presents DANISH STRING QUARTET - · PDF file2 | For Tickets and More: | 415.392.2545 ARTIST PROFILES San Francisco Performances presents the San Francisco debut of the Danish String

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presents…

DANISH STRING QUARTETFrederik Øland | Violin Asbjørn Nørgaard | ViolaRune Tonsgaard Sørensen | Violin Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin | Cello

Monday, February 19, 2018 | 7:30pmHerbst Theatre

BARTÓK String Quartet No. 1, Sz. 40 Lento Poco a poco accelerando all’Allegretto Introduzione: Allegro; Allegro vivace

Folk Music from Nordic Countries

INTERMISSION

BEETHOVEN String Quartet in F Major, Opus 59, No. 1 Allegro Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando Adagio molto e mesto Thème russe: Allegro

The Shenson Chamber Series is made possible by Fred M. Levin and Nancy Livingston, The Shenson Foundation.

This concert is made possible in part by the generous support of the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation.

The Danish String Quartet is represented by Kirshbaum Associates711 West End Avenue, Suite 5KN, New York, NY 10025kirshbaumassociates.com

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ARTIST PROFILES

San Francisco Performances presents the San Francisco debut of the Danish String Quartet.

Embodying the quintessential elements of a chamber music ensemble of the high-est caliber, the Danish String Quartet has established a reputation for their integrat-ed sound and technical and interpretive talents matched by an infectious joy for music making and “rampaging energy” (The New Yorker). Since making their debut in 2002 at the Copenhagen Festival, the musical friends have demonstrated a pas-sion for Scandinavian composers, who they frequently incorporate into adventurous contemporary programs, while also giving skilled and profound interpretations of the classical masters. The New York Times se-lected the quartet’s concerts as highlights of 2012 and 2015, praising “one of the most powerful renditions of Beethoven’s Opus 132 String Quartet that I’ve heard live or on a recording,” and noting that “the adventur-ous young members of the Danish String Quartet play almost everything excitingly.”

The Danish String Quartet’s expansive 2017–18 North American season includes more than 30 performances across 17 states. The ensemble gives debut perfor-mances at numerous renowned venues, such as Bravo! Vail and Ravinia summer

festivals, Cleveland Chamber Music So-ciety, Santa Fe Pro Musica, Oregon Bach Festival, and San Francisco Performances, among others. Further season highlights include returns to the Mostly Mozart Fes-tival, UW World Series at Meany Hall in Seattle, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the Philadelphia and Buffalo Chamber Music Societies. This season, the Quartet features a richly satisfying array of diverse repertoire that includes both gi-ants of the string quartet canon—Bartok, Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, and Mozart—with lesser-performed works by Sibelius, Schnittke, and Jörg Widmann.

The Quartet’s recent debut recording on ECM Records features works of Danish com-posers Hans Abrahamsen and Per Nørgård and English composer Thomas Adès and re-ceived five stars from The Guardian, praised as “an exacting program requiring grace, grit and clarity and the Danish players sound terrific...It’s a sophisticated performance.” The recording debuted at #16 on the Bill-board Classical Chart and continues to earn international acclaim. In addition to their commitment to highlighting Scandinavian composers, the Danish String Quartet de-rives great pleasure in traditional Nordic folk music. Their subsequent recording, Last Leaf, was released in September 2017 and has since been listed as one of the top clas-

sical albums or the year by NPR, WQXR, The New York Times, Boston Globe and Spotify.

In 2009 the Danish String Quartet won First Prize in the 11th London International String Quartet Competition, as well as four additional prizes from the same jury. This competition is now called the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Compe-tition and the Quartet has performed at the famed hall on many occasions. The en-semble received the 2010 NORDMETALL-Ensemble Prize at the Mecklenburg-Vor-pommern Festival in Germany and, in 2011, won the prestigious Carl Nielsen Prize. The Danish String Quartet received the 2016 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award pro-vided to support outstanding young artists in their international endeavors, joining a small, illustrious roster of past recipients.

PROGRAM NOTES

String Quartet No. 1, Sz.40

BÉLA BARTÓKBorn March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós, HungaryDied September 26, 1945, New York City

Bartók composed his First String Quar-tet while he was a 27-year-old professor at the Budapest Academy of Music. He made the first sketches in 1907, did most of the composition in 1908, and completed the quartet on January 27, 1909, but the music had to wait over a year for its premiere. The Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet gave the first performance at an all-Bartók concert in Budapest on March 19, 1910.

Any composer who sets out to write a string quartet is conscious of the thunder behind him, of the magnificent literature created for this most demanding of forms. When Beethoven composed his first set of string quartets in the last years of the eigh-teenth century, he was quite aware of the example of Haydn (who was still composing string quartets at that time) and of Mozart. A century later, Bartók too was aware of the ex-ample of the past, and many have noted that in his First Quartet Bartók chose as his model one of the towering masterpieces of the form, Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Opus 131. Both quartets begin with a long, slow contrapuntal movement that opens with the sound of the two violins alone, both show a similar concentration of thematic material, both quartets are performed with-out breaks between their movements, both recall in their finales themes that had been introduced earlier, and both end with three

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massive, stinging chords. Yet Bartók’s First Quartet does not sound like Beethoven, nor was he trying to write a Beethoven-like quar-tet. Instead, Bartók took as a very general model a quartet that he deeply admired and then used that model as the starting point to write music that is very much his own.

If the First Quartet does not have the dis-tinct personality of Bartók’s later essays in this form, it nevertheless shows a young composer in complete command of the form. Bartók’s mastery is evident through-out the First Quartet. The quartet is in three movements, rather than the traditional four, these movements are played without pause, and there are subtle relationships between those three movements. From the beginning, Bartók was quite willing to re-imagine quartet form (of his six quartets, only the last is in four movements, and even this is a highly-modified structure). Finally, one of the features of Bartók’s ma-ture style already present in the First Quar-tet is his assured handling of motivic de-velopment. Ideas that first appear as only a tentative few notes will gradually yield un-suspected possibilities (and riches) as they evolve across the span of a complete work.

Many have noted that the First Quartet gets faster and faster as it proceeds. The music moves from a very slow opening movement through a second movement marked Alle-gretto and on to a very fast finale that grows even faster in its closing moments. Simply as musical journey, this quartet offers a very exciting ride. It gets off to quite a subdued start, however. The Lento opens with the two violins in close canon, and their falling fig-ure will give shape to much of the thematic material that follows. Cello and viola also enter in canon, and this ternary form move-ment rises to resounding climax before the viola introduces the central episode with a chiseled theme marked molto appassionato, rubato. The reprise of the opening canon is truncated, though this too rises to a grand climax before falling away to the quiet close.

Bartók proceeds without pause into the second movement. A duet for viola and cello and then for the two violins suggests another fundamental shape, and then the movement takes wing at the Allegretto. The first violin’s first three notes here take their shape from the very opening of the Lento, but now they become the thematic cell of a very active movement. Some have been tempted to call this movement, in 3/4, a waltz, but the music never settles comfortably into a waltz-rhythm, and soon the cello’s firm piz-zicato pattern introduces a second episode. After all its energy, this movement reaches

a quiet close that Bartók marks dolce, and he goes right on to the Introduzione of the finale. Here the cello has a free solo (Bartók marks it Rubato) of cadenza-like character, and the music leaps ahead on the second vi-olin’s repeated E’s. Molto vivace, says Bartók, and he means it: this will be a finale filled with scalding energy. In unison, viola and cello sound the main theme (adapted from the main theme of the second movement), and off the music goes. For all its length and variety, the finale is in sonata form, with a second theme, a recurring Adagio episode, and a lengthy fugue whose subject is derived from what we now recognize as the quartet’s fundamental shape. As he nears the conclu-sion, Bartók pushes the tempo steadily for-ward, and his First String Quartet hurtles to its three massive final chords.

Folk Music from Nordic CountriesThe management of the Danish String Quartet has furnished an introduction to this part of their program.

Folk music is the music of all the small places. It is the local music, but as such it is also the music of everywhere and every-one. Like rivers, the melodies and dances have flowed from region to region: when-ever a fiddler stumbled on a melody, he would play it and make it his own before passing it on. You don’t own a folk tune, you simply borrow it for a while.

In 2013 the Danish String Quartet bor-rowed and arranged a bunch of Nordic folk tunes on a recording that they called Wood Works. This album created quite some stir and has been featured on concert stages all over the world, on NPR’s Tiny Desk Con-cert, and even as the soundtrack in Star-bucks coffee shops. Now the quartet has decided to embark on yet another journey through the rich world of Nordic folk melo-dies, and they have recorded and released Last Leaf, another album of traditional music from the Nordic countries, the Faroe and Shetland Islands.

String Quartet in F Major, Opus 59, No. 1

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVENBorn December 16, 1770, BonnDied March 26, 1827, Vienna

Count Andreas Kyrillovich Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna, was

an amateur violinist and a string quartet enthusiast who had studied with Haydn. When he commissioned a set of three string quartets from Beethoven in 1805, he could not possibly have known what he would receive in return. Beethoven had at that time written one set of six quartets (published in 1801 as his Opus 18), cast very much in the high classical mold as set out by Haydn and Mozart. Doubtless Razu-movsky expected something on this order, and he provided Beethoven with some Rus-sian themes and asked that he include one in each of the three quartets. The count further assisted the composer by putting at his disposal the count’s own string quar-tet, led by Beethoven’s friend Ignaz Schup-panzigh. Beethoven worked two years on these quartets, completing them in 1806 and publishing them two years later.

The three quartets Beethoven published as his Opus 59, known today as the “Ra-zumovsky Quartets,” were so completely original that in one stroke they redefined the entire paradigm of the string quartet. These are massive works—in duration, sonority, and dramatic scope—and it is no surprise that they alienated their early audiences. Only with time did Beethoven’s achievement in this music become clear. Trying to take the measure of this new mu-sic, some early critics referred to the Razu-movsky quartets as “symphony quartets,” but this is misleading, for the quartets are genuine chamber music. But it is true that what the Eroica did for the symphony, these quartets—and the two that followed in 1809 and 1810—did for the string quar-tet: they opened new vistas, entirely new conceptions of what the string quartet might be and of the range of expression it might make possible.

Schuppanzigh’s quartet is reported to have burst into laughter at their first read-ing of the Quartet in F Major, convinced that Beethoven had intended a joke on them. When Schuppanzigh complained about the difficulty of this music, Beethoven shot back: “Do you think I worry about your wretched fiddle when the spirit speaks to me?”

The Quartet in F Major, Opus 59, No. 1 is, at forty minutes, one of the longest of Beethoven’s quartets, and its opening Al-legro is conceived on a gigantic scale. The movement springs to life with its main theme rising powerfully in the cello under steady accompaniment and then taken up by the first violin. This is an extremely fer-tile subject, appearing in many guises and giving the movement much of its rhythmic

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Danish Notes continued from page 3

and melodic shape. It is entirely char-acteristic of Beethoven that this theme, which will unleash so much strength and variety across the span of the movement, should be marked dolce on its first appear-ance. There is no exposition repeat—the music seems to repeat, but Beethoven is al-ready pressing forward—and the develop-ment centers on an unusual fugal passage introduced by the second violin. At the conclusion of the movement, the open-ing subject returns to drive to a massive climax marked by huge chords and slash-ing power. While this music is clearly con-ceived for string quartet, both in sonority

and technique, it is exactly this sort of powerful climax that earned these quar-tets the nickname “symphony quartets.”

A curious feature of this quartet is that all four movements are (more or less) in sonata form. The second, Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando, has an unusual shape, alter-nating scherzando sections with trios. The opening rhythm—announced by the cello and consisting of only one note, a recurring B-flat—underlies the entire movement; this figure–one repeated note—particu-larly infuriated many early performers and listeners. The main theme itself, an oddly asymmetrical figure, appears in the fourth measure and takes up some of this rhythm.

The heartfelt third movement is built

on two ideas: a grieving opening theme announced by the first violin (Beethoven marks it mesto: “sad”) and a steadily rising melody first played by the cello. The move-ment comes to a close as a quasi-cadenza for violin leads without pause to the finale, marked Thème russe. Here is the Count’s “Russian theme,” a folk melody played by the cello under a sustained violin trill. The blazing final movement is based pri-marily on this theme, and its energy level matches the power of the first two move-ments. Beethoven offers a final recall of this theme—at a very slow tempo—just before the Presto rush to the close.

—Program notes by Eric Bromberger