2023 Summer Festival BONUS: Goldmund Quartet: Europe’s Rising Stars (full subscribers only)

Hailed as one of the most exciting young string quartets in the world, the Goldmund Quartet’s exquisitely refined playing has been awarded prizes at major competitions such as the Wigmore, Melbourne, and ARD Munich. They are the Rising Stars of the European Concert Hall Organisation leading to debut recitals at the Philharmonie de Paris, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and the Vienna Konzerthaus. In this concert, hear the Goldmund perform dramatic chamber works written by Puccini, Haydn, and Schubert on their historic set of Stradivari instruments once owned by the great virtuoso Niccolò Paganini.

“The Goldmunds make a beautiful sound, elegant and transparent, with a real sense that these four players are friends both on and off the concert platform.”
– Gramophone

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Program

Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.

PUCCINI I Crisantemi

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)

I Crisantemi (1890)

Since they last well in the cold, Chrysamthemums are customarily laid on European graves on November 1, All Saints’ Day, honoring the exemplary lives of saints we should be imitating, as well as remembering loved ones gone. I Crisantemi is such an offering written in memory of Puccini’s friend, Amedeo di Savoia, who was frankly no saint but a lively Italian prince who reigned briefly as King of Spain. Amedeo soon decided court politics were just not worth the hassle, so he abdicated and got out of there returning to Italy where he assumed his innate charm could better serve his amorous intrigues than his political ones. His wife did not agree, but that is another story. The sudden death of his companionable friend at 45 so shocked Puccini that he poured out this elegy seamlessly in one restless night.

A single-movement tribute in three brief sections, I Crisantemi is a setting of plaintive melodies Puccini had conjured up earlier as a student and, recognizing their mournful power, wisely stored them away for future use. The same themes show up a bit later in Manon Lescaut (1893). The elegy opens with a long arching line, aching with chromatic sorrow.  The same arc figures effectively in Manon’s final scene where she wanders to her death, despairing, bewildered, lost, resigned—the same mourning emotions I Crisamtemi conveys. Following the expansive first moment here, the middle section of the tribute allows the first violin to sing with sweet memory, though with restless pulsation and irregular stabs of pain underneath. After a brief reappearance of the first theme, the instruments sink collectively into sorrowful contemplation and resignation. The power of I Crisantemi resides in its openly expressive sorrow, concentrated and quietly controlled; surrender yourself to this sorrow. In these pandemic times it is well we pause at the start of a concert to remember lost friends and family.

—  Frederick Noonan

HAYDN String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 20, No. 5

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)

String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 20, No. 5

We tend to think of “Papa” Haydn as a genial guy comfortably employed by music-loving Prince Esterhazy, writing for an audience of candle-lit aristocrats and maybe listening, maybe not. In spite of this casual elegant atmosphere, all was not well at the palaces.  Haydn’s musicians were unhappy playing the same old stuff — Italian galante music with only one guy getting all the good tunes. Haydn was unhappy composing the same old Divertimenti, the very name precluding serious thought. Even at home, he was saddled with an unhappy wife, a poor soul with no interest in his ideas and never laughing at his jokes. What to do?  Sturm und Drang was creating atmospheric pressure in literature; the restless sorrows of young Werther were in the air.  But here is a hint: do the dates 1776 or 1789 ring a bell?

Since the late 1760s Haydn had been tinkering with the idea of reshaping his divertimenti.  By 1771 he had published, as Op. 9 and Op. 17, 12 light and graceful offerings for a new type of ensemble.  He pared the entertaining dance movements from the prevailing several down to only four, and distilled his players down as well, to simply four.  The Enlightenment elegance of balance and pattern remained, the Italian lilt and grace stayed to sing, but a startling new concept rose up and re-shaped everything — equality among the players, cello belatedly included. Liberté, égalité, fratérnité. Haydn’s string quartet was the French Revolution happening right before our ears. The violin king was not guillotined, but he no longer did all the talking. As Goethe put it: the quartet became “a conversation among equals.”

With Haydn’s Op. 20 — known as the “Sun Quartets’’ from a logo printed on the first edition—the world of chamber music was forever changed.  The six quartets no longer relied on melody and pleasing Italian grace, but were bursting with innovation, variety and surprise, sly tricks and dark stormy moods, singing cavatinas. Even the baroque fugue, long abjured by the Italians as too difficult or bothersome to keep track of, was resurrected, a welcome device for all four voices to vie equally with each other.  After years of listeners not listening at the Esterhazy palaces, Haydn was determined that players and audience be really engaged by his music. With Opus 20, he accomplished that.

Op. 20, No. 5 was originally No. 1 but was shuffled to fifth place probably because the publisher deemed its Sturm und Drang dark, foreboding key an inappropriate way to start off the “Sun Quartets.” The listener is plunged immediately into a dark sonic environment throbbing with an undercurrent of discontented repeated notes. Clearly no idle entertainment but a whole new emotional world. The conventional sonata form can be detected but Haydn toys freely with harmonic changes and combinations. Note particularly the use of silences throughout the entire quartet. Not just at endings, which promise a forceful conclusion but suddenly dwindle away, but also with small calculated interruptions. The work is suavely peppered with these moments — Haydn perhaps checking if you are awake, maybe sometimes winking at you, but most likely just aware of the power of unexpected silence.

The minuet, ordinarily a graceful invitation to dance, is here strenuously perpendicular, almost grudgingly refusing to dance though the coquettish major-key trio seductively loosens things up. In the Adagio, a gentle siciliano, the first violin is unexpectedly indulged, given unopposed a chance to sing a cavatina with ‘improvisatory’ arabesques. At the end the instruments sing in unison with subtly amusing gentle hesitations. The final fugue proceeds not with mathematical Prussian deliberation but as a lively Viennese scramble, the voices chasing each other about instead of each waiting its turn, playful as a pile of puppies — a long journey away from the earnest moody beginning — Haydn showing off.

We take string quartets now for granted; they have held center stage in chamber music for over 200 hundred years. But remember: once they did not even exist. Haydn began it all — a revolutionary act of the imagination, almost like the inventing a use for the wheel. The sun of the Op.20 Sun Quartets has proven not just a logo, but a shining blessing.

—  Frederick Noonan

SCHUBERT String Quartet in D Minor, D.810, “Death and the Maiden”

Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828)

String Quartet in D Minor, D.810, “Death and the Maiden”

Ah, Schubert. His sad history is well-known from same-old-story program notes: born in Vienna, son of a school master, sang in the Vienna Boy’s Choir; taught school occasionally himself but was always poor, too poor even to marry; a jolly fellow with lots of friends; a vast output of work especially devoted to chamber music and lieder; never went anywhere; died young, probably of syphilis; short, fat, near-sighted. Even though he also studied with the infamous Salieri and admired Beethoven, he lived a life peripheral to the glittering music world of Vienna. However, since Austria was revelling in the new phenomenon of an educated, musically aware, middle class, he accrued an appreciative audience of friends, musicians both professional and amateur, who gathered to play his works in evenings now known as Schubertiads.

In his lifetime his work rarely reached the printers. After his death Schumann, ever alert to important emerging talent, visited the family, pawing through cupboards and closets to see what there was. He took the manuscript of the never-played “Great” Symphony in C to Mendelssohn who premiered it posthumously in Leipzig for an elite audience who had never even heard of the composer. Later, Sir George Grove of music dictionary fame saved more of his music for posterity. Gradually, well over nearly 1,500 works were rescued from the usual fate of scattered manuscripts: being sold to used bookshops. It is strange to realize how near we came to never even knowing these treasures of Schubert.

Late in 1823, Schubert learned he was seriously ill and had best make the most of his time left.  Thus began his ‘mature period’ — at the advanced age of 27 — a time of intense, profound and prodigious composing, laden not so much with wisdom as with sorrow. He became adept at pouring out glowing melodies to dispel the effect of his somber, pensive movements. “More often than not,” wrote the pianist Alfred Brendel, “happiness with Schubert is but the surface of despair.” This accounts for the way the most profoundly affecting movements of the C major Quintet and the B-Flat piano sonata, for instance, are followed by disconcertingly sunny and exuberant dances. That’s Schubert getting a hold of himself to move on, so to speak. In the end, it is this very human dimension of Schubert that reaches our hearts.

There is no anecdotal evidence that Schubert intended this quartet to carry such an ominous name, but by choosing to include a theme from one of his earlier lieder of the same name, he made this label inevitable. In the song a young maiden confronts Death unexpectedly and begs with distress to be excused, citing her youth. Death however insists, saying it will be but a gentle sleep. In view of his diagnosis, clearly the quartet should be called Death and Schubert.

As with all of Schubert’s works, this quartet is a complicated and lengthy journey, emotion-laden, but very self-aware of musical patterns. Opening with almost orchestral force, the confrontation of inexorable fate is answered with a gentle chorale. This back and forth of fierce and gentle bargaining characterizes the entire work, usually with triplets running underneath to provide atmospheric support. Hurtling forward, cowering, or singing sweetly, Schubert conscientiously works through the usual sonata forms with multiple restatements in the Allegro first movement. A final quiet concession leads into the Andante’s lengthy funeral theme, 24-measures long. Schubert never shied away from what came to be called his ‘heavenly length’! Five variations follow, each filled with individual character, only one offering major-key sunshine. The brief Scherzo, a minuet more demonic than courtly, is a heavily syncopated vacillation between fortissimo and pianissimo contrasts with the welcome relief of an ethereal trio. The final Presto is a frenzied tarantella, the Italian dance of death, a whirlwind of notes. Schubert, ever-carefully aware of form, offers a rondo with two themes, one with limping rhythm, the other stately, lurching as usual between loud and soft through three episodes. The last reaches a moment of really strange harmonic delirium before coming back to reality, first trying a coda in a major key but surrendering finally to the doom of D minor.

And so, Schubert draws to a close this deeply personal confrontation with his fate. He went on to pour out a farewell of astonishing major chamber works, piano sonatas, and the ultimately lonely Winterreise, an isolated departure from friends. A jolly life-long sociable guy, Schubert himself once mused: “Some people come into our lives, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never the same again.” How grateful we are for Schubert’s indelible footprints.

—  Frederick Noonan

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