Home

Our 2011-2012
Season

Past Seasons:

2010--2011
2009--2010
2008--2009
2007--2008
2006--2007
2005--2006
2004--2005

Subscriptions
and Tickets

Contact Us

In 1789 King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia commissioned Mozart to write six string quartets after the composer's visit to Berlin and Potsdam. As it turned out, Mozart completed only three "Prussian" quartets (K. 575, 589, and 590), the last of his string quartets.

The King was an excellent cellist, and Mozart was challenged to write music that would feature the cello without becoming either too difficult or too concerto-like. Consequently, as Paul Griffith points out in The String Quartet, every movement of the quartet includes cello solos with the instrument playing at the top of its range. To balance the prominent cello, Mozart wrote parts of greater consequence for the two inner voices, the second violin and the viola. So many solos, notes Griffiths, "can make the ensemble sound like a committee in which all must have their say." This concertante style has a number of limitations: it dilutes the music since so much has to be stated four times, and it "predisposes the music to a moderate tempo since hurried little solos would be absurd and repeated slow ones wearisome." Therefore, all the movements proceed at a moderate tempo, the outer ones and the minuetto marked Allegretto with the Andante offering some variation in tempo.

The quartet opens with buoyant good spirits as the first theme, a rising arpeggio followed by a descending scale, is stated in the first violin and then the viola. The second theme also features the rising arpeggio, this time ending in a long held note. The development and recapitulation follow conventional practices of sonata form.

Mozart casts the Andante in A-B-A form. The contrast between the two sections comes, as Melvin Berger describes it, "from the melodic contour of A, an earthbound line, and B, a soaring phrase that passes from instrument to instrument." Further contrast emerges in the thick texture of A, with the violins doubled, and B, a single melodic line accompanied by repeated-note figures. After the return of A, a short coda concludes the movement on a four-note turn.

A four-note turn also announces the sprightly Menuetto, where, Berger says, "the music glitters with sharp contrasts -- soft and loud, staccato and legato. The trio is a showcase for the cello, which sings out the cantabile melodies (with that same four-note turn), very high in its range." After the trio, the menuetto repeats to end the movement. The cello introduces the main theme of the "serenely happy last movement," which begins with a rising arpeggio that recalls the first movement. Contrasting interludes of the movement's rondo form spring from ascending arpeggios, but in different keys, settings, and scorings, so that they sound like new material. Tightly organized and highly contrapuntal, this movement is probably the most interesting of the quartet.

Grammy-Award winning Richard Danielpour is one of the most gifted composers of his generation; his music is performed worldwide, and he is among America's most recorded composers. He believes deeply in the nurturing of young musicians and is currently on the faculties of the Curtis Institute and the Manhattan School of Music.

In her dissertation at Florida State University, Ruth Ruggles Akers provides an historical context for Danielpour's work. "Much of the music written and performed well into the third quarter of the twentieth century," she explains, "was completely unintelligible to a majority of concertgoers, and a huge gap had developed between classical composers and the public." Seeking to bridge that gap, Danielpour aligned himself "with the tradition of writing music that is emotionally evocative and musically valid"; he writes in "an accessible, neo-romantic style that embraces tonality despite frequent dissonance."

Danielpour describes the programme of "Shadow Dances": "In this work each movement is an evocation of hidden, recessive, or 'shadow' aspects (used in a Jungian vein) of personality. As Joseph Campbell spoke of man as 'one being with many personas', so this quartet is one work with four faces that hopefully complement and contradict one another within a unified whole.

'Stomping Ground' is a return to the child within, to the exuberance and uninhibited wonder, energy and sense of surprise that we experience(d) as children. There is a play-on-words with this movement's title as much of the music revolves around a repeated bass line.

'The Little Dictator,' is a scherzo that addresses the controller in us; the one who would rule and reign partly in an effort to hide the true pain and vulnerability within. The movement alternates between a driven, almost obsessive march, and a gentler, tenderer music to illustrate this.

'My Father's Song' is actually music inspired by memories of my father's funeral. It involves the 'shadowed' relationship we have with death, and the surrender and acceptance that we must submit to in order to confront this great and awesome mystery. This adagio, imbued with an air of mourning, is the darkest and, at times, most despairing of the movements in the quartet. The slow, descending scale figures that repeat in the movement's coda are an evocation of the 'laying to rest' that occurs in bidding farewell to a loved one.

'The Trickster,' refers to the character that often appears in folklore and literature in the form of various guises: the jester, the fool, the coyote, and the clown. In some cultures the symbol of the trickster has negative connotations. In almost all interpretations, however, the trickster refers to a mercurial, highly spontaneous unpredictability; it is also an energy and a persona that we all carry and often utilize. The trickster is the one who delivers the punch line, the one within that often teaches us that life cannot be controlled. Often the trickster appears in an event or through a person. Whatever the focus, the result is always accompanied by sudden change.

The music in this fast, frenetic movement recalls much of the material in the other three movements, transforming and transmuting the ideas into new but familiar ones. In this way the quartet refers (as many works do) to its own inner nostalgia, and in doing so, acknowledges the connections inherent between the movements."

Brahms was reticent to tackle the musical forms that Beethoven had raised to such magnificent heights, the symphony and the string quartet. He worked on his first symphony for ten years before allowing its publication, and he wrote and destroyed some twenty string quartets before the publication of his Op. 51, which he took eight years to complete.

Berger observes that while the first Op.51 quartet "was written under the specter of Beethoven ...the spirit that informs the second belongs to Bach" in its wealth of polyphonic devices, especially canon. Canon is the strictest form of musical imitation in which two or more instruments take up, in succession, a musical phrase, note for note.

Brahms weaves the violinist Joseph Joachim's musical motto Frei, aber einsam ("Free, but lonely") into the quartet in the gracefully arching three-note motto (F-A-E). This motif appears as part of the first and last movements' opening themes. The first movement's development section honors Bach in its "outstanding demonstration of polyphonic writing, replete with canons, inversions, and retrograde motion, in which the melody is, respectively, imitated, turned upside down, and played backward" (Berger).

In "Brahms the Progressive," Schoenberg praises the consoling and beautiful theme of the Andante for its superior development of musical ideas and its structural intricacies. Accompanied by viola and cello, the first violin introduces the warmly lyrical melody; after a contrasting outburst, the cello concludes the movement with a re-statement of the elegant theme.

Stephen Hefling says that the third movement opens calmly with a "ghost of a minuet." Its tranquil tune is interrupted by two sparkling interludes followed by polyphonic sections in canon. In a remarkable double canon the first violin and viola play a theme from the interlude while the cello and second violin play a variant of the minuetto theme.

Structurally, the bustling Finale alternates between a czardas, a fast Hungarian dance, and a relaxed waltz. The coda begins quietly with the first theme in canon between cello and first violin; the instruments eventually pick up speed and volume to bring the quartet to a brilliant conclusion.