Brentano String Quartet

JOSEPH HAYDN
String Quartet in D Major, Op. 33, No. 6

In 1781, Haydn published his opus 33 string quartets, which he advertised as “written in a new and special style.” There has been plenty of debate about what he meant by this: do these quartets really present a departure from his earlier work, and how? Or was it just a sales pitch for this new work, coming after his quite successful and widely circulated opus 20 quartets? Certainly one can perceive new trends in the opus 33: a lightening of tone, an abandoning of the learned fugues that ended several of the opus 20, a replacing of minuet movements with fleeter, cleverer “scherzos.” Witty and innovative as he always was, in the opus 33 he sharpened his attention in this department, finding new comedic timings, sudden stops, reversals of the expected order of events, funny ways of chopping up and jumbling his melodies. 

The final quartet in the opus, number six, announces its “chopped-up” nature right from the opening: its main idea consists of a series of little gestures, courtly bows where nobody can decide who will walk into the room first. The first minute or so of the movement has a surprising number of “ending” moments: apparent attempts to come to a conclusion, when the music has only just begun. This is a favorite trick of the composer, imposing roadblocks and spinning his musical carriage down the road in spite of them. Often the snippet of music that attempts to conclude will become the germ of the new idea, to its own surprise. In the second, developmental section of the movement, Haydn does just that, launching the section with a reversal of the gestures from the beginning, so that the final gesture is now answered by the opening one — a reimagining of that conversation. A few bars later, the entire playbook of sonata form is thrown out of the window, as the moment of return happens in the wrong key, with an appearance of enormous confidence. Hurriedly, the correct key turns up in the second phrase and dismisses the impostor, trying to assure all onlookers that things are under control. But clearly the disturbance has created waves, as the music enters into an extended doubtful passages, modulating and exploring various other keys, working out its issues till it finally re-emerges in the home key — almost stumbling across it! — able to confirm matters with authentic conviction this time. 

The slow movement follows, a dark and sorrowful aria in D minor redolent perhaps of Gluck, and strikingly like the slow movement of Mozart’s Oboe Quartet, composed in the same year. The movement showcases Haydn’s love of melodic ambiguity: at the opening, and several more times, the first violin holds a long sustained note while the other voices play figures that might be murmuring accompanimental patterns or might be melody. Always this relationship is on a knife-edge — does the first-violin note evolve into the “true” melody of the passage, does it continue to stand by, does it get subsumed into the accompanimental rhythms? All of these things happen at one point or another, the melodic role sliding between voices as the music works its way through a richly chromatic landscape. This protean sliding-around — the refusal to assign fixed roles, melodic or accompanimental, to the four parts — is central to the movement’s beauty, a shared grieving whose source of eloquence remains shifting, unclear. 

The third movement, the Scherzo for this quartet, begins elegantly enough, with an idea that leans gracefully on downbeats, and is imitated by all the voices as they enter. However, almost right away everybody gets a case of the hiccups, and the wrong notes start poking out. (Or is Haydn laughing at all of us string players who struggle to control our bowstrokes?) By contrast, the middle Trio section, introduced by the cello, doesn’t wait to become wrongfooted: right from the start the melody places its highest, most dissonant note on the upbeat, which makes it hang in a pleasingly awkward, unbalanced way. Once more, lemmings as ever, the other voices jump in and hop around in this unbalanced dance. 

In some ways, the Finale is a departure for Haydn. Normally the master of the fake-out — irregular phrase lengths, sudden pauses, elisions, and order-reversals — here he serves up a movement that is utterly regular, almost to the very end. It is a kind of round dance in a comfortable, even jolly Allegretto tempo, alternating major-key and minor-key sections. In the opening section, the melody features a bouncing downward leap, a kid jumping off a slightly too high ledge for fun. The spiky good cheer of the major sections alternate with a smooth, mournful cast in the minor ones. As the movement progresses, the composer weaves embellishments into each section as it returns, triplets and hocket-like offbeats. We are disarmed by the simplicity of this succession, unceasing until three bars before the end, when — Haydn being Haydn — he drops in just one unexpected silence when the players seem to forget their lines; and then he finishes off the piece in one glad swoop.

– Misha Amory

LEI LIANG
Madrigal Mongolia 
(for string quartet, 2024)

Madrigal Mongolia sprang from a musical and spiritual heritage that has a special place in my heart – the music of Inner Mongolia.

I have loved this music since my childhood. One of my family’s closest friends, the renowned Mongolian scholar Wulalji visited our home in Beijing frequently. With a sip of alcohol, he would start singing, sometimes continuing late into the night. These personal memories date to the years after the Cultural Revolution, when obnoxiously cheerful propaganda music flooded the airwaves. Yet it was these lonely long songs that evoked in me a deep sense of longing and awakening. 

The Mongols were the world’s most feared conquerors, yet the music they sing today is not martial in character. Quite the contrary, they sing of a mother’s devotion, friendship, loss of loved ones, and homeland. Their melancholy sentiments are understandable, for the warriors were always far from home. These songs remind us of what it means to be away.

Aren’t we all living far away from “home” today?

Madrigal Mongolia was commissioned by the Brentano Quartet, who worked closely with Professor Chou Wen-chung,who once told me these inspiring words about the cultural heritage of our home: “In calligraphy, every stroke has emotion. Here, lines become waves, and becomes textures.” Madrigal Mongolia was written in memory of him.

Madrigal Mongolia was commissioned by the Spiralis Music Trust in honor of Chou 

Wen-chung, ProtoStar Group, Salt Bay Chamberfest with Richard Replin, and Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts.

– Lei Liang

JOHANNES BRAMS: 
String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 67

In the summer of 1875, the 42-year-old Brahms was summering in the beautiful German town of Ziegelhausen, and trying to avoid working on his special bugbear, the First Symphony. Instead he wrote quite a lot of other beautiful music, including his Third String Quartet, all of which he dismissed in a letter to a friend as “trifles,” a way to put off the serious work that lay ahead.  In the event, he didn’t procrastinate for long, as the symphony was published and premiered the following year; and the Third Quartet, according to Joseph Joachim, was later to become his favorite of the three quartets.

While this quartet may have been a “trifle” to its composer, there is nothing trivial about it – or its predecessors – for string quartets who undertake to play it. It is common knowledge to performers of Brahms’ chamber music that the sextets, and many quintets, that he wrote are kinder to their performers than the string quartets. The sound palette of Brahms’ musical imagination was of a peculiar richness and depth, to the point that five or six performers provided the right natural sonority, but four would find themselves just that much more taxed, their resources that much more stretched. This difference works its way into the skin of the quartets, making them more interestingly effortful and craggy, subtly altering their essence. As one listens to this music, one senses a tension between the large sound-concept and the slightly smaller box that it has been fit into, which places its own stamp on the piece, independent of the musical content itself. 

Brahms’ Third Quartet truly sounds like the work of a man on his summer holiday. Especially in its outer movements there is a feeling of the countryside, of sunshine. The first movement has strong ties to the same movement of Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet. Aside from sharing its key and its meter – fairly superficial traits – the Brahms evokes the atmosphere of the hunt from the very opening, imitating hunting horns perhaps even more faithfully than Mozart’s music. In many of its most important melodies and motifs it specifically recalls similar material from the earlier piece. And, perhaps most importantly, there seems a conscious effort at simplicity of harmony and texture in many sections, from a composer who, like Mozart, was known for music that was often sophisticated, intricate and dark. In the main melody at the opening, Brahms uses the simplest call-and-response, a quiet playful idea that is trumpeted back immediately in forte; this exchange continues, evoking a child’s game of monkey see, monkey do, rare and disarming in its artlessness. Much later we hear the other main idea of the movement, a basic skipping up and down a few steps of a major scale, again an evocation of child’s play, written intentionally to be rhythmically and harmonically as simple as possible.  This is not to say that the movement is devoid of darker or more complicated music – there is quite a lot of shadow, as well as plenty of involved counterpoint – but at the movement’s close we are left with a recollection of sunny, carefree laughter, a conscious setting-aside of worry and convolution.

The second movement is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary slow movements Brahms ever wrote, despite a crowded field of contenders.  A hushed unison opening branches out into harmony, introducing a tender and reaching aria for the first violin. Again we are struck by the simplicity of the rhythm in this melody (although the harmonic underpinnings are now richer and more chromatic, more typically Brahms); perhaps the singer is young, sweetly naïve, discovering first love.  The contrasting middle section presents a fiercer, prouder idea in dotted rhythms, which alternates with a smoother, more mysterious choral response; this world is plural, the many voices in concert rather than the single, private one. From here the first violin embarks on a wandering fantasy of 16ths, meeting a partner (the second violin) with whom he conducts a difficult, searching conversation. Ultimately the music reaches an anguished climax, after which we are eased into a return of the opening song – this time shared between the cello and first violin, an easier, more graceful exchange than the earlier one. An expressive coda returns to the arching gesture which opened the movement, exploring it more fervently, and reaches another passionate climax before closing at last with a prayerful cadence.

The third movement is a different story: troubled, elusive and restless, yet graceful too, evoking an unnameable dance. Now the viola is the hero, singing out boldly while the other instruments, muted, band together in shadowy support. The “Agitato” in the movement’s title is felt rhythmically – in the persistent, obsessive rhythms of the opening idea, in the tendency towards hemiola (grouping beats in two’s against the movement’s triple meter), and in moments that halt and jar ill-fittingly.  But there is also a latent agitato feel in the harmony of the music, which wanders, changes key constantly, and shades towards minor even in major-key passages. The first violin often steps forward, a counterpart to the viola, sometimes agreeing with him, sometimes interrogating and confronting him, providing a kind of balance without which the music might tilt dangerously out of control. A shorter middle “Trio” section provides a lighter, more tightly structured contrast: at first the three muted instruments play a fragmented, graceful tune, then the viola enters and sings a mournful melody against its repetition. After the return of the main section, and the climax which it attains a second time, a strangely calm coda follows, bringing a disconsolate almost-peace, an uneasy conclusion to the movement. 

With the finale, the mood of the piece returns to the geniality of the opening movement, though not at first matching its energy. Here we have a set of variations, which recalls the finale of Beethoven’s “Harp” Quartet so strongly that it seems like an homage of sorts. As with the Beethoven, the movement is a lighter companion to three more intense preceding movements. Both the Beethoven and the Brahms feature a quite short, slightly irregular theme in two repeated sections, charmingly laconic, playing it close to the vest.  The two movements also share many details: a variation where the cello plays repeated triplet notes under legato duple rhythms in the other instruments, an early variation featuring the viola, and a fantasy-like coda. However, the Brahms movement deviates from the script when, after several variations have gone by, the music from the first movement stages a kind of invasion, crashing in and assuming command of the proceedings for awhile.  But the variation structure persists, despite the intrusion, and ultimately we perceive that the invading forces are subsumed in the landscape of the music, though they never disappear entirely. Late in the coda, the storyline flags, gently losing momentum and finally coming to a near-halt, before the movement is swept to a close in one joyous flourish.

– Misha Amory

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.” The Quartet has performed across five continents in the world’s most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall in New York; the Library of Congress in Washington; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the Konzerthaus in Vienna; Tokyo’s Suntory hall; and the Sydney Opera House. Festival appearances include Aspen, the Ojai Music Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, the Kuhmo Festival in Finland, and the Seoul Spring Festival of Chamber Music.

The Quartet has launched numerous projects that reimagine the standard concert program. In 2002, they celebrated their 10th anniversary by commissioning 10 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. Fourteen years later, they revisited Bach’s masterpiece, performing the entire work in an ambitious multimedia project at the 92nd Street Y in New York with dancers, narrated excerpts, and an installation by artist Gabriel Calatrava. Recently, the Quartet presented a second multimedia project at the Y, which juxtaposed the poetry of Wallace Stevens with late Beethoven and music by composer Martin Bresnick. Other projects have included a three-program examination of Late Style, presented at Carnegie Hall; a program surveying the music of lamentation over the last 300 years crowned by Bartók’s Second Quartet; and numerous adaptations of music from Renaissance and early Baroque, including works by Josquin, Gesualdo, Purcell and Monteverdi.

The Quartet has been privileged to collaborate with such artists as soprano Jessye Norman, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, as well as pianists Jonathan Biss, Richard Goode and Mitsuko Uchida. The Quartet also maintains a strong commitment to new music, and has expanded the quartet canon by commissioning works from some of the most important composers of our time, among them Bruce Adolphe, Matthew Aucoin, Gabriela Frank, Stephen Hartke, Vijay Iyer, Steven Mackey, and Charles Wuorinen. Upcoming commissions and collaborations include a new quartet from Chinese composer Lei Liang; a viola quintet from James MacMillan; and a large-scale dramatic work, “Dido Reimagined,” based on the story of Dido and Aeneas, from composer Melinda Wagner and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, to be performed with soprano Dawn Upshaw.

Dedicated and highly sought after as educators, the Quartet are currently Artists-in-Residence at the Yale School of Music, where they perform in concert each semester, work closely with students in chamber music contexts, and spearhead the instruction at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in the summers. The Quartet has given numerous master classes and workshops across the country, and returns annually to the Taos School of Music as visiting faculty. In 2013 and 2017, the Quartet assisted at the Cliburn International Piano Competition, performing quintets with competitors in the final rounds. Before coming to Yale, the Quartet served for fifteen years as Ensemble-in-Residence at Princeton University.

The Quartet has recorded extensively, releasing discs of quartets by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, as well as a recording of the Schubert Cello Quintet with Michael Kannen. The Quartet has also recorded music by several contemporary composers, among them Bruce Adolphe, Chou Wen-chung, Steven Mackey and Charles Wuorinen. The Quartet’s recording of Beethoven’s Quartet, Op. 131 was featured in the film “A Late Quartet,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Christopher Walken, released in 2012. In 2017, they recorded a live album with Joyce DiDonato, “Into the Fire—Live from Wigmore Hall,” which included works by Strauss, Debussy, Guillaume Lekeu and Jake Heggie for Warner Classics. Their most recent release features the K. 428 and K. 465 (“Dissonance”) Quartets of Mozart for the Azica label.

Awards and honors include the first Cleveland Quartet Award (1995); the Naumburg Chamber Music Award (1995); inaugural members of Chamber Music Society Two at the CMS of Lincoln Center (1996); and the Royal Philharmonic Award for Most Outstanding Debut (at Wigmore Hall in 1997.)

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.

For more information, please visit their website.