JULY 12  BRENTANO STRING QUARTET
Sunday, 4:30pm ~ Venetian Theater

Acclaimed as the American string quartet of its generation, the dynamic and elegant Brentano String Quartet has been sharing impassioned and profound interpretations with Caramoor audiences for over a decade. Here, the Brentanos present an intricately constructed program exploring polyphony and counterpoint.

Introduce your family to Caramoor and enjoy the sounds of the concert from the picnic lawns.
Concert Al Fresco tickets $10.00   order online

ABOUT THE MUSIC
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)
(arr. Mark Steinberg)
Four Madrigals (from Book VI)
Claudio Monteverdi, the father of the modern opera who wrote on the cusp between the Renaissance and the Baroque, was the composer of nine books of madrigals. In these astounding works he painted in sound the images and thoughts suggested by his selected texts. So it might seem strange to hear these works in a text-less setting, as a string quartet. What can I say other than I was overcome with jealousy towards those who get to live with this music? I recently saw a movie, Reprise, directed by Joachim Trier, in which there are some scenes wherein a conversation is heard in the background but one sees only gazes and glances between the characters involved. The import of the words is there even in their absence. Here, in this string quartet setting, Monteverdi's reflections of the words remain intact and the music is suffused with emotion every bit as specific as words allow. Rhetoric present in inflection can sometimes convey emotion even more honestly than the words it carries. We would like to think that much of the tenor of the text is still present here, and that the strengths of the string quartet medium closely parallel those of a vocal ensemble. We aim to give a convincing performance with shadow puppets.

This group of four madrigals is taken from the sixth book, a group of pieces that perhaps has autobiographical import as it follows the deaths of two women in Monteverdi's life: his wife and his favorite pupil, who had lived with him. Death and separation flavor the entire set.

Lasciatemi morire is the opening section of Ariadne's Lament, the text of which is "Let me die. How should I find comfort in this cruel fate, in this great suffering? Let me die." The painful yearning for oblivion is contrasted with the hope of peace.

Ohimè il bel viso is a setting of a text by Petrarch. The text reads "Alas, the fair face, alas, the gentle grace. Alas, the graceful and noble bearing. Alas, the voice that humbled arrogance and cruelty, and made all cowards brave. And alas the sweet smile, whence issued that dart which was my greatest joy in this world: regal spirit, most worthy of an empire, but that it came down to us too late. I must burn with love and sigh for you, for I was yours, and having lost you cannot be grieved by any other misfortune. With hope and desire you filled me when from my highest bliss I parted, but the wind carried away my words."

Ditelo voi is the second section of the group of madrigals entitled Tears of a Lover at the Tomb of his Beloved. The text is "Tell, O rivers, and you who heard Glaucus rending the air with cries upon her tomb, deserted meadows, Nymphs and Heaven, you know that grief has been my food, tears my drink, and since the ice-cold earth covered my beloved, your fair bosom, O blessed stone, has been my bed."

Zefiro torna is also on a Petrarchan text. "Zephyr returns and brings back the sweet season and grasses and flowers, his sweet companions, and twittering swallows and lamenting nightingales, And Spring, white and rosy. The meadows smile, the sky is blue once more. Jove gazes upon his daughter with delight. Earth, air and water are filled with love; every creature renews its courtship. But for me, alas, the heaviest sighs return, rising from the depths of my heart, drawn by the one who took its key with her to heaven. And birdsong and the meadow flowers, and the sweet actions of fair and honest women are as a wilderness and cruel wild beasts." Of special interest is the way in which the tempo and affect shifts as the poem speaks of the poet's inner world in contrast to his surroundings. The setting of the final line is of particular beauty and pathos.
©2007 by Mark Steinberg
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Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
String Quartet in G minor, Op. 20, No. 3
Joseph Haydn wrote his six opus 20 quartets in 1772, when he was forty years old.  At that time he had been the court composer to Count Esterhazy for twelve years, and was to fill that position for a total of thirty. "I was completely secluded from the world," he said of those years, so that "nobody was nearby who could distract me or confuse me about myself; in this way I became original."  Coming fast on the heels of two earlier sets (opus 9 and opus 17), the opus 20 quartets are arguably Haydn's first quartet masterpieces.  They make the fullest use of four completely independent voices (in his earlier quartets Haydn would often fuse the viola and cello parts together to be one line), employ a much expanded range of texture and dynamics, and show for the first time the composer's flexibility in phrase length and structure, with all its attendant capacity for wit and surprise. The set’s nickname, the "Sun Quartets," is due merely to the sun that was displayed on the cover of the first edition; the name even seems somewhat misleading, since two of the quartets are in darker, minor keys (it was more the custom to have only one minor-key work in a set at this time), and since the many bright moments in these works are well balanced by passages that are more learned, convoluted, and experimental.

The key of G minor had tragic connotations for Haydn's great contemporary, Mozart, as one can hear clearly in his 40th Symphony or his G minor Viola Quintet. Haydn does not seem to have shared Mozart's feelings about this key.  In the opus 20 #3 Quartet, as in its later counterpart, the "Rider" Quartet, Haydn couples the key of G minor with a spirited, feisty attitude, sometimes even turbulent and stormy; there is never that sense of fatefulness, of deep sorrow, that the younger composer was to bring. The first movement opens with a figure that is distinguished by a number of jagged leaps up and down, which immediately set a kind of combative tone. By the eleventh bar the composer has already steered the work into a sunnier major key, a sure sign that the movement will be pithy and succinct. The most extraordinary aspect of this movement, however, is its penchant for stopping short in its tracks.  Even by Haydn's standards - he was a master of sudden silences - this movement, especially in its development, is dotted with these quick stops. Into each silence falls a hushed declaration by the whole quartet in unison, evoking a Greek chorus commenting on the actions of the play's indecisive hero. The dialectic between the forceful main mood and the quiet "commenter" is really what forms the drama of this first movement.

The minuet is perhaps a shade more serious. It is distinguished by phrases of irregular length - a favorite habit of Haydn's which gives the music an unconstrained, rhetorical air - and by a rather  beautiful trio section in which lyrical counterpoint in the lower three instruments unfolds against a tracery of first-violin eighth-notes. The movement ends in a fading, mournful major key, marked "perdendosi," or "dying away."

The slow, third movement opens like a hymn, with a stately, rising figure in the first violin accompanied by simple chords. The main contrasting idea appears soon after: a tender, twisting line of sixteenth-notes in the cello, the accompaniment now celestial in the high upper strings. These two themes alternate persistently throughout the movement, seeming to suggest an elevated sermon from the individual, the grave response from the multitude.

The finale is a fiery Allegro with strong Gypsy undertones.  Despite the minor key, an atmosphere of dark-hued merrymaking prevails. As in the first movement, there are copious sudden stops, sometimes dramatic, sometimes humorous, which keep the listener constantly guessing. A twittering, almost irritable motif, which is first heard right away in the first violin part, becomes a kind of ubiquitous comic leitmotif, refusing to go away; and in fact it has the last word, mumbled in the cello's lowest register as the quartet comes to a close. © by Misha Amory
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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Grosse Fuge for String Quartet in B-flat, Op. 133
Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, Op. 133, is one of the great artistic testaments to the human capacity for meaning in the face of the threat of chaos.  Abiding faith in the relevance of visionary struggle in our lives powerfully informs the structure and character of the music; this is surely one of the composer's most inspiring achievements.

The Great Fugue was originally conceived as the final movement of the Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 130.  In that work it followed directly the Cavatina, one of the most intimate embodiments of the frailty and vulnerability of love ever made audible to human ears (a movement we had the honor of playing at Carl Sagan's memorial service, as he included it among the works sent into space on Voyager, representing some of the greatest achievements of humanity). This juxtaposition with the most touching lyricism makes the opening of the fugue shocking, as Beethoven takes the final G of that movement and explodes it into a stark octave passage for the whole quartet. The writing is jagged and austere, then, following the Overtura which opens the movement, there is a brief evocation of the wispy, halting breaths of the Cavatina in eerie double notes for the first violin alone. The fugue proper then defiantly announces itself with disjunct, painful and completely unvocal leaps, all elbows and knees. Shouting, on the brink of whirling into chaos, the argument of the fugue is actually tightly ordered; of the dual description Beethoven gives for the movement - partly free, partly studied - this is the studied side.  It will be the task of the Grosse Fuge to make sense of this ever-present possibility of complete collapse, to bring resolve and purpose to the human condition in the midst of uncertainty.

During the private premiere of the original version of Op. 130, given by the Schuppanzigh Quartet, Beethoven absented himself, choosing to drink in a local pub instead. It fell to the second violinist of that group, Holz, to go to the pub to report to the composer. He declared the occasion a big success, and recounted how those present asked to have two of the inner movements repeated. Beethoven immediately asked about the fugue, and when he was told that there was no request for a repeat of that he remarked that the audience had been made up of  "cattle and asses." The audience as well as the players had in fact had great difficulties with the movement, finding it nearly incomprehensible.  It was suggested to the composer that he replace the last movement of the quartet with one which would be more accessible.  Certainly Beethoven himself never doubted that the fugue was a masterpiece of great potency.  One of the great mysteries of musical history is what could have convinced Beethoven, a quintessentially headstrong man, to agree to remove the fugue from Op. 130 and publish it separately (as Op. 133), writing an alternate finale for the quartet. Today quartets often play Op. 130 in its original incarnation, ending with the Grosse Fuge.  We have played that piece in both versions, finding the original version the more satisfying of the two, monumental in its scope.

As confrontational and even brutal as the Grosse Fuge seems to us today, it is hard to imagine the effect it must have had at that time.  Stravinsky was fond of saying of this piece that it will forever be contemporary. This is perhaps only partly true.  The unforgiving, jagged texture of much of the piece certainly brings it close to sounds not heard again for a century hence, and the piece has a raw energy which will never be blunted.  Its surface texture in parts could easily be taken out of context as representative of music of our own time.  Still, we live now in the age of quantum mechanics, which takes the physical world out of the realm of the completely measurable, and of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which tells us that no logical system will ever be powerful enough to prove all statements we know to be true. Our faith in the invincibility of human reason and perception for explaining our world has been severely shaken.  Much of the art of our era has been devoted to feelings of pessimism and despair.  This is not Beethoven's world.  He shares our recognition of the vulnerable fragility of man, the inadequacy of the mind to fully ponder all the enigmas of our world.  And yet, his view is one which encompasses hope, and the possibility of triumph, a victorious human spirit.  The turn to clarity and optimism happens late in the piece, and quickly, but it is unmistakable, regretless, and moving beyond words.

Early in our quartet's relationship with this piece I happened to be reading Norman Maclean's book Young Men and Fire and came across a paragraph which I thought captured something of the essential nature of the Grosse Fuge.  I would like to share that passage with you:

Far back in the impulse to find a story is a storyteller's belief that at times life takes on the shape of art and that the remembered remnants of these moments are largely what we come to mean by life.  The short semi-humorous comedies we live, our long certain tragedies, and our springtime lyrics and limericks make up most of what we are.  They become almost all of what we remember of ourselves.  Although it would be too fancy to take these moments of our lives that seemingly have shape and design as proof we are inhabited by an impulse to art, yet deep within us is a counter impulse to the id or whatever name is presently attached to the disorderly, the violent, the catastrophic both in and outside us.  As a feeling, this counter impulse to the id is a kind of craving for sanity, for things belonging to each other, and results in a comfortable feeling when the universe is seen to take a garment from the rack that seems to fit.  Of course, both impulses need to be present to explain our lives and our art, and probably go a long way to explain why tragedy, inflamed with the disorderly, is generally regarded as the most composed art form.   ©  by Mark Steinberg
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String Quartet in C Major, Op. 59, No. 3 (Razumovsky)

Following the completion of the Opus 18 quartets, Beethoven avoided the string quartet medium for a time. The gap was not especially long—only about four years—but it was momentous for Beethoven’s creative development. Those four years saw the creation of the Eroica Symphony, which marked the opening of the floodgates. Never again was Beethoven to be so prolific, turning out symphonies, concertos, quartets, and an opera, along with many other works, all projected on a scale much larger than before.

Until very recently it was always the middle period that people referred to when they spoke of Beethoven’s style; the early works were too much influenced by his forebears, it was said, while the late ones were too bizarre and recherché. Even today, though we recognize the authentic Beethoven behind the masks of all three periods, we often feel that his middle period Beethoven’s works are individual in a way not always true earlier (though even here, his enormous debt to Haydn and Mozart is still evident).

Composition of the Opus 59 quartets occupied Beethoven in 1805-6, during which years he also composed the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Appassionata Sonata, and Fidelio (in its first incarnation as Leonore). These three quartets have often been compared with the Eroica Symphony and, rightly or not, their taut muscularity generally symbolizes our concept of what is Beethovenian.

A Viennese composer writing a quartet in C major with a slow introduction featuring mystifying and dissonant suspended harmonies cannot fail to call up the ghost of Mozart; and Beethoven’s Opus 59, No. 3, does indeed recall the “Dissonant” Quartet of the earlier master, at least in its opening measures, which play musical puns with Beethoven’s favorite chord of ambiguity, the diminished seventh. The Allegro vivace gets underway with a two-note rhythmic figure consisting of pickup and downbeat rising stepwise, a figure that become nearly ubiquitous in the movement to follow. The chords that support this figure punctuate interjections by the first violin taking off in solo flight. (The concerto-like flashiness of some of the soloistic writing calls to mind the fact that Beethoven was heavily involved in the composition of concertos immediately before and after the Opus 59 quartets: the third through fifth piano concerts, that for violin, and the Triple Concerto all appeared within a year or two on either side.)

The slow movement, in A minor, though not too slow (Beethoven modifies the marking Andante con moto with the addition specification “quasi Allegretto”), is filled with soulful “Russian” qualities, perhaps to make up for Beethoven’s failure to include a Russian folk song in this score, as he had done with the other two works in this set dedicated to a Russian nobleman. In any case, the hints of modal themes and scales in this extended movement may very well have been his idea of what Russian folk music sounded like.

By way of contrast, the movement that follows is unexpectedly a Minuet, squarely phrased, a decidedly old-fashioned genre employed here as a buffer between the somber, heavily minor-key weight of the slow movement and the vigorous energy of the finale.

The last movement is one of Beethoven’s most vigorously pushy, even hectoring quartet movements, built on a racing, somewhat repetitious fugato designed to return at the recapitulation enriched by the addition of a new counterpoint. The emphatic buildup to climaxes (sometimes rudely undercut, other times allowed to grow to completion) obviously recalls the triumphant C-major conclusion of another work of those years—the Fifth Symphony. Here, as elsewhere in his quartet output, Beethoven strains the rhetorical possibilities of the medium to the limit so as to close in a burst of glory.
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Brentano String Quartet
Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim.  "Passionate, uninhibited and spellbinding," raves the London Independent; the New York Times extols its "luxuriously warm sound [and] yearning lyricism"; the Philadelphia Inquirer praises its "seemingly infallible instincts for finding the center of gravity in every phrase and musical gesture"; and the Times (London) opines, "the Brentanos are a magnificent string quartet...This was wonderful, selfless music-making."  Within a few years of its formation, the Quartet garnered the first Cleveland Quartet Award and the Naumburg Chamber Music Award; and in 1996 the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center invited them to be the inaugural members of Chamber Music Society Two, a program which has become a coveted distinction for chamber groups and individuals ever since. The Quartet had its first European tour in 1997, and was honored in the U.K. with the Royal Philharmonic Award for Most Outstanding Debut. That debut recital was at London's Wigmore Hall, and the Quartet has continued its warm relationship with Wigmore, appearing there regularly and serving as the hall's Quartet-in-residence in the 2000-01 season.

In recent seasons the Quartet has traveled widely, appearing all over the United States and Canada, in Europe, Japan and Australia. It has performed in the world's most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York; the Library of Congress in Washington; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the Konzerthaus in Vienna; Suntory Hall in Tokyo; and the Sydney Opera House. The Quartet has participated in summer festivals such as Aspen, the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, the Edinburgh Festival, the Kuhmo Festival in Finland, and the Taos School of Music

In addition to performing the entire two-century range of the standard quartet repertoire, the Brentano Quartet has a strong interest in both very old and very new music. It has performed many musical works pre-dating the string quartet as a medium, among them Madrigals of Gesualdo, Fantasias of Purcell, and secular vocal works of Josquin. Also, the Quartet has worked closely with some of the most important composers of our time, among them Elliot Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Chou Wen-chung, Steven Mackey, Bruce Adolphe, and György Kurtág. The Quartet has commissioned works from Wuorinen, Adolphe, Mackey, David Horne and Gabriela Frank. The Quartet celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2002 by commissioning ten composers to write companion pieces for selections from Bach’s Art of Fugue, the result of which was an electrifying and wide-ranging single concert program. The Quartet has also worked with the celebrated poet Mark Strand, commissioning poetry from him to accompany works of Haydn and Webern.

The Quartet has been privileged to collaborate with such artists as soprano Jessye Norman, pianist Richard Goode, and pianist Mitsuko Uchida. The Quartet enjoys an especially close relationship with Ms. Uchida, appearing with her on stages in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

The Quartet has recorded the Opus 71 Quartets of Haydn, and has also recorded a Mozart disc for Aeon Records, consisting of the K. 464 Quartet and the K. 593 Quintet, with violist Hsin-Yun Huang. In the area of newer music, the Quartet has released a disc of the music of Steven Mackey on Albany Records, and has also recorded the music of Bruce Adolphe, Chou Wen-chung and Charles Wuorinen.

In 1998, cellist Nina Lee joined the Quartet, succeeding founding member Michael Kannen. The following season the Quartet became the first Resident String Quartet at Princeton University. The Quartet’s duties at the university are wide-ranging, including performances at least once a semester, as well as workshops with graduate composers, coaching undergraduates in chamber music, and assisting in other classes at the Music Department.

The Quartet is named for Antonie Brentano, whom many scholars consider to be Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved," the intended recipient of his famous love confession.
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