Opening Night with the Emerson, Guarneri & Calidore Quartets
Experience performances by three of the world’s finest string quartets – the Grammy Award-winning Emerson String Quartet, the late great Guarneri Quartet, and rising stars the Calidore Quartet – all in one night!
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Premieres June 22 @ 7 pm PT
Available through June 23 @ 11:59 pm PT
Program
Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.
- BARBER Adagio from String Quartet in B Minor, Op. 11 (1936)
BARBER (1910-1981) Adagio from String Quartet in B Minor, Op. 11 (1936)
Copyright, 1936, by G. Schirmer, Inc. International Copyright Secured. Synchronization rights licensed from G. Schirmer, Inc. Used with permission.
- BRAHMS Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115 (37’)I. Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Andantino
IV. Con motoJohannes Brahms had retired from composing by the time he heard the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, but was so inspired by his playing that he came out of retirement expressly to write for the clarinet. The resulting chamber music includes the Clarinet Trio, two Clarinet Sonatas, and the poignant Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115, all some of his final, most mature works. Written as they were in the twilight of Brahms’ life, these works have a reflective quality, highly emotional, but experienced from the remove of memory.
The Clarinet Quintet seems to straddle two opposing sides of a coin. The conspicuous lack of tonic in the violins’ opening gesture creates a momentary ambiguity between B minor and D major, an early herald of the duality that will outline the work’s affective trajectory. The three-note motive that the clarinet sings in the Adagio is the same that forms the pillars of the movement’s rhapsodic middle section. The third movement is similarly constructed on two contrasting sections — a melancholic scherzo in B minor between the pastoral spaciousness of the D major Andantino areas — both mosaicked with the same two motives. Even the fourth movement sources its opening material from the Andantino, but this time the turbulent B minor casts a shadow of malaise on the sunny repose that ended the third movement. The final variation’s collision with reprised music from the first movement signifies a sort of communion, a coming full circle that seems to acknowledge this material as the bookends of a unified story. The realization of this goal allows the piece to finally come to rest, but not before the final upset of the forte penultimate chord: Brahms’ harrowing last gasp right as the curtain falls.
—© Graeme Steele Johnson
- FELIX MENDELSSOHN Octet for Strings in E-flat Major, Op. 20
FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809–1847)
Octet for Strings in E-flat Major, Op. 20I. Allegro moderato con fuoco
II. Andante
III. Scherzo: Allegro leggierissimo
IV. PrestoFelix Mendelssohn wrote the original Octet for Strings in E-flat Major (1825) when he only 16 years old. With this rule-bending, sophisticated feat, Mendelssohn stepped into his maturity as composer—not even Mozart was so brilliant at such a young age.
Mendelssohn’s Octet was inarguably the first of its kind, a work that integrates two string quartets and fully explores the potential textures, from unison passages to eight-part counterpoint. He may have been aware of one recent “double quartet” by Louis Spohr, but Spohr’s experimental work has doesn’t compare in scope; otherwise, there is no known precedent.
Mendelssohn’s scope is indicated first by the unbelievable breadth of the Allegro moderato ma con fuoco, surpassing 600 measures as it was first notated. At times the ebullient movement seems like a vast symphony, at others like an intimate quartet.
The remarkable third movement Scherzo is a perfect example of early Romanticism. Felix’s sister Fanny recalled that he based the music on a dream sequence from Goethe’s Faust, in which the author satirically presents cultural figures of his time such as philosophers, critics, and religious leaders as participants in a turbulent witches’ Sabbath. Accompaniment for the Sabbath is provided by an orchestra of flies, mosquitoes, frogs, and crickets. The festivities end at dawn, and everything vanishes, represented by the final violin line at the end of the movement.
In the Presto finale Mendelssohn pays tribute to two of his idols, Mozart and Beethoven, with a movement that contrasts lyrical melodies and incessant contrapuntal lines, ending in a symphonic outburst showing the power of eight instruments.
—© Ethan Allred