AT-HOME: Brentano String Quartet: A Tribute to Stravinsky

The “fiercely intelligent and expressively pristine” (The New Yorker) Brentano String Quartet, CMNW’s 2021-22 Artists-in-Residence, unleash an immersive program in celebration of Stravinsky through the medium of quartet and beyond. Interlacing the legendary 20th century composer’s beautifully idiomatic compositions with poetry and works from his contemporaries and acolytes, you’ll first go on an eclectic journey deep into the world of Stravinsky. That immersive investigation will be followed by masterpieces that influenced Stravinsky including 16th century madrigals and Beethoven’s epic final quartet with its wild, kaleidoscopic finale that could almost be mistaken for Stravinsky himself. 2021/22 Artists-in-Residence

Premieres on CMNW.org beginning Saturday, December 18 @ 7:30 PM (PT) and can be accessed through Friday, December 31 at midnight.

Brilliant, virtuosic, and still mellow, its members perfectly meshed in sound while retaining their individual personalities—the Brentano Quartet…must be one of the great musical hopes of a field overcrowded with contenders…The [players] made every utterance sing and every phrase connect within the total.”

— Los Angeles Times

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Premieres Saturday, 12/18 • 7:30 pm PT

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Program

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

PROGRAM NOTES: Learn About the Music for A Tribute to Stravinsky

Brentano String Quartet: A Tribute to Stravinsky (50 years after his death)

Fifty years after the death of Igor Stravinsky we’ve chosen to celebrate his contribution to the string quartet repertoire with a program that orbits around some of the great composer’s preoccupations, juxtaposing his music with poetry and other music that reflects and refracts features of these works. Stravinsky’s two major works for quartet, the Three Pieces and the Concertino, are included, pieces in which he seems to have written utterly idiomatically for the medium, albeit in an idiom that didn’t previously exist. He has teased out some hitherto hidden personality traits of the quartet, asking the group to be a clicking, whirring machine, or to wheeze and flutter, or to intone solemnly in the manner of a faintly remembered ancient chant. Stravinsky returned to both of these pieces later in his life and arranged the music for larger forces; the arrangements shine with the colorations of his characteristic, variegated tonal landscape. He must have heard even further into the works to reveal their intrinsic Technicolor souls, and to have been fond enough of the music to want to give it new life.

Again and again in these works Stravinsky collects a small set of pitches to shuffle and reshuffle within an individual line, a collection of worry beads being fingered, or a sort of obsessive fixation that burrows into itself. Kaleidoscopic textures emerge out of layering these, so that the end result seems some sort of bizarre machine comprised of individual components which separately dance and twitch and try to sing. I’m reminded of the great Paul Klee painting The Twittering Machine, in which birds are rigged up to a possibly menacing wire mechanism. The two Cage movements surrounding the Concertino play the same game, stratifying material that coalesces into a kind of Music of the Spheres amalgam, peaceful in Quietly Flowing Along, playful in Quodlibet. Neither Stravinsky nor Cage was especially fond of the other’s music, but these particular works perhaps share a penumbra.

Each of the Stravinsky Three Pieces is here partnered with a piece that shares some vital aspect of its mien or comportment. The three-part Machaut motet provides a vivid example of the layering of individual lines previously explored in the Cage and the Concertino. The three strands of material share a space and contribute to a Gestalt, revolving around or flowing beside each other without betraying much mutual influence. This is actually a simultaneous setting of three separate texts that unfold in parallel, suggesting a distant pre-echo of the texture of the first of the Three Pieces (which was entitled Danse when later arranged for orchestra). The quirky, awkward Shostakovich Polka partakes of some of the oddity and physical comedy on display in the second of the Three Pieces (later entitled Excentrique), which was inspired by the English music-hall clown known as Little Tich. (You can see him on YouTube!) Stravinsky stated “the jerky, spastic movement, the ups and downs, the rhythm – even the mood or the joke of the music – was suggested by the art of the great clown.” And the Verdi Ave Maria serves as a haunting liturgical prelude to the mystery of the chant-like third of the Three Pieces (later entitled Cantique). This Ave Maria was written as a response to a challenge in a music periodical to compose a piece based on the so-called enigmatic scale (which you can hear in long tones in each part in turn). Verdi, a composer much admired by Stravinsky, responds to the imposed restriction with imagination and affecting poignancy; Stravinsky likewise creates voluntary restrictions of register and timbre that sculpt his piece into something ascetic, sibylline and eloquent. In between each of the mirroring pairs of pieces we hear the three movements of Amy Lowell’s poem Stravinsky’s Three Pieces “Grotesques,” for String Quartet. Lowell was at an early performance of the Three Pieces (by the Flonzaley Quartet) and was so overwhelmed by the experience that she was inspired to “translate” the music into poetry. These vibrant, evocative poems introduce each of the Stravinsky movements in our program.

The choral topic introduced by the Verdi, the Cantique and, obliquely, by the inclusion of text in the program is picked up by Stravinsky’s late period Anthem, a setting of a section of a T.S. Eliot poem (part IV of Little Gidding, from Four Quartets), here, of course, textless, but retaining the austere, bracing harmonies and severely entwined, tangled lines of the original version. The second half of the program then opens with more vocal music, three madrigals by Gesualdo. Stravinsky was largely responsible for bringing Gesualdo back into the consciousness of the public (much like Mendelssohn with Bach), and chose to set three madrigals for orchestra in the Monumentum pro Gesualdo, the three madrigals that we present here arranged for quartet. Stravinsky’s arrangements highlight the sense of rupture inherent in the often jagged, strident harmonic shifts of the originals, the continuity of the musical rhetoric constantly under threat of tearing at the seams.

This sense of possible rupture permeates, as well, Beethoven’s final quartet, Op. 135, which closes the program. This piece is largely built on small motivic units that get snipped apart and cobbled back together, reminiscent of Stravinsky’s use of small cells of material in the earlier works on the program. There is a translucency here, a lightness born of playing with ideas and teasing out their possibilities in real time. This is the quality that Italo Calvino (in the Six Memos to the Next Millennium) may have had in mind when he said: “In fact, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.” I have to confess that in putting together this program I had a vivid memory of having read that Stravinsky described the astonishing passage in the Scherzo of Op. 135, where the lower three voices manically, unremittingly (48 times!) repeat a five note turn figure at the top threshold of their dynamic range while the first violin rages and rails within its own constellation of pitches, as his favorite in all of Beethoven. Research into this has yielded no trace of such a quotation. Yet, I remain convinced that Stravinsky must have, at the very least, said this in some parallel universe, that it is apt and resonant. Certainly this is the most Stravinsky-like of the Beethoven quartets, and, in its playful yet profound juggling of musical quanta, it serves as both a reflection of some of Stravinsky’s obsessions, and an alternate emotional sphere within which those obsessions might blossom and reside.

— © Mark Steinberg, Brentano Quartet

JOHN CAGE from Quartet in Four Parts, I. Quietly Flowing Along (1950)

IGOR STRAVINSKY Concertino for String Quartet

JOHN CAGE from Quartet in Four Parts, IV. Quodlibet (1950)

MACHAUT Quant en moy, M1

AMY LOWELL poem reading: “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces Grotesques for String Quartet,” Movement I, recorded by Barbara Sukowa

IGOR STRAVINSKY Three Pieces for String Quartet, I. Danse

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Two pieces for String Quartet, II. Polka

AMY LOWELL poem reading: “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces Grotesques for String Quartet,” Movement II, recorded by Barbara Sukowa

IGOR STRAVINSKY Three Pieces for String Quartet, II. Excentrique

VERDI “Ave Maria” from Quattro pezzi sacri

AMY LOWELL poem reading: “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces Grotesques for String Quartet,” Movement III, recorded by Barbara Sukowa

IGOR STRAVINSKY Three Pieces for String Quartet, III. Cantique

IGOR STRAVINSKY Anthem: “The Dove Descending Breaks the Air”

BEETHOVEN String Quartet No. 16 in F-Major, Op. 135

Concert Program

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