five years later Mozart was in debt to a cloth-merchant called Puchberg who belonged to the same Masonic Lodge: Mozart offered him the proceeds from a concert of chamber music, and suggested three string quintets. This was quite bold as he was still rehearsing Don Giovanni for its premiere and he hadn't written a note of any of them. More or less overnight he wrote the C major and G minor quintets - if one of them isn't his greatest piece of chamber music, the other one is. But he was still one short, so he rattled off a string version of the wind serenade to produce this quintet, known as K.406. The arrangement, probably made between turns at the billiard table, is miraculous for every figure and gesture fits the string context perfectly, although its incarnation as wind music is masterfully apposite. The symphonic argument into which the opening gesture launches us, arguably too weighty for its original, incidental nature, seems perfectly suited to these five stringed performers, while the beautiful triple-time slow movement looks forward to an aria from Cosi Fan Tutte. Before the thrilling set of variations which ends the work we have another minuet in canon, though here the trio is cleverer still (two pairs of upside-down canons simultaneously) - this technical marvel occurring in the traditionally simpler middle-section of the supposedly lightest movement of a piece written as aural wallpaper while an aristocrat had his tea.
Sextet from 'Capriccio', Op. 85, TrV 279a Richard Strauss (1864 - 1969)
Richard Strauss was a celebrated composer some years before the 19th-century became the 20th but he lived on, composing, into the 1940s. His last opera is flagrantly undramatic, perhaps an escape in 1942 from the horrors wreaked not far from his mansion in the Bavarian Alps. Entitled 'Capriccio - a conversation piece about music in one act', it is a three-hander: a composer and a poet are rivals for the love of a countess, who must choose between suitors and between their arts. Despite the customary large band in the pit the work opens with a sextet for solo strings: the rising curtain reveals that this is an offering by Flamand, the composer - his pitch for the Countess's affections. Strauss himself sanctioned the performance of this unusual operatic overture as a one-movement concert piece, and you might like to know that, despite this gorgeous music, the Countess decides in the end that she cannot choose - she'll have both.
String Quintet in C major, D. 956 Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828)
Allegro ma non troppo
Adagio
Scherzo: Presto - Trio: Andante sostenuto
Allegretto
It's hard not to be affected by the story of Schubert's life: a failed school teacher, he passed his days on the periphery of bourgeois society. Somewhat unprepossessing and stricken with a terminal illness in his early 20s, he saw some of his songs and piano music accepted for publication before his death at 31, but his chamber music, his symphonies and his operas were virtually ignored. Under the shadow of severe ill-health his last two years saw a series of masterpieces as profound as they were revolutionary and yet it was more than a generation before they were unearthed, performed and published. There is a majesty and a timelessness about this music which contrasts profoundly and painfully with the shy youth who produced them, knowing that nobody cared. He spent his last summer writing the Quintet we will hear this week and he sent it with some songs to a publisher, who kept the songs and returned the quintet with the comment that Schubert should stick to writing simple pieces for piano that would sell.
Like much late Schubert the canvas is pretty vast - please don't flee if I suggest you don't get much change out of an hour. And the first movement is about a third of the total length, painfully dark in musical tension for a C major work, where the only respite comes from lyrical episodes such as the cellos offer first in a duet. The slow movement in the remote and glistening key of E major is one of those artefacts they should put on a rocket to distant galaxies: the human race has done a lot of silly, evil things but this Earthling at least managed to create something of immortal beauty. A three-voice hymn with plucked bass-line and whispered comment from the first fiddle makes a long statement that is complete in itself. A stormy scene interrupts in the very remote key of F minor, until passions are calmed for the return of the heavenly music of the opening, although the accompanying bass-line won't let go its memories of past pain. And the Scherzo movement is even more frabjous than Beethoven managed: two cellos with all those low double-stoppings create a sensation of an army of players, propelling us into the world of Mahler and the Resurrection Symphony, the same composer whose ghostly death-marches are foretold in this movement's middle section. And finally a stamping Allegretto that is unwilling to forsake the minor mode, which just before the end gets a little more frenetic, and then a little faster still, before the very last gesture: a final unison compromised by the most ungraceful grace note in the world.
GROUP 3
String Quartet in B flat major, K.172 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
Allegro spiritoso
Adagio
Menuetto
Allegro assai
The earliest music to be heard this week comes from a set of six quartets Mozart wrote during the summer of 1773, having just entered the service of the ruler of Salzburg. It's not really clear why he should produce a set like this - his duties ought to have been confined to church music, and to the entertainment of the Prince-Archbishop. Perhaps he was inspired by the recent publication of two sets by Haydn.
The two quartets we hear this week afford many glimpses of his peculiar mastery. The earlier, K.172, the fifth of the set, begins with an excitable triple-time movement, it includes a minuet where the instruments chase each other in canon, and its highlight is a gorgeous slow movement whose melody prefigures the Countess's aria from The Marriage of Figaro.
String Quartet in G minor, Op. 74 No. 3 Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)
Allegro
Largo assai
Menuetto (Allegretto)
Finale: Allegro con brio
The quartet by Haydn we will hear this week is the last of a set of six commissioned by Count von Apponyi, who was a member of the same Masonic Lodge as the composer, and a kinsman of his employer. The set was written in 1793, between Haydn's two visits to London: Mozart had been dead two years and a bumptious, unruly young man called Beethoven had begun taking instruction. Although its key was very dark for Mozart, this quartet is one of Haydn's friendliest: the lively bounce of the triple-time first movement, and the conspicuous oom-cha in the last, which I think is why the Germans call this quartet the 'Rider', are balanced by a serene slow movement, in the entirely bananas key of E major, which sounds a bit like a hymn-tune, and a genial Minuet in G major. Of course our performers may feel this work differently ...
String Quintet in F major, WAB 112 Anton Bruckner (1824 - 1896)
Gemássigt
Scherzo. Schnell - Trio. Langsamer
Adagio
Finale. Lebhaft bewegt
Anton Bruckner, the very famous church musician and not very famous composer, had completed his Fourth Symphony without having heard a full performance of any of them when he consented to provide a quartet, for free, with a new work. Completed in 1878, the work had morphed into a quintet, for the set-up to which Mozart contributed six examples and Brahms was to produce two: quartet plus another viola. Like so much of his music, the Quintet had an unhappy early history: the Scherzo was deemed too difficult, so Bruckner was forced to offer an alternative, and the first performance was minus the Finale as the players were struggling with that too. It was the first large-scale work by the composer to be accepted for publication (they generously agreed not to charge the composer a fee), and it is dedicated to Duke Max Emanuel of Bavaria, who sent Bruckner a diamond tie-pin to say thank you. And it is a towering masterpiece of chamber music, with another slow movement of great depth, in the key of G flat major, so remote from the surrounding tonality of F that its other-worldly quality is ensured. The whole work is on the scale of the composer's symphonies, that is to say, rather longer than comparable works by Mozart, but your ears will tell you this week that Bruckner was emboldened by the example of Schubert. Maybe the last chunks of both outer movements strain the form a little, and there are some fearsome difficulties of individual technique and coordination, so it is a rare privilege to hear this titanic piece performed live - and several times too!
And so to Mendelssohn: this year we celebrate him at the Classical Ceilidh with another string symphony from the series he wrote between the ages of 12 and 14. This, the eleventh and almost the last, is remarkable in that it has five movements: it has a slow movement at its centre and a minuet second to last, but includes a character piece second - marked Comodo (which translates as something like 'Easily') it purports to be a Swiss song, and it is at least as cheesy as you might think. At the other end of Mendelssohn's career his last masterpiece was a quartet in F minor, and, although this symphony begins rather gently, the main body of the first movement, the slow movement and the last are all in this rather dark key, which we've encountered several times this week. Like the Mozart with which my notes started it's startling how much of the mature composer is revealed in music written in Mendelssohn's early teens, even before he visited our island.
Programme notes © Richard Jeffcoat
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