Variations Music for string quartet

Elliott Schwartz (b. 1936)

Bellagio Variations 19.45

1 Theme 2.02

2 Variation I 1.11

3 Variation II 1.52

4 Variation III 1.07

5 Variation IV 2.08

6 Variation V 1.37

7 Variation VI 1.44

8 Variation VII 2.13

9 Variation VIII 5.51

Published by Margun Music, Inc.

George Rochberg (1918-2005)

String Quartet No. 3 43.20

10 I Introduction: Fantasia 6.01

11 II March 2.59

12 III 14.32

13 IV March 4.16

14 V Finale 15.29

Published by Galaxy Music Corporation

Total CD duration 63.05

Kreutzer Quartet Peter Sheppard Skærved : Gordon MacKay : Bridget Carey : Neil Heyde

ROCHBERG - Quartet No.3 Bellagio Variations - SCHWARTZ

The time IS ripe for an unprecedented outpouring of post-modernist, collage-oriented "polystylistic" music. In fact, there's never been a better time. Many possible reasons:a) the existence of LP (and now CD) recordings from every historical era and every part of the globe –a veritable supermarket of the world's people who buy records think of them as a commodity, and the listening experience as entertainment – but they do have amazingly catholic tastes and broad listening memories to draw upon. b) that same listening audience has acquired a uniquely post-1950's habit of hearing music in disconnected, randomly assembled chunks. "Dis-continuity" is what the scholars call it. Everyday examples abound-the TV channel remote control 'zapper', the search button on one's car radio, etc. c) the models and influences of the other composer's pioneering work in this area makes the leap into "poly-stylism" much easier for younger composers. The precedents include Rochberg, of course, and Foss, Berio, Stockhausen, Kagel, Bolcom, Schnittke, etc., etc. (and long before any of those, of course, Ives and Stravinsky).

Elliott Schwartz – letter to PJSS, January 2000

This disc might be seen as presenting ways of dealing with our musical past. However, at the root of much 'serious' musical thinking, there is a prejudiced notion of musical aesthetics at work. This limits many of the qualitative assessments that performers, composers and critics make. Both the composers on this disc have fallen foul of these assessments at one time or another, but in many ways they provide a clue to the musical language of the future. The time when 'new music' was able to pretend to itself that it was not discoursing with a whole host of archetypes has surely gone. Certainly, the listening world has changed, has developed catholic tastes and expectations, be this as a result of the enormous diversity of music and sound with which the modern ear is assailed every day, or merely the pragmatic plundering of the film composer. The ear of the 'average' listener is no longer average. It is often not only attuned to, but expecting, great diversity of reference and language in the works that it hears. The notion that is strangely still current in the classical world that there is acceptable and unacceptable musical language is now the anachronism.

Coming to terms with the past (Aufarbeitung) does not imply a serious working through of the past, the breaking of its spell through the act of clear consciousness. It suggests, rather, wishing to turn the page and, if possible, wiping it clean. Theodor Adorno

I recently showed a colleague in Germany some scores by the distinguished young London-based composer Sadie Harrison. His remark was instructive. 'Hmm, very good, exciting, well-structured, but rather too tonal for me – can we really play something like that here?' It is this kind of prejudice that advocates of pluralist, catholic musical language have faced ever since the turning point of Darmstadt. It does not seem to matter whether composers are die-hard serialists, minimalists, mystics, tonalists, new complexitists, as long as they stay within their classified boxes. In any other field than art such limiting definitions would be seen as fascist, to be akin to cultural racism. Tippett was vociferous against them; he felt that they were as much of a real danger to society as fundamentalism in religion, a sort of musical Taliban'. It is not that any one approach holds sway now, but that there are seen to be 'appropriate' languages, 'acceptable' categories, which must certainly not be exceeded, and certainly not mixed or crossed. In today's Germany, it is a 'post-Lachenmann-esque' shuffling, scratching noise; in the UK, distant echoes of Monteverdi with some quasi-serial skeins of ornamentation; in the US, the 'wham' of "Bang-on-a-Can". We adhere to these 'Grenzen' at our cultural peril, leaving the excluded voices to wither, dismissed as eccentrics, reactionaries, sentimentalists, and worst of all, romantics.

Thinker after thinker, composers, politicians, novelists, scientists have all been advocating pluralism for years, yet in nearly every musical area there seems to be adverse reaction when many languages are actually used and understood. Is the 'binary posturing' of Schnittke at his most well-known the most people can accept?

Much of the writing on Rochberg, and in particular concerning the Third Quartet, focuses on issues

of reaction, both to the piece, and to the issues and dogmae to which composer and work are

themselves responding. For the performer this writing is useless, as it is difficult to imagine making

an interpretation founded on reaction. Writer after writer seems unable to refrain from defining

some of the music as atonal, some of it as tonal, with the result that the reader who has not heard

any of the music might be led to think that it is merely founded in the balancing of musical polar

opposites.

I was trying to find ways to anchor atonal adventures in tonal thinking.

George Rochberg, 1999

The player today has the benefit of hindsight; Ligeti's seminal Second Quartet was being premiered as Rochberg's third was being composed. Both composers can be seen to be constructing radical critiques of the Beethoven Op. 132 model – the very model that had provoked the one mature Sibelius Quartet (Voces Intimae) at the beginning of the century, and which would 'kick-start' works from Berg's Lyric Suite to Robert Saxton's 1997 Quartet in the course of it.

When I mentioned the extraordinary violin concerto which Rochberg wrote for Isaac Stern to a player in the mid-eighties his response was typical. 'Oh, but that is just so romantic... yukk'. Little has changed; recently, I was talking about the Caprice Variations with a respected BBC broadcaster. 'So what style is he writing in THIS time?' was the predictable enquiry.

Perhaps some currently fashionable composers, who often seem to use a very limited and technically hobbled 'tonal' language, are equally unwilling to acknowledge Rochberg out of simple self-protectionism, which I can perfectly understand. After all, he had anticipated, developed, and assimilated so much of today's rejection of intellectualised 'concept-driven' writing thirty years ago. It is clear that, by the time that he came to write this quartet masterpiece, the process had gone far beyond being a reaction or a rebellion, it was a full-scale, integrated movement, a language sufficient to itself.

. ..coming just at the temporal juncture, the divide between two violently different times, almost different cultures, the "old" modernist time, the "new"-stuck!...don't know what I call it, and certainly don't want to diminish or demean it by calling it "post-modern", a useless term with no texture or dynamic to it at all-like a lifeless note 'senza qualita' on a chord with no meat on its bones. In any case, there's no going back to modernism and the real question now that the clock has been turned to 00 [is] what can the composers of your time and generations say to capture and hold the mind and heart of music?

Rochberg-Letter to PJSS, February 2000

George Rochberg's major works, his orchestral and large-scale chamber music, have been almost completely neglected of late in Europe. This is despite the tacit acknowledgment that the Third Quartet was one of the defining 'moments' in the post-war musical world. The neglect has not come from wind players, harpists and guitarists, a minority who have continued to evangelise certain of his works with almost missionary zeal. There have been almost no notable performances of the quartets on the international stage since the demise of the Concord Quartet, for whom they were written. In 1999, the Kreutzer Quartet gave its first performance of the Third Quartet in 'De Doelen', Rotterdam. It is fair to say the acclaim with which the work was received, was akin to that of a successful first performance, rather than what it should have been, the reception of an interpretation of an established masterpiece.

It is possible that the reason for this resistance of Rochberg is born out of a feeling that he is actually far too literate musically, a resentment of his ability to treat the whole kaleidoscope of western musical language as a unified whole, and pass easily between what any normal mind would label

separate classifications. Perhaps the truth of the matter is that there is a very real fear of the 'Rochberg Challenge'. He would charitably say that composers had suffocated their individual 'signatures' with the rules and strictures of modernism: that their resistance of the re-incorporation of tonal writing is evidence of a general fear that, after nearly a century of ducking the compositional challenge set by the great 'canonic' historical works, the strain and effort of relearning, of making up what might be found to be lost ground, will be simply too much to undertake.

The central variation movement of the Third Quartet is proof of the distance that Rochberg has been willing to travel. After all, how many other quartet composers face up to the colossal challenge of Beethoven's late slow movements. There have been some such as Tippett, but, almost none would dare to begin and continue a movement with an evocation of Beethoven's philosophical and expressive world, and successfully continue it thus, whilst eschewing so many of Beethoven's instrumental and harmonic techniques.

Throughout I've managed to give modernism and modernists a real hard time, especially over the (ever-rising from the ashes like the proverbial phoenix) issue of the thing that really bugs the hell out of them; erasing all walls and borders based on historicity and aesthetic purities-declaring an all-at-once world within which all that matters once again is craftsmanship of the ancient kind, taste of the kind Mozart and Haydn possessed; judgment of the kind Bach and Beethoven and Brahms and Bartok applied to every major decision they made; 's'far as I'm concerned it's back to basics, nothing to hide behind, not even so-called talent. George Rochberg-Letter to PJSS, August 2000

Elliot Schwartz's only string quartet to date, Bellagio Variations was written nine years after the Rochberg No. 3. The composer was staying and working at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, next to Lake Como. Whilst he was there he discovered a piano piece, the Bells of Bellagio, written by his former teacher, Otto Luening. This became the 'revealed-theme' of the piece, and the choices of materials that went into the mix of these variations, be they quotes, collage, or completely original material, was informed by their relationships to the intervals and harmony of this theme. Schwartz has repeatedly said that despite his free-wheeling approach to the assembly of his music, he is irresistibly drawn to the old established forms. This work bears that out, through its melding of an archetypal variation form with the use of spotlit cadenza technique that feels like an echo of the solo writing in George Crumb's 'Black Angels', or the accompanied recitatives in the Beethoven Op 132.

A good set of variations needs to have an actual or implied fundamental harmonic frame, large and sufficiently open to permit filling out, expanding, compressing, substituting, even bending out of shape so long as the frame remains fundamentally unchanged even as it seems to undergo change, its transformation akin to a piece of musical topology.

George Rochberg, Five Lines and Four Spaces, 1999/2000

There is a fascinating question of performance style attached to all of this. Tippett often said that his work was liberated by the post-war 'early music' revival; that he particularly enjoyed performances of his music by the younger performers who had grown up with the colours and shapes of 'informed performance' as part of their musical education, as it was precisely this older aesthetic from which much of his music sprung. The works of the composers on this disc are full of potential stylistic conundrums, which is a partial legacy of their 'Post-lvesian1 pedigree. All informed performance is now at a point where there are serious aesthetic or performance practice questions to be resolved whether the work is Ciconia or Ligeti. This is a particularly vexed issue in such post-modern repertoire. In order to perform the music of Schnittke in a century's time, it could be necessary for the player of the future to have a working knowledge of late twentieth-century baroque performance practice; quite apart from knowing the correct way to execute a late twentieth-century quarter-tone trill. So, what to do in works such as this, where the collective voices of Beethoven, Mahler, Bartok, Vaughan Williams, Schoenberg, American College football songs, Cole Porter etcetera jostle for primacy? Should the player jump from playing style to playing style, attempt to point out the disparate points of view of each integer of the score? Of course, this is just as much a problem with other 'historicising' works, be they Beethoven's appropriation of the language of Monteverdi and Palestrina at the opening of Op. 131, or the opening of the variation movement of Brahms' First Sextet or the Theme in his Händel-Variationen.

Elliott Schwartz is instructive on this matter;

In any event, I don't believe that a musical experience has only one 'true meaning'. There are many layers of meaning, for different listeners/performers, all perfectly valid. The composer's job – the performer's too – is to 'recollect in tranquillity', to project and simulate the essence of an expressive/emotional adventure, while in fact being very professional, business-like, and aware of the dramatic timing and similar strategic issues. In other words, the artist has lived it/felt it in his/her private life, but fakes it (!) during professional activity. It's the difference between acting and therapeutic acting-out...

Elliott Schwartz-letter to PJSS, January 2000

Notes © Peter Sheppard Skærved, November 2000

Kreutzer Quartet on Métier

The Kreutzer Quartet is the dedicatee of hundreds of new works, both collectively and as soloists. Composers that have composed for them include Judith Weir, Hans Werner Henze, George Rochberg, Jörg Widmann, Gloria Coates, David Matthews, Halfidi Hallgrimsson, Elliott Schwartz, Michael Finnissy, Nicola LeFanu, Peter Dickinson, Luca Mosca, Evis Sammoutis, Thomas Simaku, Nigel Clarke, David Gorton, Richard Beaudoin, John Zorn, Edward Cowie, Paul Pellay, Judith Bingham, Poul Ruders, Jeremy Dale Roberts, Michael Alec Rose, Jim Aitchison, Roger Steptoe, Howard Skempton, Dmitri Smirnov and Robert Saxton. They are now (2014) quartet in residence at Wilton’s Music Hall in London. The Quartet’s personnel on this recording made in 2000 is: Peter Sheppard Skærved and Gordon MacKay (violins); Bridget Carey (viola) and Neil Heyde (cello).

MSV 28507 Northern Lights String Quartets by John Casken, Robert Saxton and Judith Weir

“The range of worthwhile issues on the Divine Art label continues to expand with this outstanding release of three relatively recent string quartets by British composers. The most important work here is that by Robert Saxton... utterly compelling in its strength and sheer passion. The performances seem very fine and totally committed, and the recording quality is excellent. Very strongly recommended.” - Robert Matthew-Walker (Musical Opinion)

MSV 28537 Tapestry Music by Elliott Schwartz

With Nicole Johnson (cello), Aaron Shorr (piano), Longbow

“The sensation of being transported always amazed me... I could sit, relax and enjoy being taken through both familiar and unfamiliar places. When I listened to this album, something similar happened. If you like journeys, you should listen to Tapestry. It will take you places.: - Jorge Variego (Fanfare)

MSV 28541 Grieg - Finnissy Piano Quintets

With Roderick Chadwick (piano)

“Here is a remarkable congruence of composers. [The completion of Grieg’s Quintet] is a creative transfiguration of academic prowess and critical insight.” – Paul Driver (Sunday Times)

MSVCD 92011 Michael Finnissy – works for string quartet

“This is rather special. If variety is the spice of life, then this disc is hot. And so are the Kreutzer Quartet, whose commitment and spirit make this demanding music sound clear, fluent and gritty. A must for anyone interested in new music, or in the evolution of the string quartet as a genre.” - Fabrice Fitch (Gramophone) Gramophone “Critics’ Choice” CD for 1998

Gramophone ‘Essential Finnissy’ CD 2013

MSVCD 92026 Catalan Quartets Works by Miquel Roger, Albert Sarda and Josep Soler

“Were it not for fiercely dedicated independents such as the Metier label, music lovers with a taste for adventure would be far less served. This Catalan string quartet disc is a remarkable release. The recording itself… is about as good as they get. This is exemplary string sound and the ambient space is exactly right. The Kreutzer Quartet plays with precision, heart, and soul… marvellous stuff.” - Mike Silverton (LaFolia)

MSVCD 92032 Roberto Gerhard – String Quartets 1 & 2

“It will be difficult to beat, with first-class playing and admirable recording, and at mid-price the short playing time should not be an issue. Very strongly recommended.” - Arnold Whittal (Gramophone)

MSVDX 101 (multi-region DVD) Quartet Choreography Works by Stravinsky, Lutosławski, Ligeti and Finnissy

“Any release spunky enough to embrace Ligeti’s and Finnissy’s Second Quartets..is OK by me. These films are edited to mirror something of the composer’s approach to structure but, more significantly, to allow viewers to see the physical interaction between player and instrument. Stravinsky was right: we hear these moves, see the sounds differently. - Philip Clark (Gramophone)

Other recordings in our catalogue include performances by the Kreutzer Quartet – see the website for details

More Rochberg from Peter Sheppard Skærved and Aaron Shorr

MSV 28521 Caprice Variations / Violin Sonata (2CD)

“Metier continues its faithful dedication to contemporary music by adding this remarkable release to its already abundant collection. An outstanding recording that provides wonderful listening experiences.” – Danny Kim-Nam Hiu (ConcertoNet)

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