Emerson Quartet Farewell with Gloria Chien
The Emerson Quartet’s powerful tone, extraordinary exploration of repertoire, and longevity have made it the most acclaimed chamber ensemble in the world. After 17 appearances over a span of 30 years, this is their final unforgettable performance at Chamber Music Northwest. There is no better grand finale than Beethoven’s cathartic Opus 131 quartet, one of the most transcendent pieces in music history. CMNW Artistic Director Gloria Chien salutes and celebrates the Emersons, joining them in Robert Schumann’s irrepressibly joyous piano quintet.
NOTE: Extremely limited seats remain and are available only by phone. Please call our ticket office at 503-294-6000 for more information.
PRELUDE PERFORMANCE:
6:30pm | Young Artists Institute students with quartet performances on stage at Kaul Auditorium
Following the concert, audience members are invited to join us for a special farewell celebration in the lobby.
Reed College, Kaul Auditorium
Saturday, 7/8 • 8:00 pm PT
Program
Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.
- BEETHOVEN String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131 (39’)Opus 131 is played as one continuous piece, without pause between its seven sections:
I. Adagio ma non troppo
II. Allegro molto vivace
III. Allegro moderato
IV. Andante ma non troppo
V. Presto
VI. Adagio quasi un poco andante
VII. AllegroLudwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131, dates to 1825–26. Like all of his late quartets, Opus 131 pushes the string quartet’s boundaries to previously unimaginable places. It is officially in seven movements, but it might be more constructive to consider it as a single vast movement, as there is no true break between them.
Beethoven’s publisher had asked him to send an “original” work, and so Beethoven included the comment “Assembled together with pilferings from one thing and another” with his completed score. The publisher didn’t get the joke, and Beethoven had to assure him that it was indeed an original work. And original it is.
The opening Adagio is an austere but expressive fugue reflecting Beethoven’s intensive study of Johann Sebastian Bach’s counterpoint. Beethoven pushes the boundaries of tonality, taking the listed key of C-sharp Minor only as a brief starting point and transitioning subtly but frequently through related and unrelated key areas. The Allegro molto vivace is a dance movement with a light, folklike theme that seems to constantly ascend.
The severe third movement emulates recitative and allows for a transition in key and character to the graceful theme of the fourth movement theme and variations. By this point, Beethoven’s theme and variations were integrated, unpredictable, and wide-ranging, building out in all directions from the original theme in often idiosyncratic ways.
The fifth movement Presto breaks out from a sudden staccato cello motif based around an E Major triad. Scherzo-like in character but in duple meter, the flow is often interrupted.
The minor-mode sixth movement provides a solemn transition to the sonata form seventh movement Allegro, back in C-sharp minor. The abrupt, angular first theme fades into a more lyrical second theme that seems to descend into the earth. In a vast development of the themes, the two ideas trade back and forth at a rapid-fire pace, with other unrelated ideas occasionally finding their way in.
—Ethan Allred
- R. SCHUMANN Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44
ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)
Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44 (33’)I. Allegro brillante
II. In modo d’una marcia. Un poco largamente
III. Scherzo: Molto vivace
IV. Allegro ma non troppoIn its time, Robert Schumann proposed an idea that seems obvious – combining the piano and the string quartet – but had never been tried. In the space of only a few weeks, Schumann wrote a legendary and unprecedented piece of music that influenced countless followers, including Brahms and Dvořák.
Schumann dedicated the quintet to its intended pianist, his wife Clara, and the piano is central to this work. Clara did not play in the first performance, however, as she fell ill and their friend Felix Mendelssohn stepped in at the last minute.
The Allegro brillante begins dramatically, with a chordal theme sounding like Mozart. The development is very dark, foreshadowing the second movement’s funeral march and eventually arriving at a minor-mode version of the first theme.
The second movement begins as a halting funeral march, departing from choppy phrases only briefly for legato piano lines. A carefully restrained cello and violin duet follows, over a blurry, arpeggiated accompaniment. After a return to the march, an agitated section pits staccato arpeggios in the piano against sharp chords in the strings. A violin tremolo adds to the agitation, before the violin and cello duet returns and the movement closes with a final funeral march.
The third movement Scherzo uses incessant scales to maintain its constant energy, transitioning into a trio that uses several arpeggios (and a canon between violin and viola) to subtly move between key areas. After a return to the Scherzo, the furious second trio repeats a short motive in different ranges, instruments, and pitches, before closing with the Scherzo once more.
The fourth movement Allegro ma non troppo begins with an accented theme in the piano. Typically for Schumann, he moves suddenly between different sections, allowing for striking juxtapositions. He closes the Quintet by bringing back the first movement’s main theme (described as Mozartean above) in a double fugue with the main theme of the last movement. Schumann connects the themes skillfully, bringing the tone of the two movements together and meeting somewhere in the middle.
Ethan Allred, 2015
Artists
-
Gloria Chien
Piano & Artistic Director
-
Taiwanese-born pianist Gloria Chien has one of the most diverse musical lives as a noted performer, concert presenter, and educator. She made her orchestral debut at the age of sixteen with the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Thomas Dausgaard, and she performed again with the BSO with Keith Lockhart. She was subsequently selected by The Boston Globe as one of its Superior Pianists of the year, “who appears to excel in everything.” In recent seasons, she has performed as a recitalist and chamber musician at Alice Tully Hall, the Library of Congress, the Dresden Chamber Music Festival, and the National Concert Hall in Taiwan. She performs frequently with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In 2009, she launched String Theory, a chamber music series in Chattanooga, Tennessee that has become one of the region’s premier classical music presenters. The following year she was appointed director of the Chamber Music Institute at Music@Menlo, a position she held for the next decade.
In 2017, she joined her husband, violinist Soovin Kim, as artistic director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival in Burlington, Vermont. The duo became artistic directors at Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon in 2020. They were named recipients of Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Award for Extraordinary Service in 2021 for their efforts during the pandemic.
Most recently, Gloria was named Advisor of the newly launched Institute for Concert Artists at the New England Conservatory of Music. Gloria released two albums—her Gloria Chien LIVE from the Music@Menlo LIVE label and Here With You with acclaimed clarinetist Anthony McGill on Cedille Records.
Gloria received her bachelor, master’s, and doctoral degrees at the New England Conservatory of Music with Wha Kyung Byun and Russell Sherman. She is Artist-in-Residence at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, and she is a Steinway Artist.
Upcoming Concerts & Events
-
Emerson String Quartet
Ensemble
-
Eugene Drucker, violin
Philip Setzer, violin
Lawrence Dutton, viola
Paul Watkins, celloThe Emerson String Quartet will have its final season of concerts in 2022-23, disbanding after more than four decades as one of the world’s premier chamber music ensembles. “With musicians like this,” wrote a reviewer for The Times (London), “there must be some hope for humanity.” The Quartet has made more than 30 acclaimed recordings, and has been honored with nine Grammy Awards (including two for Best Classical Album), three Gramophone Awards, the Avery Fisher Prize, and Musical America’s “Ensemble of the Year” award. As part of their larger mission to keep the string quartet form alive and relevant, they have commissioned and premiered works from some of today’s most esteemed composers, and have partnered in performance with leading soloists such as Renée Fleming, Barbara Hannigan, Evgeny Kissin, Emanuel Ax, Mstislav Rostropovich, Yefim Bronfman, James Galway, Edgar Meyer, Menahem Pressler, Leon Fleisher, André Previn, and Isaac Stern, to name a few.
In its final season, the Quartet will give farewell performances across North America and Europe, including San Francisco’s Herbst Theater, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, Vienna’s Musikverein, Prague’s Rudolfinum, and London’s Southbank Centre for the completion of its acclaimed cycle of Shostakovich quartets, and more, before coming home to New York City for its final series there with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, in a trio of programs entitled Emerson Dimensions where the Quartet will perform some of its most storied repertoire. They will give several performances of André Previn’s Penelope with Renée Fleming and Uma Thurman, including at the Los Angeles Opera, and they will appear at Carnegie Hall with Evgeny Kissin to perform the Dvořák Quintet as part of a benefit concert for the Andrei Sakharov Foundation. The final performance as the Emerson String Quartet will take place in October 2023 in New York City, and will be filmed for a planned documentary by filmmaker Tristan Cook.
The Quartet’s extensive discography includes the complete string quartets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bartók, Webern, and Shostakovich, as well as multi-CD sets of the major works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Dvořák. In its final season, the Quartet will record Schoenberg’s Second Quartet with Barbara Hannigan for release in 2023, with the session’s video documented by Mathieu Amalric for a short film. Deutsche Grammophon will also reissue its box set of the Emerson String Quartet Complete Recordings on the label, with two new additions. In October 2020, the group released a recording of Schumann’s three string quartets for the Pentatone label. In the preceding year, the Quartet joined forces with Grammy-winning pianist Evgeny Kissin to release a collaborative album for Deutsche Grammophon, recorded live at a sold-out Carnegie Hall concert in 2018.
Formed in 1976 and based in New York City, the Emerson String Quartet was one of the first quartets whose violinists alternate in the first violin position. The Quartet, which takes its name from the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, balances busy performing careers with a commitment to teaching, and serves as Quartet-in-Residence at Stony Brook University. In 2013, cellist Paul Watkins—a distinguished soloist, award-wining conductor, and devoted chamber musician—joined the original members of the Quartet to form today’s group.
In the spring of 2016, the State University of New York awarded full-time Stony Brook faculty members Philip Setzer and Lawrence Dutton the status of Distinguished Professor, and conferred the title of Honorary Distinguished Professor on part-time faculty members Eugene Drucker and Paul Watkins. The Quartet’s members also hold Honorary Doctorates from Middlebury College, the College of Wooster, Bard College, and the University of Hartford. In January of 2015, the Quartet received the Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award, Chamber Music America’s highest honor, in recognition of its significant and lasting contribution to the chamber music field.
The Emerson String Quartet enthusiastically endorses Thomastik strings.
Upcoming Concerts & Events