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As critic Keith Horner tells us (2004), Camille Saint-Saëns was a child prodigy who made his official debut as a pianist in Paris at the age of ten, where he offered any Beethoven sonata that his audience cared to name as an encore. A prolific composer, he published over 169 musical compositions as well as writings on music, a book of philosophy, essays on botany and zoology, several plays, and great deal of poetry.

After Beethoven, string quartet production became increasingly rare: Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms continued the tradition in the Austro-German region where the form had received the greatest attention. The piano had become so important and authoritative that its presence, even in chamber ensembles, was considered almost indispensable. Few string quartets were published in late nineteenth France, the most important among them those of Debussy (1893), Franck (1899), and Ravel (1903). Saint-Saëns composed two works in the genre, this first one in 1899, which he dedicated to the celebrated Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, who had formed a quartet for the purpose of spreading contemporary French music. Like Brahms and Schumann before him, Saint-Saëns favored the piano in chamber ensembles, so composing for string quartet challenged him as he worked with the tone-colors and sonorities of the four string instruments in harmonic and polyphonic situations where parts must be of equal importance.

In the first movement, a somewhat melancholy introduction leads into a vigorous Allegro; knowing that Ysaÿe would be the first violinist led Saint-Saëns to write virtuosic passages with extremely high pitches. Syncopation and fugal passages enliven this movement. The lively scherzo consists of a series of variations on a popular song from Brittany. The slow movement's broad, sweeping gestures and textures are reminiscent of the late Beethoven without the intensity. The Finale, notes Horner, is "a closely argued and serious movement which cools down somewhat before a brisk coda propels the work to its end."

Osvaldo Golijov (pronounced Goll-ee-hoff) grew up in an Eastern European household in La Plata, Argentina, where he was surrounded by classical chamber music, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music, and the new tango of Astor Piazolla (whose "Milonga del Angel" the Ahn Trio performed for us in April 2003). Golijov moved to the United States in 1986, earned a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, and is now an Associate Professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.

Composed in 1992 for the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Yiddishbbuk is Golijov's first major work for string quartet. Of his collaboration with the St. Lawrence, Golijov has written, "If it's true, as Borges has said, that in every man's life there is a moment that defines his existence, then meeting the St. Lawrence String Quartet was that moment for me." On hearing their first read through of Yiddishbbuk's first movement, he said, "It felt like lightning. For the first time in my life I was listening to what I had written being played as vividly as I had heard it in my head. I was frozen, speechless ... ." The St. Lawrence's 2002 recording of the work was nominated for two Grammy awards in 2003: Best Chamber Music Performance, and Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

In his notes for the 2002 recording Golijov explains his inspiration for the music. While reading Kafka, he learned that the Czech writer had copied fragments from some apocryphal psalms in the original Yiddishbbuk. Kafka's notes included the opening text, "A broken song played on a shattered cymbalon," and ended with "No one sings as purely as those who are in the deepest hell. Theirs is the song which we confused with that of the angels." Golijov based his string quartet on these textual fragments in "an attempt to reconstruct that music."

Golijov explains that "The movements of the piece bear the initials of persons commemorated in the work. The first movement commemorates three children interned by the Nazis at the Terezin: Doris Weiserova (193 - 1944), Frantisek Bass (1930 - 1944), and Tomas Kauders (1934 - 1943). Their poems and drawings appear in the book '...I never saw another butterfly...,' published by the US Holocaust Museum. The second movement bears the initials of the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904 - 1991), and the last movement the initials of Leonard Bernstein (1918 - 1990)."

Yiddishbbuk is a highly spiritual and complex meditation. In "Perfect Notes from a Lost Book," Richard Byrne's analysis offers listeners insight into the musical text. In this fourteen-minute work, he tells us, Golijov "attempts nothing less than a cycle of reclamation, mourning and celebration that links essential moments in 20th century Jewish art and music."

The three shattered songs that make up the first movement are, Byrne observes, "a perfect metaphor for the Nazi attempts to destroy Jewish lives and art." The music for D.W. begins the movement with a "haunting motif that attempts to echo just what that 'broken song' would sound like: strings plucking and thudding arrhytmically, almost to the point of breaking." The music for F.B. opens eerily and pianissimo as the "thread of melody which represents the youthful talent of the children is reconstituted." The movement ends in music for T.K in which the melodic thread is "cruelly choked off after yet another frantic assault of strings," the whole movement conveying "a chillingly black finality."

The 1978 Nobel Prize winner Issac Bashevis Singer escaped the horrors of the Holocaust that would have found him in his native Poland and immigrated to the United States in 1935 where he continued to celebrate his Central European Jewish roots in the Yiddish language. The music emerges out of silence, its opening motif suggesting the hushed tolling of bells. As the movement progresses, the texture thickens, the strings become more strident, and the cello sings a plaintive song. After a pizzicato melody is introduced over slightly murmuring strings, the movement settles into silence.

The third movement celebrates not the Leonard Bernstein of West Side Story or Candide, but the American conductor who gave "passionately magic renditions" (Byrne) of the work of another Jewish composer - Gustav Mahler. The movement opens with an anxious gesture over a prolonged note in the cello, followed by a dialogue between upper and lower strings. The intensity builds, textures thicken, and sonorities deepen when, suddenly, single chords interrupt the chaos and bring a moment of linear clarity, as if some resolution has emerged from the "deepest hell" of the Holocaust.

This quartet is considered the first great Russian string quartet, and the circumstances of its composition were unusual. Though a professor at the Moscow Conservatory and the teacher of a growing number of private students, Tchaikovsky was struggling financially when his friend Nikolay Rubinstein suggested that to raise funds he prepare a concert of his own music. Since hiring an orchestra was too expensive, Rubinstein suggested that the program consist of solo and chamber music. Lacking a major chamber work, Tchaikovsky composed his first string quartet in the month of February 1871. The work soon achieved international currency owing to the popularity of its second movement.

Structurally this first quartet is more classical than romantic, following the models of Mozart and Schubert, but its musical themes are clearly Slavic. The rising and falling of the opening chords of the first movement have given the quartet the subtitle "The Accordion." Constructed in sonata form, the first movement offers two themes, the first fluid, the second opening with a richly harmonized melody in the viola. The closing theme begins with light, delicate passages played by the first violin. All three themes are addressed in the development section and restated in the recapitulation. The movement ends in a high-spirited coda.

The Andante cantabile is based on the folksong "Sidel Vanya," which Tchaikovsky had heard at his sister and brother-in-law's family estate at Kamenka in Ukraine. The song begins with the unremarkable line, "Vanya sat on a divan and smoked a pipe of tobacco." Between statements of this folk melody, Tchaikovsky introduces a highly expressive original melody, played twice by the first violin over pizzicato accompaniment.

Marked "Not too fast and with fire," the Scherzo exhibits the robust rhythmic character of a Russian peasant dance. The trio consists of the three upper instruments playing complex figurations over a sustained drone in the cello. A repeat of the scherzo completes the movement.

The Finale is permeated by folk idioms, its first theme an exuberant dance, its second a song of Slavic soulfulness. After Tchaikovsky works out both themes, a sudden stop interrupts the music. A whirlwind coda brings the string quartet to a close.