NEW ESTERHAZY QUARTET

A FLIGHT OF FUGUES

SATURDAY, JANUARY 17, 2015

SYNOD HALL, 8PM

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DID YOU KNOW?

R&B would like to thank the

Penn Quartet for their performance prior to the main concert.

Hannah Ishizaki, violin 9th Grade, Mt. Lebanon High School Kerry Broker, violin 10th grade, Shady Side Academy Jim Cunningham IV viola 10th grade, CAPA Kyle Johnson, cello 11th grade, Peters Township High School

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SATURDAY, JANUARY 17, 2015, 8PM

New Esterhazy Quartet

A Flight of Fugues

Lisa Weiss — violin

Kati Kyme — violin

Anthony Martin — viola

William Skeen — violoncello

Fantazia XI Henry Purcell

1659-1695

Phantasia supra Ut, re, me, fa, sol, la Johann J. Froberger

arranged by Mozart 1616-1667

Fugue in C minor Johann Sebastian Bach

from the Well Tempered Clavier, Book 2 1680-1750

arranged by Mozart

Adagio & Fugue, K. 546 Wolfgang Mozart

1756-1791

Cavatina & Grosse Fuge Ludwig van Beethoven

Opp. 130 & 133 1770-1827

---Intermission---

Grave & Allegro Gregor Joseph Werner

from The Prodigal Son 1693-1766

arranged by Haydn

Divertimento in C, Op. 20, No. 2 Joseph Haydn

Moderato 1732-1809

Capriccio: Adagio

Menuet: Allegretto

Fuga a 4tro soggetti: Allegro, sempre sotto voce

***

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A gaggle of geese, a pride of lions, an unkindness of ravens … why not, then, "a flight of fugues"? "Fuga" is originally just the Latin for "flight" or "fleeing," after all, close kin of our English "fugitive." In musical terms, the word means, broadly, a texture in which each voice in turn offers the same subject, the entries as it were chasing one another through the score. It's at once one of the simplest forms to describe and one of the most intricate to construct, or (for that matter) to hear. The New Esterházy Quartet offers here a tasting flight of fugues, one that should give listeners a sense of what happens when fugue meets string quartet. Many and wondrous are the vintages! Not every piece in this flight is properly a fugue. For a couple of centuries, much music relied on a looser variety of fugal texture called "imitation," where there would be a set of entries on one subject, another on another subject, and so on—overlapping—all through the work. The seventeenth century threw this method of making a piece into tumult, as it did practically everything else (musical and otherwise), and what emerged on the other side was the fugue as Bach and his contemporaries and successors knew it. Henry Purcell's Fantazia, which opens this program, is about the last vestige of the older style. Not only were Purcell's viol fantazias from very early in his career, but they were antiquated well before they were written; the heyday of the English fantazia or "fancy" was many decades earlier, and one of the wonders of the Purcell fantazias is how closely he can follow the likes of Byrd and Dowland (to say nothing of the following generations) while still contriving to move subtly beyond them. That said, the first of the Fantazia's three parts really does approach "fugue," in its overwhelming concentration on one small melodic cell. Johann Jakob Froberger, earlier in time than Purcell, is therefore not all that dissimilar. The Fantasia ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la (the first six notes of the scale, the piece's equivalent to a fugue subject) is among the works Mozart transcribed for the circle of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, in whose biography trifles like writing the libretto to Haydn's Creation matter less than his efforts to reintroduce the works of Bach to a later generation. The cluster of musicians around van Swieten are very nearly the only link we have to Bach between his death in 1750 and Mendelssohn's Bach revivals more than 80 years later. The Froberger—one of only two works published in its composer's lifetime, which presumably explains how Mozart got ahold of it—is an outlier in the latter's small stock of arrangements. More typical are the Bach arrangements for quartet, K. 405, and the ones for trio, K. 404a (though the authenticity of those latter is disputed). There are only five fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier in K. 405, but as you'd expect, Mozart picked the plums. The C-Minor from WTC II is typical in

PROGRAM NOTES

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laying out all the tricks of Bach's fugal trade—devices like stretto (beginning a new entrance of the subject before the previous one is finished) and al rovescio (flipping the subject over so that what was up is now down, and vice versa) and augmentation (doubling the note lengths in an entrance). As a compact demonstration of "how to fugue," it has few rivals, and most of those are also in the WTC. When Mozart came to write his own instrumental fugues, things were a little different; he seems to have had some trouble reconciling the fugal manner with the requirements of late-18th-century style, at least so far as instrumental music was concerned. The Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546, is a striking work, with a fugue gnarled, dense, and intensely chromatic. Here the al rovescio sounds so exactly like the original that by the time you're halfway through the piece, it's difficult to recall which came first. The grand, tragic Adagio preceding the fugue sets the stage admirably. Igor Stravinsky and his son Soulima once made a recording of the two-piano version of K. 546 (the Fugue only, no Adagio) that is harrowing in its studious,

PROGRAM NOTES

precise inhumanity. It's no coincidence that Stravinsky also lauded Beethoven's Grosse Fuge. "It is pure interval music," he wrote, "and I love it like no other." Presumably he knew the Grosse Fuge from its own alternative piano-four-hands version, because no one who has played the string quartet original—or, for that matter, been in the same room with someone who has—could extract "pure interval music" from the work's patent, extreme physicality. There are stretches where every individual note of the subject is marked forte. More than a few bowhairs and even strings tend to get broken over the course of a performance. Perhaps one reason Beethoven acceded to his publisher's request to issue the fugue as a stand-alone work was a belated recognition of the enormous physical demands of leaving it at the end of the long, suite-like Op. 130. There are places in the Grosse Fuge where tonality nearly breaks down altogether, leaving the four string players tackling a sort of four-headed monster. The textures are many-varied and often very complex. Two players may be duking it out on the main theme in alternation, while the other two pursue the jagged countersubject. In a couple of places the music erupts into streams of triplets; in another, suddenly everything dissolves into a buzzing swarm of trills. (Trills are everywhere in late Beethoven, but never anywhere else like this.) And then the music turns a corner and all is somberly placid—as in the slow middle section; or abruptly light and carefree—as in much of the large section following it. At the beginning and near the end, fragments of the several manners and countersubjects are presented. It is fascinating, intricate, and unaccountable. In the long tradition of adagios preceding fugues, the NEQ have opted to precede the Grosse Fuge with the Cavatina, the previous movement of the quartet (Op. 130) for which the Grosse Fuge was the original finale. A strange idea, and yet a compelling one. It makes sense of the unison G that starts the fugue, for one thing, a feature that Beethoven preserved in the substitute finale he wrote when his publisher suggested that the first one might be just a mite, er, unwieldy. And the Cavatina is a lovely thing in its own right. It is straightforwardly, if gloriously, sweet at the outset, but then comes a middle section where all the air seems to be sucked out of the room. The first violin, whose part is marked beklemmt (stifled), can only stammer out a few hesitant notes, frantic and shy at once. When the opening music returns, it seems subtly transformed. If there appears to be rather a lot of C minor on this program, that's likely because there is. Gregor Josef Werner's chief claim to fame in music history is in being Franz Josef Haydn's predecessor as music director at Esterháza, which is no mean thing, but also no substitute for being remembered in your own right.

PROGRAM NOTES

Though their relations were sometimes strained during the transition, Haydn did Werner the favor, late in his own life, of extracting six adagios and fugues from Werner's choral works and arranging them for string quartet. This one, the fourth, is a welter of chromaticisms. If acute ears hear resemblances between the opening of the Werner and the Mozart Adagio and Fugue, never mind the Grosse Fuge, well, they'd be quite right; an amazing number of minor-key fugue subjects play around with a relatively few notes, of which the four common to the Werner and the Mozart are the most frequent. And that's before we get to the fugue proper, just as chromatic but much busier. Haydn arranged the Werner in 1804, by which time he had all but stopped composing. More than thirty years earlier he wrote his Op. 20 string quartets. Now, there is something to be said for every Haydn string quartet opus, even the earliest, but there's something unique about Op. 20—a richness, almost a surfeit, that is not found again until Op. 76, and not always even then. Partly this is due to the opulent cello writing; though Haydn wrote even more daunting cello parts later, none are more splendid. But it's more than that: it's a sort of imaginative concentration that he wasn't to regain in full until the 1790s. Everything in the pieces seems new, unthought-of, plucked from the air. Among these many new things are the fugues. Three of the six quartets have fugal finales, with two, three, and four subjects respectively. A fugue in which every appearance of the subject is accompanied by a fixed countersubject is called a "double fugue"; here Haydn gives us a double fugue, and a triple, and a quadruple. The quadruple is the finale of Op. 20/2, and it would make the work extraordinary even if there were nothing else. Of course, there is a great deal else, beginning with the first movement's wonderful opening, the cello’s melody floating serenely above the second violin and viola; the literally fantastic slow movement, half-recitative, half-aria, but with the former constantly breaking into the latter; the gossamer minuet, following without a break. And then the fugue itself—like its siblings in Op. 20, sotto voce until the end, and replete with fugal tricks, not only the four subjects, but a hefty dose of al rovescio to boot. Ultimately, the fleeing voices coalesce into unison. The "flight" is at an end. - Michelle Dulak Thomson

PROGRAM NOTES

Founded in 2006 and currently in its eighth year of subscription concerts in San Francisco, Berkeley and Palo Alto, the New Esterházy Quartet continues to present masterworks of the classical period alongside intriguing works from less-familiar composers. With Haydn's 68 quartets as its core repertoire, NEQ is increasingly recognized as one of the world's top period-instrument string quartets. The ensemble has been presented by the San Francisco Early Music Society, Arizona Early Music Society, Carmel Chamber Music Society, has performed in New York and Los Angeles, and appeared as a Main Stage event for the 2012 Berkeley Festival & Exhibition. NEQ was also selected for Early Music America's Touring Artists Roster and has received two grants from the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music. Recent seasons have featured works by pupils and admirers of Haydn, late quartets of Schubert and Beethoven, and novel explorations of early Bartók and Schoenberg. January 2014 saw the world premiere of Esterházy, book II, written for the ensemble by noted New York composer Paul Brantley. NEQ's 2014 summer project was the complete Mozart "Haydn" Quartets, performed at Berkeley's historic Hillside Club in a three-concert Amadè-Athon. The coming season will include an appearance on Pittsburgh's prestigious "Renaissance and Baroque" series in January and a summer cycle of the late Beethoven quartets. Four Haydn recordings are currently available, and a world premiere recording of a mid-19th century string quartet by Hungarian composer Imre Székely is near release. The members of NEQ are internationally-known period-instrument and chamber music specialists Kati Kyme and Lisa Weiss, violins, violist Anthony Martin, and cellist William Skeen. As individuals, the players have performed and recorded in the top echelon of early music ensembles worldwide. In addition to many years of musical collaboration in Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, and a long list of renowned chamber ensembles, these four Bay Area musicians have enjoyed decades of friendship and shared experience. Their history as both colleagues and friends endows the quartet with an unusual commonality of musical language and gesture,

ABOUT THE ARTISTS ABOUT THE ARTISTS

and provides a strong foundation for a unique and original ensemble voice. In addition to concert appearances, NEQ enjoys performing in private homes and other intimate settings where the traditional experience of true chamber music is renewed and shared by players and listeners together.

Renaissance & Baroque is a proud member of the Pittsburgh Music Alliance