Program Notes
Pacifica Quartet with Amy Dissanayake, piano
Saturday, October 23, 2004
Simin
Ganatra, violin
with guest artist Amy Dissanayake, piano
One
of today’s most dynamic and exciting string quartets, the Pacifica Quartet
continues to win the hearts of audiences around the world with its impassioned
interpretations and unique musical voice. Formed
in 1994, the Pacifica quickly achieved international stature, capturing several
of chamber music’s most important awards:
Grand Prize at the 1996 Coleman Chamber Music Competition, top prize at
the 1997 Concert Artists Guild Competition, the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music
Award, and the 2002 Cleveland Quartet Award.
Among its many other achievements, the Pacifica was instrumental in
creating the Music Integration Project, an innovative program that provides
musical performances and teacher training to inner-city elementary schools.
The Pacifica Quartet can be found on the Web at http://www.pacificaquartet.com.
Pianist
Amy Dissanayake was a student of Ursula Oppens at Northwestern University, where
she earned a Doctorate in Piano Performance in 1999.
Awards include a stipend prize at the 2000 Darmstadt Internationale
Fereinkurse für Neue Musik, first prizes in the American Opera Society of
Chicago competition, the Union League and Civic Arts Foundation piano
competition, the Farwell Competition, and the Rose Fay Thomas Competition, as
well as prizes in the Joanna Hodges International Piano Competition, and the
Frinna Awerbuch International Piano Competition.
The
Pacifica Quartet appears through special arrangement with Melvin Kaplan, 115
College Street, Burlington, Vermont 05401.
Quartet in A major, op. 13 (composed 1827)
Adagio; Allegro vivace
Adagio non lento
Intermezzo: Allegretto
con moto; Allegro di molto
Presto
His
friend Robert Schumann called Felix Mendelssohn "the Mozart of the 19th
century," not least because of the astounding number of works he produced
during his short lifetime: volumes
of works for piano and for organ; five symphonies; monumental choral pieces;
overtures and incidental music; songs and part-songs; and no fewer than two
dozen chamber works. Throughout
Europe, Mendelssohn was in demand as an organist, pianist, conductor, and
composer, spending his last decade directing the Gewandhaus Orchestra in
Leipzig. There he championed
neglected works of the previous century, premiered his own compositions and
those of his contemporaries, and tried to raise the standards of both orchestral
performance and public taste.
Never an
innovator, Mendelssohn strove to reconcile the classical heritage of the 18th
century with the romantic tenor of his own.
Yet, aside from the “Octet, op. 20,” Mendelssohn's chamber music has
tended to languish in the shadow of his orchestral works.
Completed on October 26, 1827, seven months to the day after Beethoven's
death, the “Quartet in A major, op. 13” was chronologically Mendelssohn's
second string quartet. It had been preceded by an E-flat major quartet from 1823
that remained unpublished during his lifetime, and was followed by the
“Quartet in E-flat major, op. 12,” written in 1829.
Although
Opus 13 both opens and concludes with reference to Mendelssohn's own 1827 song,
“Ist es wahr?, op. 9, no. 1,” it is Beethoven's ghost that hovers over the
quartet. The introductory
“Adagio” recalls the middle movement of Beethoven's piano sonata, “Les
Adieux, op. 81a,” and the main theme of the “Allegro vivace” brings to
mind the “Quartet, op. 132.” The
first theme of the “Adagio non lento” combines memories of “Ist es wahr?”
with elements of the “Cavatina” movement from Beethoven's “Quartet, op.
130.” The fugue that follows (and
dramatically reappears in the finale as well as in the coda of this slow
movement) has a clear antecedent in Beethoven's “Quartet, op. 95.”
The
“Intermezzo” features the violin's minor-mode air over pizzicato
accompaniment. The trio is one of
Mendelssohn's trademark "elfin" exercises in contrasting major. After the “Intermezzo” theme's return, it and the trio
blend in the coda. Not only is
Beethoven's “Quartet, op. 132” evoked in the passionate violin recitative
over undulating accompaniment that opens the “Presto,” but when this final
movement reviews the themes of the previous three, it can't help but remind us
of the same tactic in the finale of Beethoven's “Symphony no. 9.”
After the coda sounds, the fugue theme from the “Adagio non lento,”
“Ist es wahr?” returns, bringing the quartet full circle back to
Mendelssohn.
toward the deepening stillness beyond visible light
(composed 2004)
Read
the lowercased titles of even a few of Jeffrey Mumford’s compositions and you
will get a sense of his concern for the subtleties of color and light, the
nuances of sound, the evocation of clouds, and the presence of landscape:
“a window’s gathering of clouds” (1981), “fragments from the
surrounding evening” (1984), “as the air softens in dusklight” (1994),
“ringing fields of enveloping blue” (1997), and “toward the deepening
stillness beyond visible light,” the piano quintet receiving its world
premiere this evening.
Mumford
was born in Washington, D.C. in 1955. He
has been on the faculty of the Washington Conservatory of Music and an Artist in
Residence in the College of Musical Arts at Bowling Green State University.
With the beginning of the new academic year this fall, he becomes Oberlin
Conservatory of Music’s Composer In Residence.
He has been co-director of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the American
Composers Forum and has served on the boards of the National Academy of
Recording Arts and Sciences and the League of Composers/ISCM.
Concerning
“toward the deepening stillness beyond visible light,” Mr. Mumford has
written the following:
“toward
the deepening stillness beyond visible light” was commissioned by a consortium
of presenters consisting of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Chamber Music Columbus (Ohio), and Omus
Hirshbein for the Pacifica Quartet and pianist Amy Dissanayake, and is a
celebration of the collective talents of these amazing performers.
The
title for me suggests layers and intensities of late afternoon and evening light
as experienced through gradually receding clouds.
Thus, in terms of its developmental scenario, the piece concerns itself
with how these layers of shifting space (strings) interact with a more stable
and resonant sound world (piano).
Often the piano and strings reinforce one another but increasingly the
piano’s music establishes a personality of its own which eventually dissipates
into the distance.
In
the “New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,” David Froom writes of Mr.
Mumford’s “interest in long, fanciful, lyrical lines of contrasting
character, superimposed in layers of simultaneous activity.”
Froom likens the style to the movement of clouds:
“a constant cycle of separation and recombination, dissipation and
reformation, with layers moving at different speeds.”
Appreciation
for Mr. Mumford’s work has been reflected in numerous grants, commissions,
fellowships, and awards, as well as performances worldwide, from the Library of
Congress to Finland’s Helsinki Festival.
Among his awards is the "Academy Award in Music" from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He also won the inaugural National Black Arts Festival/Atlanta Symphony
Orchestra Composition Competition.
Quartet in D minor, D. 810 (“Death and the Maiden”) (composed 1824)
Franz
Schubert probably did not conceive his most renowned string quartet as a
showcase for the set of variations on his 1817 song “Tod und das Mädchen, D.
531,” wherein Death comforts a young girl.
Only in the imaginations of nineteenth-century commentators did the
quartet’s pervasive minor quality, the second movement’s variations, and the
finale’s reference to that other death-laden song “Das Erlkönig, D. 328,”
blur into the morbid program that has come down to us.
More
likely, Schubert intended the quartet not as a meditation on death but as a
vital dress rehearsal for composing the “grand symphony” to which he
aspired.
He had written in March 1824 to his friend and sometime librettist Josef
Kupelwieser about several works -- including this quartet, the “Quartet in A
minor, D. 804,” and the “Octet in F major, D. 803” -- that he considered
to be preparation for his crowning symphonic opus.
His earlier quartets had been family affairs, woven with the abilities
and tastes of his father, brothers, and self in mind.
But his acquaintance with the viola virtuoso Ignaz Schuppanzigh
(1776-1830) around 1824 and news of Beethoven’s completion of his “Ninth
Symphony” inspired him to plan a monumental work of his own.
Whether this was the mysterious lost “Gastein Symphony” of 1825, the
“’Great’ C major Symphony” of 1828, or something he never lived to write
at all, remains unknown.
Signs
of symphonic assurance abound, from the quartet’s cyclic construction suffused
with the opening rhythm to the orchestral texture suggested by the frequent use
of multiple stops.
Incredibly, Schuppanzigh disliked the work, Schubert filed it away, and
it remained unpublished until 1931, three years after the composer’s death.
Germinating the entire quartet is the forceful five-note descending figure that opens the “Allegro.” The movement ends with a two-part coda, the first mysterious, the second gentle. A tripartite theme (the piano prelude and the end of Death’s melody, both from the eponymous song, separated by a new section not heard in the song) and five variations constitute the “Andante con moto.” Variation one is impatient and restless; two is dominated by the singing cello; three is a duet between the first violin and the cello; four, almost the only major-mode relief in the work; and five, a great crescendo and dying away. The syncopated “Scherzo” contrasts with its tender, innocent trio section, and the “Presto” finale rushes past
Program notes by Jay Weitz, Consulting Database Specialist for music, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, Ohio. He is a contributing performing arts critic for the weekly alternative newspaper Alive: Music, Art, and Culture in Columbus (http://www.columbusalive.com).
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