DA CAPO
PERMIAN BASIN STRING QUARTET FALL RECITAL
Friday, November 3, 2023 | 7:30PM
The Copper Rose - 415 N Grant Ave, Odessa


String Quartet in B♭ Op. 76, No. 4 “The Sunrise” (1797)
Joseph Haydn

     I. Allegro con spirito
     II. Adagio
     III. Menuetto: Allegro
     IV. Finale: Allegro, ma non troppo

Haydn composed 78 quartets over a period of 40 years, in which at least 30 are celebrated as masterworks of the form, hence his title “The father of the String Quartet”. In 1795 Haydn returned from his spectacularly suc-cessful visits to England to the relatively light duties prescribed by the new Esterházy Prince Nikolaus II. Nikolaus had abandoned his father’s palace at Esterházy, sacking its extensive musical establishment, and divided his time between Eisenstadt and Vienna. Haydn was kept on, but his main duty was just to write a Mass for the Princess’s name day. He was free to accept other commissions. One such came from Count Joseph Erdödy, the Hungarian Court Chancellor. Although Erdödy’s father had employed an orchestra to play in their family’s three palaces, the son, on inheriting the title in 1789 responded both to contemporary taste and financial stringency by replacing it with a string quartet.

In 1796 he placed a generous commission with Haydn for six quartets. The resulting ‘Erdödy’ quartets are a triumph, perhaps the pinnacle of Haydn’s long quartet-writing career. The fourth of the set, nicknamed ‘The Sunrise’, dawns gently in a simple Bb chord from the three lower strings. The first violin’s theme cautiously rises, with no suggestion of the movement’s Allegro con spirito marking. After 20-odd bars light floods in, somewhat reminiscent of the opening of ‘The Creation’ on which Haydn was working at the time, and the spirit is freed in dancing semiquavers. The opening chord returns in F but now with the theme in the cello curving down, rather than rising. The movement develops the contrast between these ideas.

The Adagio is one of Haydn’s most profound. Its pausing, hesitantly rising opening recalls, in slowmotion, the start of the first movement. The first violin’s rapt meditation is intensified by closely overlapping entries of this opening phrase. The Menuetto or German Waltz is rustic rather than courtly, and its lines again recall the gentle rise of the opening sunrise. The Trio transports the dance from a beer hall to the countryside as the drone of the french musette completes the transformation from palace to peasantry through a held chord on the cello and viola, again recalling the work’s opening. The last movement or finale begins with a charming English Folk song, crisp and tuneful with a jolly lilt. Like Beethoven, Haydn had an inexhaustible skill for transforming simplicity into elegance through the power of imaginative variation in a rondo style, alternating major-minor episodes, but after the reprise of the major section Più allegro, Più presto, the movement concludes into an exhilarating race to the finish. The marvel of Haydn’s ingenuity is only enhanced by a constant sense of accelerating tempo as the last variation scurries beyond our breathless reach into a giddy final cadence. Haydn’s inestimable achievement raised music to the highest levels of elegant play and the sheer pleasure of delicious design.

Notes by Chris Darwin / Kai Christiansen


Fuga y Misterio (1968)
Astor Piazzolla

Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) was an Argentine tango composer, bandoneon player and arranger. His oeuvre revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style or “nuevo tango”, incorporating elements from jazz and classical music.

Fuga Y Misterio (Fugue and Mystery) is a short piece by Astor Piazzolla composed in 1968 that quickly became one of the well-known and appreciated pieces of the Argentinian Musician. Fuga in three parts: in Nelegatti’s arrangement, the viola initiates with an agitated solo, which presents the actual fugue in tango rhythm, followed progressively by the rest of the strings, which together create an aggressive outbursting dance, only to abruptly come to a halt by a reflective and lyrical arioso - Misterio, whose melody is drawn from Piazzolla’s tango operetta “Maria de Buenos Aires”, which vanishes into the third part. The conclusion is a direct reprise or rebirth from the previous turbulent dance.

Notes by The Wind Repertory Program


String Quartet No. 2 in D Major (1881)
Alexander Borodin

Borodin’s two numbered string quartets, dating from the last fifteen years of his life, are still fundamentally salon-orientated, albeit on a more ambitious scale than his previous chamber works and reflecting lessons learned from the examples of Beethoven and Mendelssohn. The first quartet was explicitly ‘inspired by a theme of Beethoven’ (part of the replacement finale to the Große Fuge in the B flat major quartet, Op 130). Its doubly Germanic adoption of genre and theme did not go down well with Musorgsky or with Vladimir Stasov, the godfather and chief public advocate of the Mighty Handful. The String Quartet No 2 in D major, too, has a Beethoven connection, in that it was premiered at an Imperial Russian Musical Society concert in St Petersburg on 7 February 1882 (some sources say 9 March) alongside Beethoven’s second ‘Razumovsky’ quartet. However, by this stage in his career, Borodin had thoroughly absorbed his classical lessons and the quartet exudes a sovereign freedom of invention. Borodin’s second string quartet is more obviously tuneful than his first and has therefore become the more popular. It was composed in the summer of 1881 and is dedicated to the composer’s wife, some say in recognition of their twenty years together. Borodin had in fact just returned from another German tour, taking in Heidelberg, so the connection may well have been on his mind.

The first movement opens with the first of many glorious melodies that run throughout the work, heard on Borodin’s own instrument, the cello, but soon passed to the first violin. With the second subject, featuring the same two instruments, comes a more energetic texture, but the tone remains more serenade-like than strenuous. These ideas submit to traditional sonata-form routines, generating little or no tension, yet radiating such warmth and generosity that few would dream of complaining.

The second movement is a one-in-a-bar scherzo, with the theme initially on the viola. Its slower second idea (swaying violin lines in thirds) is derived from the first by inversion, and the movement is remarkable above all for the freedom of its development (rather than trio) section. The contrasting theme gained an unexpected afterlife when given the famous lyrics ‘Baubles, bangles and beads’ in Robert Wright and George Forrest’s 1953 musical Kismet, set in the Persia of the Arabian Nights.

The same show also appropriated the main theme of the succeeding notturno, for the song ‘And this is my beloved’. There can hardly be any complaint at this, since one of Borodin’s hallmarks, most conspicuous in his unfinished opera Prince Igor, was precisely this kind of evocation of Oriental sultriness. The languishing cello melody over rocking, syncopated accompaniment returns us to the expressive world of the first movement. The faster central section at last allows the second violin to join in the fun, with some playful dialoguing on rising scales that briefly enliven the essentially languid mood.

The boisterous last movement outlines two motifs in the introduction, which are then combined in artful counterpoint. Seemingly in a perpetual state of becoming, thanks in part to the repeated references back to that introduction, the finale falls into a perfectly regular, textbook sonata form, while its themes gracefully effect a reconciliation between Beethovenian terseness and Russian-orientalist luxuriance.

Notes by David Fanning © 2017



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