Program Notes
St. Lawrence String Quartet with Todd Palmer, clarinet
Saturday, October 20, 2007, 8 p.m.
Southern Theatre

St. Lawrence String Quartet
            Geoff Nuttall, violin
            Scott St. John, violin
            Lesley Robertson, viola
            Christopher Costanza, cello
                        With Guest Artist Todd Palmer, clarinet

About the Artists:  St. Lawrence String Quartet

Since its genesis in Toronto in 1989, the St. Lawrence String Quartet has delighted audiences across Europe, Asia, North America, and South America, establishing itself as one of the world-class ensembles of its generation.  During the early 1990s, the St. Lawrence won the Banff International String Quartet Competition and the Young Concert Artists Auditions.  The ensemble’s debut CD, released in 1999, received both Germany’s Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik and Canada’s Juno Award.  For more than a dozen years, the ensemble has been the Resident Quartet to the Spoleto USA Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, Ensemble-in-Residence at Stanford University since 1998, and visiting artists at the University of Toronto since 1995.  The St. Lawrence previously appeared under the auspices of Chamber Music Columbus on November 6, 2004.  The St. Lawrence String Quartet can be found on the Web at http://slsq.com.

The St. Lawrence String Quartet appears by arrangement with David Rowe Artists, Marblehead, Masschusetts.  The St. Lawrence String Quartet records exclusively for EMI.

About the Artist:  Todd Palmer

Todd Palmer won the 1990 Young Concert Artists International Auditions and has served as principal clarinetist of Wyoming’s Grand Teton Festival and the Minnesota Orchestra.  In 1988, he was the first wind player to receive the Grand Prize at the Ima Hogg Young Artist Competition, allowing him to make his concerto debut with the Houston Symphony.  He is a regular collaborator with several string quartets that are favorites of Central Ohio audiences:  the St. Lawrence, Borromeo, and Brentano Quartets.  He has had an especially close relationship with composer Osvaldo Golijov since they were first introduced to each other in 1997 and is currently one of only two clarinetists authorized to perform the orchestra version of The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind until 2009.  Todd Palmer has been presented previously by Chamber Music Columbus as part of the touring ensemble Spoleto Festival USA Chamber Music on February 12, 2000, and March 6, 2004.

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
            Quartet in C major, op. 54, no. 2 (H. III:57) (composed 1788)
                        Vivace
                        Adagio
                        Menuetto:  Allegretto; Trio
                        Finale:  Adagio; Presto  

Joseph Haydn (born Rohrau, Austria, March 31, 1732; died Vienna, May 31, 1809) Quartet in C major, op. 54, no. 2 (H. III:57) (composed 1788)

Johann Tost is one of those people remembered, if at all, for his connection with one of the immortals, Joseph Haydn. That link is not entirely savory, however, in spite of Tost's being the dedicatee of Haydn's String Quartets, opera 54, 55, and 64. As far as can be determined, Tost was a violinist in the Esterházy orchestra from 1783 to 1789, the last few years of Haydn's tenure as Kapellmeister of that court. It appears that Tost went abroad in 1789 with the intention of selling the rights to some of Haydn's symphonies and quartets to publishers in both Paris and Vienna.

According to letters from the composer to two publishers at that time, Tost's machinations included an attempt to pawn off a symphony by the obscure Bohemian Adalbert Gyrowetz (1763-1850) as one by Haydn. Tost apparently found such chicanery so much to his liking that he quit music-making, married, and became a wealthy cloth merchant in Vienna.

Be that as it may, Haydn wrote twelve quartets for the violinist Tost, among which are the three of Opus 54. The Quartet in C major, like its siblings, finds Haydn at his inventive peak, taking inspiration from the younger Mozart but always traveling his own road toward the heights. The opening Vivace, symphonic in its scope, is monothematic and features the broad expressions of the first violin. The gypsy-flavored Adagio spotlights an impassioned first violin part marked "per figuram retardationis," indicating that the violin figurations are always just a step behind the dark chordal accompaniment. Without a pause, the Menuetto begins. Its Allegretto became so popular in the Esterházy court that Haydn adapted the tune as one of his thirty-two pieces for musical clock, the eighteenth century equivalent of a hit cell phone ring tone. the minor mode Trio startles with its modernistic dissonances based on the interval of the fourth.

As if the Trio were not remarkable enough, Haydn concludes this second of the "Tost" Quartets with a Finale unprecedented in his catalog. Is this a true Adagio with a brief Presto passage or a mini-Presto with an outsized slow introduction and conclusion? Although the Adagio melody is in the first violin, the plodding arpeggios of the cello often cross into the treble range of the other strings. Listeners familiar with The Creation will recognize the Adagio's secondary theme as one Haydn would later rework as the aria Mit Wurd' und Hoheit (In Native Worth) from that 1797 oratorio.

Perhaps it is worth noting that after his early successes in Vienna's business world, Johann Tost was himself tossed into harder times. At that point late in his life, he had to return to the violin to make ends meet. One wonders if Haydn's music came to his financial rescue once again.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
            Quintet in A major, K. 581 (composed 1789)
                        Allegro
                        Larghetto
                        Menuetto
                        Allegretto con variazioni  

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (born Salzburg, January 27, 1756; died Vienna, December 5, 1791) Quintet in A major, K. 581 (composed 1789)

Even as a child, Mozart loved the sound of the clarinet. Throughout his life he would highlight the instrument in operas, symphonies, and chamber works. In 1789, he got a special opportunity to contribute a piece to the annual Christmas concert to benefit the widows and children of members of the Vienna Society of Musicians. Because his friend and fellow Mason, the clarinet virtuoso Anton Stadler, also happened to be involved in the charity event, Mozart decided on a quintet for clarinet and strings. The Quintet in A major, K. 581 was completed on September 29 and premiered (with Stadler on clarinet and Mozart on viola, no less) on December 22, 1789.

The two repeated their performances the next April at the home of the Councilor to the Hungarian Exchequer, Count Johann Karl Hadik. It was then that Mozart referred to the work as "Stadler's Quintet." The composer may have been generous to the clarinetist, but there's evidence that the clarinetist may have taken some advantage of that. At the time of Mozart's death in 1791, Stadler owed him the equivalent of some $5000, money that could have come in handy to the impoverished composer and his family in his final years. But let's give Stadler the benefit of the doubt and attribute it more to Mozart's kindness than to Stadler's insensitivity. After all, Mozart's final complete instrumental work was his Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, written in October 1791 to be played by you-know-who.

The quintet opens with a quiet theme in the strings followed by a spirited clarinet response. Later, a second theme sounds in the first violin, and a third shared by the clarinet and first violin. The development deals mostly with that early clarinet phrase, now traded among the strings. The strings are muted as the clarinet glides over them in the Larghetto. At its center is a clarinet and first violin duet. In the third movement, the passionate minuet section is played by all five instruments. The strings have the first trio, in A minor, to themselves. The second trio, in A major, features the clarinet in a folksy dance. The finale is a naïve theme, in the strings with clarinet punctuations, followed by six variations. The third variation highlights a sad viola , but the last one returns to joy and light.

Osvaldo Golijov (born 1960)
            The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (composed 1994)
                        Prelude:  Calmo, sospeso
                        I.  Agitato -- Con fuoco -- Maestoso -- Senza misura, oscillante
                        II.  Teneramente -- Ruvido -- Presto
                        III. Calmo, sospeso -- Allegro pesante
                        Postlude:  Lento, liberamente  

Osvaldo Golijov (born La Plata, Argentina, December 5, 1960) The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (composed 1994)

Born in La Plata, Argentina, to a family of Eastern European Jewish heritage, Osvaldo Golijov studied composition and piano before moving to Israel in 1983. In 1986, he came to the United States, studying with George Crumb and earning his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1991, Mr. Golijov has taught at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and also serves on the faculties of the Boston Conservatory and at the Tanglewood Music Center.

Members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet and Golijov met at Tanglewood in the summer of 1992. Written in 1994, The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, for clarinet and string quartet, evokes klezmer excitement as well as Jewish liturgical melodies. The composer likens the artistic commitment of musicians to that of the kabbalist rabbi of medieval Provence, Isaac the Blind, who postulated that the entire universe resulted from combinations of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. About The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, Golijov has written:

The movements of this work sound to me as if written in three of the different languages spoken by the Jewish people throughout our history. This somehow reflects the composition's epic nature. I hear the prelude and the first movement, the most ancient, in Aramaic; the second movement is in Yiddish, the rich and fragile language of a long exile; the third movement and postlude are in sacred Hebrew.

The prelude and the first movement simultaneously explore two prayers in different ways: The quartet plays the first part of the central prayer of the High Holidays, 'We will observe the mighty holiness of this day...', while the clarinet dreams the motifs from 'Our Father, Our King'. The second movement is based on 'The Old Klezmer Band', a traditional dance tune, which is surrounded here by contrasting manifestations of its own halo. The third movement was written before all the others. It is an instrumental version of K'Vakarat, a work that I wrote a few years ago for Kronos and Cantor Misha Alexandrovich. … This movement, together with the postlude, bring to conclusion the prayer left open in the first movement: '...Thou pass and record, count and visit, every living soul, appointing the measure of every creature's life and decreeing its destiny'.

But blindness is as important in this work as dreaming and praying. I had always the intuition that, in order to achieve the highest possible intensity in a performance, musicians should play, metaphorically speaking, 'blind'. That is why, I think, all legendary bards in cultures around the world, starting with Homer, are said to be blind. 'Blindness' is probably the secret of great string quartets, those who don't need their eyes to communicate among them, with the music, or the audience. My hommage to all of them and Isaac of Provence is this work for blind musicians, so they can play it by heart. Blindness, then, reminded me of how to compose music as it was in the beginning: An art that springs from and relies on our ability to sing and hear, with the power to build castles of sound in our memories.

In 2005, Golijov created a version of Dreams and Prayers for clarinet and string orchestra. Only two clarinetists, Todd Palmer and David Krakauer, are authorized to play the orchestral version until 2009.

Program notes by Jay Weitz, Consulting Database Specialist for music, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, Ohio, and a contributing performing arts critic for the weekly alternative newspaper Columbus Alive. (http://www.columbusalive.com)

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