The Escher String Quartet concluded its Caramoor residency and year-long exploration of the quartets of late-Romantic composer, Alexander von Zemlinsky, with a program that highlighted the composer’s Hungarian heritage and formative experience in Prague. The Eschers also gave the world premiere of a string quartet by American composer Pierre Jalbert, recipient of the Elise L. Stoeger Prize for composition.
ABOUT THE MUSIC
Alexander von Zemlinsky
1871-1942
String Quartet No. 3, Op. 19
For some years Alexander Zemlinsky remained completely unknown, or else he was cast into the shadows by the dominance of his sometime pupil and later brother-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg. But performances and recordings have begun to bring to light this imaginative and expressive composer of the last years of Vienna’s musical hegemony. A native Viennese, born in 1871, Zemlinsky showed his musical talents early, and by age thirteen he had entered the conservatory at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. By 1890 he finished his piano studies, officially ranked as “the best pianist at the Conservatory,” and continued work in composition for two more years. He attained renown in Vienna, then in Prague, where he was the director of the opera company from 1911 to 1927, following that with directorship of the Kroll Opera in Berlin until 1933, when he fled home to Vienna. In 1938 he fled once again, via Prague, to the United States; there he lived out his last few years. He died in 1942 virtually penniless and unknown. Yet the accidents of his political fortunes had one lucky result: Zemlinsky’s manuscripts ended up not in Vienna (where they might have been destroyed by the Nazis before the war was over) but in the Library of Congress.
Zemlinsky wrote in virtually every musical form from small songs and chamber pieces to operas and symphonies. In a Vienna that was sharply divided between the “Wagnerians” and the “Brahmsians,” Zemlinsky followed his piano teacher Anton Door into the Brahms camp. Door had founded the “Wiener Tonkünstlerverein” (Viennese Musicians’ Society) with Brahms as honorary president. Zemlinsky joined in 1893 and began to make his mark as composer and pianist. A number of his chamber works had their first performance under its auspices. When, in 1896, the Hellmesberger Quartet played a string quartet of Zemlinsky’s, the young composer had a chance to become much well acquainted with Brahms. The following year his Trio for clarinet, cello and piano took third prize in a competition for new chamber works with wind instruments. Brahms wrote to his publisher Simrock, commenting, “I can equally recommend the man and his talent.”
Zemlinsky wrote four string quartets, which, spread fairly evenly throughout his life (1896, 1915, 1924, 1936) by themselves provide something of a stylistic survey of his development. From the beginning Zemlinsky pursued the technique of the “developing variation”—that is, the musical ideas constantly undergo change, refinement, development—and not simply in a “development section” or within a “theme and variations” form. But this is exactly what Schoenberg found so significant, and so revolutionary, about Brahms. Unlike Schoenberg, though, Zemlinsky insisted that the artist “must respect the boundaries of beauty, even if he extends them far further than hitherto”—and this in a 1902 letter to Schoenberg. Thus, despite their similarities in many respects, it was inevitable that they would come to a parting of the ways.
Even after that, however, Zemlinsky remained strongly connected to the music of Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg, but they two had strikingly opposite approaches. Berg adored symmetry, and he went out of his way to create elaborate forms of musical balance, while Zemlinsky also preferred touches of irregularity in his solution to musical problems, logical perhaps, but never carried to the last degree for its own sake.
In his Second Quartet, completed in the middle of World War I, Zemlinsky was writing in large-style symphonic terms, as a kind of tribute to Mahler, expansive and rich. When the War ended, everything changed. Composers stopped writing for orchestras of more than 100 instruments in scores filled with lush harmonies. And though string quartets kept the same number of players both before and after the War, the nature of the music changed.
But personal experiences played a part in the expressive changes of the new piece as well. Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde had been married to Arnold Schoenberg for twenty-two years when she died on October 18, 1923. The marriage had had its rocky moments, particularly when Mathilde had an affair with young painter named Richard Gerstl in 1907. Nonetheless, Mathilde returned to her husband and they remained married until her death. Schoenberg found himself unsuited to the bachelor state, and in ten months he had remarried, this time Gertrude Kolisch, the sister of the leader of one of the great string quartets of the day.
On August 21, 1924, the very day that Schoenberg announced his marriage—two months earlier than conventional mourning for a wife expected—Zemlinsky began drafting his Third Quartet, composing at white heat. The first movement took him only three days, and the entire work was completed in three weeks.
The work marked a quite drastic break with the past—the sometimes overheated romanticism of his earlier works, the rupture of his relationship with his former brother-in-law, and his first encounter with many of the post-War trends that he had heard at contemporary music conferences, particularly the metrical irregularity of Stravinsky and the “new objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit) of Hindemith. But Zemlinsky is not simply changing camps in the new-music wars; rather he takes elements from different sources and presents them for inspection, sometimes in ironic ways. There is a spirit of a cool rationality here. The very first theme seems to be almost a declaration of principle: It comes from his Lyric Symphony, where it appeared with the words Vergiss dieser Nacht, wenn die Nacht aus ist (“Forget this night, when the night is over”). The romantic night is over.
The second movement is a set of variations growing out of the exploitation of semitones, often expanded through displacement to another octave. This was one of the elements of Schoenberg’s technique of composing with all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Zemlinsky knew the details of the procedure, because Schoenberg had called his circle together in February 1923 to read them the treatise he had written on the subject. Zemlinsky offers the performance designation “mysteriously,” but the mystery may have at least something to do with number symbolism (like Schoenberg and Berg, Zemlinsky shapes that variations into specific numbers of measures of other ways of organizing the material).
The third movement, Romance, was the last to be written. As the title suggests, it is a kind of romantic respite, with another thematic recollection of the Lyric Symphony with a phrase that had originally be set to the words, “Speak to me, my love!”
The closing movement is a parodistic rondo that Zemlinsky’s biographer Antony Beaumont sees as a self-portrait. Zemlinsky was not in any sense a handsome man by traditional standards, and he found occasion to parody himself, even to using the image of an ugly dwarf to represent himself—as he had done in writing on opera entitled Der Zwerg (“The Dwarf”) based on Oscar Wilde’s The Birthday of the Infanta. The music ranges far afield from any tonal center, but at its vertiginous close, Zemlinsky asserts that he had not yet accepted Schoenberg’s system by simply asserting a close, with all four instruments landing on two statements of a unison C.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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Pierre Jalbert
b. 1967
String Quartet No. 4
((World premiere of Volume X of Caramoor's Commissioning project: A String Quartet Library for the 21st Century)
My string quartet was written specifically for the Escher Quartet and is in four contrasting movements. This quartet was inspired by dynamic shapes, which, in turn, informed the gestures and contours of the piece. The first movement, Spiral I, functions as a short prelude and presents materials which will be further developed in the last movement. The idea of spirals, descending lines curving back upon themselves and lines curving outwards from a central point, are constant throughout the first movement. The second movement, Waveform, is the slow movement of the work. It begins quietly and gradually builds to a resonant climax, beginning and ending with its wave-like sound: a quarter tone oscillation centered on the note D. The third movement, Labyrinth, is a scherzo-like movement with all the instruments muted. It is a study in speedy, shifting accents and contains a middle section featuring pizzicato technique. The last movement, Spiral II, develops and extends much of the material from movement I. This movement is one of constant motion with syncopated accents, full of rhythmic energy and intensity.
- Pierre Jalbert
Commissioned by the Caramoor International Music Festival, on behalf of the Escher String Quartet, for A String Quartet for the 21st Century. World Premiere: July 10, 2008 at Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts.
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Béla Bartók
1881-1945
String Quartet No. 3 in C-sharp Major, Sz. 85
Since the time of Mozart and Haydn, and most assuredly since the contribution of Beethoven, the string quartet has been among the most serious of musical genres, demanding (most composers have felt) concentration and carefully argued discourse. In our century the string quartet has retained that position; a fair number of composers have turned to it for some of their most intense statements. Of the large, varied, vital repertory of 20th century string quartets, perhaps two composers stand out for having employed the ensemble repeatedly for music that has become virtually central to the tradition: Schoenberg and Bartók. Bartók’s six quartets have long since become standard repertory works, but none more thoroughly meets the traditional demand for concentration of argument than Bartók’s No. 3.
Composed in September 1927, a full decade after the Second Quartet, the Bartók Third was entered by the composer in a competition run by the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia. The first prize was shared by Bartók and Alfredo Casella, winning for the Hungarian composer a welcome and badly needed honorarium of $3000. The quartet bears a dedication to the Society.
In harmony, the Third Quartet is one of the knottiest of Bartók’s works, filled with crunching dissonances, rendered the more dissonant by the vigor with which they are to be played. The concentration of motivic development, too, makes great demands upon the listener’s attention. Yet the energy and the range of color that Bartók is able to draw out of these four instrumental cousins helps carry the first-time listener through the piece, and the repeat listener becomes absorbed in the working-out of the motives and the essentially two-movement form. The “Prima parte” is rather slow (Moderato) and leads directly to the “Seconda parte,” a hair-raising Allegro. This is a typical Hungarian pattern (familiar from the csardas dance form, among other places), but Bartók elaborates it by inserting a sustained, mysterious “recapitulation of the first part” virtually at the climax of the Allegro. This is followed by what Bartók labels “Coda,” but it is much more than that: the recapitulation of the slow music has prevented the fast movement from truly working itself out, so that the coda now becomes also a “recapitulation of the second part” and thus an essential element, providing a classical balance to this powerful composition.
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Antonín Dvorák
1841-1904
String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96 ("American")
When Mrs. Jeanette Thurber persuaded Antonín Dvorák to come to America as the director of her National Conservatory in New York, she expected great things of him. The Bohemian composer, at the height of his popularity, brought a cheerful, friendly personality and a musical openness that made him popular wherever he went. His works were featured on concert programs in New York and Boston, often with Dvorák himself conducting. His responsibilities at the Conservatory were designed so as to allow him time to compose, in the evident hope that he would show American composers how they ought to proceed. Quite early in his stay Dvorák was asked by reporters what advice he would offer to American composers. His response—that they should draw upon their own native musical heritage in seeking materials for their art—reflected Dvorák’s own procedure with the melodic styles and the dance forms of his native Bohemia. What Dvorák meant by that was especially the music of black Americans, which, if he knew it at all, came from concert performances of spirituals and from the popular entertainment of the minstrel show (where the music was often written by white musicians in supposed imitation of vanished “plantation life”).
The view of so distinguished a composer was widely—and heatedly—discussed. When Dvorák made these remarks, he knew scarcely any American music, either art or folk music. And he was not yet familiar with the substantial number of talented American composers who had been getting along quite well—and even anticipating his approaches years before his music was known here. To Dvorák’s credit, he was open-minded enough to recognize the talent of American musicians. Victor Herbert’s Second Cello Concerto, for example, inspired Dvorák’s own contribution to the genre, and George Chadwick’s Third Symphony was picked by Dvorák to receive a national award.
Dvorák’s first substantial work of his American years was the Symphony “From the New World,” completed in May 1893. During that summer, Dvorák spent his holiday with his family at Spillville, a Czech community in Iowa. He felt at home immediately upon his arrival there, and quickly composed two substantial chamber works—the string quartet in F (composed between June 8 and 23) and the string quintet in E-flat (between June 26 and August 1); both works were to be nicknamed “American.” The quartet was premiered in Boston on January 1, 1894, by the Kneisel Quartet, the most distinguished string quartet in America at the time (the ensemble consisted of first-chair players from the Boston Symphony Orchestra led by concertmaster Franz Kneisel).
From the outset, Dvorák’s “American” Quartet has enjoyed lasting popularity for its tunefulness, its rhythmic verve, and its happy interplay of the four instruments. Given all the publicity afforded Dvorák’s ideas on American music, one might reasonably ask just how “American” Opus 96 really is. A theme in the third movement qualifies as coming from an American: “a damned bird (red, only with black wings)” that kept singing where he was working. Dvorák worked the native bird’s song into measures 21 and following of the scherzo. Beyond that we are on less firm ground. Many of the themes are entirely or nearly pentatonic, and some have wanted to see in this the influence of the black spiritual. But in fact Bohemian folk music is every bit as likely to be pentatonic, and similar themes can be found in Dvorák’s music long before he came to America. The opening of the work was based on Smetana’s First Quartet, though Dvorák’s mood is entirely different, lighter and livelier throughout, with the poignant exception of the lyrical second movement, the plaintive melody of which—echoed between violin and cello—is a wonderful foil to the high spirits of the remaining three movements.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Escher String Quartet ~ Formed in 2005, the Escher String Quartet has attracted the attention of several esteemed artists who immediately admired the young ensemble’s individual sound, inspired artistic decisions, and unique cohesiveness. Within months of its inception, the Escher was invited by both Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman to be the quartet-in-residence at each artist’s summer festival, the Young Artists Programme at Canada’s National Arts Centre and the Perlman Chamber Music Program on Shelter Island, N.Y., respectively. The following winter, the Escher Quartet made its Washington, D.C. debut, representing the Manhattan School of Music for the Kennedy Center’s Conservatory Project.
In only two years, the group has established a reputation as a world-class string quartet. In September, the Escher began its Chamber Music Society Two Residency with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The ensemble’s season was inaugurated with performances at the Ravinia, Green, Great Lakes, Music @ Menlo, and La Jolla Festivals. Additional 2007-2008 appearances include the 92nd Street Y, Symphony Space, and the Schneider concerts at the New School in New York; Boston’s Gardner Museum; Rhinebeck Chamber Music Society; Concordia College; University of Idaho; and the Ravinia Festival. The Quartet also joins the faculty of Stony Brook University as Visiting Artist-in-Residence in a unique relationship with the world-renowned Emerson String Quartet.
Recently the Escher joined guitar luminary Pepe Romero for a New Year’s Eve performance at the 92nd Street Y and pianist Wu Han at the Greenwich Library Concert Series. Nightclub engagements at Tonic and Union Hall — an eclectic club in Brooklyn — featured the Escher in joint concerts with pop-folk singer-songwriter Luke Temple.
The Escher String Quartet takes its name from Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, whose method of interplay between individual components working together to form a whole has been a source of inspiration for the Quartet.
“[The Escher’s] sound is golden-ripe, and its performance was technically almost infallible, cool-edged, yet pulsing like the engine of a luxury car…the night’s biggest pleasure.”
- San Jose Mercury News
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