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PROGRAM NOTESIn 1789 King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia commissioned Mozart to write six string quartets after the composer's visit to Berlin and Potsdam. As it turned out, Mozart completed only three "Prussian" quartets (K. 575, 589, and 590), the last of his string quartets. The King was an excellent cellist, and Mozart was challenged to write music that would feature the cello without becoming either too difficult or too concerto-like. Consequently, as Paul Griffith points out in The String Quartet, every movement of the quartet includes cello solos with the instrument playing at the top of its range. To balance the prominent cello, Mozart wrote parts of greater consequence for the two inner voices, the second violin and the viola. So many solos, notes Griffith, "can make the ensemble sound like a committee in which all must have their say." This concertante style has a number of limitations: it dilutes the music since so much has to be stated four times, and it "predisposes the music to a moderate tempo since hurried little solos would be absurd and repeated slow ones wearisome." Therefore, all the movements proceed at a moderate tempo, the outer ones and the minuetto marked Allegretto with the Andante offering some variation in tempo. The quartet opens with buoyant good spirits as the first theme, a rising arpeggio followed by a descending scale, is stated in the first violin and then the viola. The second theme also features the rising arpeggio, this time ending in a long held note. The development and recapitulation follow conventional practices of sonata form. Mozart casts the Andante in A-B-A form. The contrast between the two sections comes, as Melvin Berger describes it, "from the melodic contour of A, an earthbound line, and B, a soaring phrase that passes from instrument to instrument." Further contrast emerges in the thick texture of A, with the violins doubled, and B, a single melodic line accompanied by repeated-note figures. After the return of A, a short coda concludes the movement on a four-note turn. A four-note turn also announces the sprightly Menuetto, where, Berger says, "the music glitters with sharp contrasts -- soft and loud, staccato and legato. The trio is a showcase for the cello, which sings out the cantabile melodies (with that same four-note turn), very high in its range." After the trio, the menuetto repeats to end the movement. The cello introduces the main theme of the "serenely happy last movement," which begins with a rising arpeggio that recalls the first movement. Contrasting interludes of the movement's rondo form spring from ascending arpeggios, but in different keys, settings, and scorings, so that they sound like new material. Tightly organized and highly contrapuntal, this movement is probably the most interesting of the quartet.
BÁRTOK. String Quartet # 3 (1927) Do the six string quartets Béla Bártok completed between 1909 and 1939 still sound "modern" and "difficult" a half-century after the composer's death? Perhaps to some concert patrons if not to the many young ensembles that have blossomed in the burgeoning of chamber music during the past several decades for whom they are now almost standard repertory. What is certain is that these quartets still constitute the most original and revolutionary contributions to the genre since Beethoven's. Its present popularity notwithstanding, Bártok's third quartet must indeed have sounded bewilderingly avant-garde to the audience at London's Wigmore Hall that first heard it on February 10, 1929. It still demands concentrated listening since it is in one continuous movement with four contrasting parts blending disparate elements of Magyar folk music with compositional devices from the Baroque period. "The melodic world of my string quartets," the composer wrote, "does not essentially differ from that of folk song, only the framework is stricter." It must be observed, however, that like Gershwin in Porgy and Bess, Bártok does not quote, echo, or imitate folk melodies, but has so assimilated and absorbed them that his creations seem authentically folkloric. From its rather bleak opening in moderate tempo to the almost frenetic recapitulation and Coda the whole quartet is built around a series of three-note cells or mottos punctuated by rising (fourth) and descending (third) intervals. "I do not like to repeat a musical idea without change," Bártok explained, adding "and I do not bring back a single part in exactly the same way." Once the listener gets used to this feeling of continuous development without the usual reiterations the work becomes much easier to comprehend and to enjoy. The novelty of this quartet becomes most apparent in the fast Seconda parte made up entirely of a rising and falling scale line first played pizzicato by the cello and then expanded with such uncommon instrumental effects as col legno (striking with the wood of the bow) and ponticello (bowing near the bridge). The recapitulation is freely varied, not a literal reprise, although containing reminders of the original three-note motif.
BEETHOVEN. String Quartet in B Flat Major, Op. 130 Beethoven's works were somewhat arbitrarily categorized by his biographer, Wilhelm von Lenz, into three styles or periods, the first from 1794 when he was 24 beginning with his piano trios Opus 1 until 1800, the second from 1800 to about 1815, and the third from then until his death in 1827. The first symptoms of Beethoven's deafness appeared before 1800, his days as a virtuoso pianist dwindled thereafter and by about 1819 his deafness became total. Thus, most of the works in the third period were composed when Beethoven was totally deaf and were dependent solely upon his training, experience and imagination, rather than his ear. During this third period he composed the five piano sonatas, opus 101, 111, the Missa Solemnis, the Ninth Symphony, the overture "Ruins of Athens", the overtures Op. 115 and 124, the late string-quartets Op. 127, 130, 131, 132 and 135 and the Grosse Fuge for string quartet, the latter being the original finale of the Op. 130 quartet, detached and published separately as Op. 133 posthumously. Because the Grosse Fuge was exceedingly long and complex and confounding to many listeners and players, Beethoven's publisher, Matthias Artaria, offered to pay him for a two piano transcription of the fugue and convinced him to substitute a new finale for the Opus 130 quartet. Performance practices vary with a few quartets playing the Grosse Fuge as the final movement of the Opus 130 quartet as Beethoven intended, but most playing the Opus 130 quartet with the substitute last movement, which is how it will be heard tonight. The subtitle "Liebquartett" ("Dear Quartet") was a name bestowed upon the quartet by Beethoven in his conservation books, used for communication with others because of his deafness. The Opus 130 quartet was one of three quartets commissioned by Prince Nicholas Galitzin in 1822 and dedicated to him.
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