Encounter: Fellowship Artist Spotlight I

Monday, August 8 · 2 PM

THE BAKER-BAUM CONCERT HALL

This event will be live streamed.

HAYDN
(1732-1809)

String Quartet in G Major, Opus 64, No. 4, Hob.III:67

Allegro con brio
Menuet & Trio: Allegretto
Adadio, cantabile e sostenuto
Finale: Presto

Pelia Quartet
Heejeon Ahn, Dalphine Skene, violins; Sung Jin Lee, viola; Nathan Cottrell, cello

BRAHMS
(1833-1897)

Piano Quintet in F Minor, Opus 34

Allegro non troppo
Andante un poco adagio
Scherzo: Allegro
Finale: Poco sostenuto; Allegro non troppo

Erin Keefe, violin; Sung Jin Lee, viola;

Aestas Trio
Wynona Yinuo Wang, piano; Sophia Stoyanovich, violin; Andrew Byun, cello

String Quartet in G Major, Opus 64, No. 4, Hob.III:67     

JOSEPH HAYDN
Born March 31, 1732, Rohrau, Austria
Died May 31, 1809, Vienna
Composed: 1790
Approximate Duration: 19 minutes

By 1790, when the Opus 64 set of six string quartets was published, Haydn was writing to satisfy a great demand for his music throughout Europe. These were to be among the final works he wrote as a servant. He was on tour in London at the time of their publication, having just been released, upon the Prince’s death, from thirty years’ service at the royal court at Esterhazy (with a generous pension). These quartets are exuberant in their mastery and are dedicated to Johann Tost, the violinist who was principal second violin in Haydn’s orchestra at Esterhazy.

As in much of Haydn’s music, his debt to the conventions and possibilities of comic opera is immediately evident. Although the first movement begins in a straightforwardly jovial manner, the opening phrase is followed by a wink-like aside to the audience, turning away from the main action. Following the next phrase the aside is further developed, motivating the continuing progress of the movement; the audience is made complicit in the wit of the proceedings, cognizant of the fact that not all is as it appears. When a cadence suggesting a second, contrasting theme in a new key is reached, Haydn instead gives us slippery, tonally unstable music; it is as if a doorbell rings in a comic opera, but when the door is flung open there is no one there and everyone looks about perplexedly. This music settles into a mildly virtuosic flurry of notes within which is embedded the motif of the original “aside.” Eventually, at the last possible moment, the expected theme pops up, teasingly appearing from around the back of the house and tapping us on the shoulder, trailing off in winks reminiscent of those at the opening. It is this late-arrived theme that ushers in the development section, with the new guest entertaining all with heavily embroidered tales of adventure. While there is not much developing in this development section, once the recapitulation of the opening arrives both the opening theme and the more lost, slippery second music have brief bouts of development, but this time the music for the late arrival is not to be found at all. The evening’s host tries to take the floor one more time, but is interrupted in mid-sentence, and after some more determined and good-natured searching we are yet again surprised by the sly intrusion of the jaunty theme, closing out the movement.

It is often convention that allows fancy to have meaning. In Haydn’s time, the minuet was a well-known, almost formulaic dance; in London in 1770 Pierre Hoegi published A Tabular System Whereby the Art of Composing Minuets Is Made So Easy That Any Person, without the Least Knowledge of Musick, May Compose Ten Thousand, All Different, and in the Most Pleasing and Correct Manner. For such an imaginative composer as Haydn, these expectations provided a perfect frame within which to frolic. In this particular minuet there is much play between rustic and elegant music, between the court’s minuet and the popular Laendler. The movement starts out closer in feel to a Laendler, a dance that was described in Haydn’s day as one where “couples hop and turn themselves continually.” It seems as if the couples dance in this fashion when we have our backs turned; as soon as one turns to look they settle more modestly into a well-behaved minuet proper. Ironically, the trio section, filled with typical Laendler figuration, almost yodel-like and repetitious (although in a cheeky way, in groups of five bars), is rather gentle, accompanied by strummed pizzicato chords in the lower three voices.

The third, slow movement is an extended aria for the first violin, surely a nod to Haydn’s friend and dedicatee Tost. It is a beautiful, spun-out song. Yet here is an unusual ideal of beauty, one that celebrates asymmetry, with offbeat notes often stressed, pulling the center of gravity of various phrases off to one side. A contrasting section in minor becomes more interior and exploratory, but when the original version of the aria returns it is still open and lyrical, unmarked by the experience.

The finale is joyful and full of invention. In a favorite game of Haydn’s, phrases are set up with the expectation of regularity and then thwarted, celebrating the careful art of disproportion. The music occasionally seems to get a bit stuck, but of course usually manages an elegant dismount despite any unconventional maneuvers along the way. The piece ends with two Puckish winks, hearkening back to the comic rhetoric of the first movement.

—Mark Steinberg

Quintet for Piano and Strings in F Minor, Opus 34

JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born: May 7, 1833, Hamburg
Died: April 3, 1897, Vienna
Composed: 1864
Approximate Duration: 41 minutes

Brahms began work on the music that would eventually become his Piano Quintet in F Minor during the summer of 1862, when he was 29 years old and still living in Hamburg. As first conceived, however, this music was not a piano quintet. Brahms originally composed it as a string quintet—string quartet plus an extra cello—and almost surely he took as a model the great String Quintet in C Major of Schubert, a composer he very much admired. But when Joseph Joachim and colleagues played through the string quintet for the composer, all who heard it felt it unsatisfactory: an ensemble of strings alone could not satisfactorily project the power of this music. So Brahms set out to remedy this—he returned to the score during the winter of 1863-64 and recast it as a sonata for two pianos. Once again the work was judged not wholly successful—it had all the power the music called for, but this version lacked the sustained sonority possible with strings that much of this music seemed to demand. Among those confused by the two-piano version was Clara Schumann, who offered the young composer a completely different suggestion: “Its skillful combinations are interesting throughout, it is masterly from every point of view, but—it is not a sonata, but a work whose ideas you might—and must—scatter, as from a horn of plenty, over an entire orchestra . . . Please, dear Johannes, for this once take my advice and recast it.”

Recast it Brahms did, but not for orchestra. Instead, during the summer and fall of 1864 he arranged it for piano and string quartet, combining the dramatic impact of the two-piano version with the string sonority of the original quintet. In this form it has come down to us today, one of the masterpieces of Brahms’ early years, and it remains a source of wonder that music that sounds so right in its final version could have been conceived for any other combination of instruments. Clara, who had so much admired her husband’s piano quintet, found Brahms’ example a worthy successor, describing it as “a very special joy to me” (Brahms published the two-piano version as his Opus 34b, and it is occasionally heard in this form, but he destroyed all the parts of the string quintet version).

The Piano Quintet shows the many virtues of the young Brahms—strength, lyricism, ingenuity, nobility—and presents them in music of unusual breadth and power. This is big music: if all the repeats are taken, the Quintet can stretch out to nearly three-quarters of an hour, and there are moments when the sheer sonic heft of a piano and string quartet together makes one understand why Clara thought this music might be most effectively presented by a symphony orchestra.

The Quintet is also remarkable for young Brahms’ skillful evolution of his themes: several of the movements derive much of their material from the simplest of figures, which are then developed ingeniously. The very beginning of the Allegro non troppo is a perfect illustration. In octaves, the first violin, cello, and piano present the opening theme, which ranges dramatically across four measures and then comes to a brief pause. Instantly the music seems to explode with vitality above an agitated piano figure. But the piano’s rushing sixteenth-notes are simply a restatement of the opening theme at a much faster tempo, and this compression of material marks the entire movement—that opening theme will reappear in many different forms. A second subject in E major, marked dolce and sung jointly by viola and cello, also spins off a wealth of secondary material, and the extended development leads to a quiet coda, marked poco sostenuto. The tempo quickens as the music powers its way to the resounding chordal close.

In sharp contrast, the Andante, un poco Adagio sings with a quiet charm. The piano’s gently-rocking opening theme, lightly echoed by the strings, gives way to a more animated and flowing middle section before the opening material reappears, now subtly varied. Matters change sharply once again with the C-minor Scherzo, which returns to the dramatic mood of the first movement. The cello’s ominous pizzicato C hammers insistently throughout, and once again Brahms wrings surprising wealth from the simplest of materials: a nervous, stuttering sixteenth-note figure is transformed within seconds into a heroic chorale for massed strings, and later Brahms generates a brief fugal section from this same theme. The trio section breaks free of the darkness of the scherzo and slips into C-major sunlight for an all-too-brief moment of quiet nobility before the music returns to C minor and a da capo repeat.

The finale opens with strings alone, reaching upward in chromatic uncertainty before the Allegro non troppo main theme steps out firmly in the cello. The movement seems at first to be a rondo, but this is a rondo with unexpected features: it offers a second theme, sets the rondo theme in unexpected keys, and transforms the cello’s healthy little opening tune in music of toughness and turbulence.

Clara Schumann, who had received the dedication of her husband’s quintet, was instrumental in the dedication of Brahms’. Princess Anna of Hesse had heard Brahms and Clara perform this music in its version for two pianos and was so taken with it that Brahms dedicated not only that version to the princess but the Piano Quintet as well. When the princess asked Clara what she might send Brahms as a measure of her gratitude, Clara had a ready suggestion. And so Princess Anna sent Brahms a treasure that would remain his prized possession for the rest of his life: Mozart’s manuscript of the Symphony No. 40 in G Minor.

—Eric Bromberger

Financial support is provided by the City of San Diego

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