Saturday, October 17, 2009, 8pm, Southern Theatre

Ying Quartet

About the Artists

Frank Huang, violin
Janet Ying, violin
David Ying, cello
Phillip Ying, viola

Since its founding in 1988, the Ying Quartet has served residencies at the Eastman School of Music and at the Aspen, Norfolk, and Tanglewood festivals.  They have won the 1989 International Cleveland Quartet Competition at Eastman, second place in the 1992 Banff International String Quartet Competition, and the 1993 Naumberg Chamber Music Award.  The ensemble has participated in the National Endowment for the Arts Rural Residency Initiative, sharing its music with the small town of Jesup in northeastern Iowa.  Now into its third decade, the Ying Quartet has made a transition to its new first violinist.  Frank Huang fills the chair originally held by Timothy Ying, who is moving with his family to Canada where he intends to start a business venture.  Since winning the 2003 Naumburg Violin Competition and the 2000 Hannover International Violin Competition, Huang has been in demand as a recital and orchestral soloist and as a chamber musician.  Huang and all four of the Ying siblings studied with members of the Cleveland Quartet, providing them with a common musical heritage.  The Ying Quartet has previously appeared under the auspices of Chamber Music Columbus on November 6, 1993; November 5, 1994; January 20, 1996; and April 1, 2001.  For more information on the Ying Quartet, see their Web site at http://www.ying4.com.

Program

Robert Schumann (born Zwickau, Saxony, June 8, 1810; died Endenich, near Bonn, July 29, 1856)

Quartet in A major, op. 41, no. 3 (composed 1842)

In February 1842, Clara and Robert Schumann launched a tour of Bremen, Oldenburg, and Hamburg.  Clara had been invited to play piano and Robert, having begged off conducting his own works on this trip, grew increasingly uncomfortable being shunted to the background.  So instead of continuing on to Copenhagen with his wife, Robert went home alone to Leipzig in mid-March to nurse his depression with the odd combination of alcohol and counterpoint.

Back in February before the tour, Robert had reported having “quartet-ish thoughts.”  Now he plunged headlong into extensive study of Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn quartets.  On April 26th, Clara returned from the tour and Robert’s mood improved considerably.  By early June, he had moved from quartet study to quartet writing and within five weeks, he had created all three of his extant string quartets, dedicated to his friend Felix Mendelssohn.  Schumann’s “Quartet in A major, op. 41, no. 3” was written entirely between July 8th and 22nd.

Though Schumann continued to churn out chamber works through January of 1843 before shifting his attention to choral music, all the remaining pieces (including the “Quintet, op. 44;” the “Fantasiestücke, op. 88;” and the “Quartet, op. 47”) featured his own instrument, the piano.  Many scholars argue that even the three string quartets betray Schumann’s preoccupation (and comfort) with the piano in how he constructs and embellishes themes.

Prominently featured in the leisurely “Andante espressivo” introduction is the falling interval of the fifth.  The main theme (“Allegro molto moderato”) opens with the same motif, and the second theme that passes from cello to first violin alludes to it, as well.  The development deals mostly with the main theme but the recap opens with the second.  A sort of scherzo, the “Assai agitato” is a set of variations in which the theme, appearing as a canon in the first violin and viola and marked “Un poco adagio,” does not sound until after the first three variations.  Those variations start out restless and grow increasingly agitated.  Listen for the use of the rising fourth, the inversion of the falling fifth.  A final variation and coda follow the statement of the theme.

Sebastian Currier (born Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, March 16, 1959)

Next Atlantis (composed 2008-2009)

Although born in Huntingdon, in mountainous central Pennsylvania, Sebastian Currier was raised in Rhode Island, in a family of musicians:  a composer mother (Marilyn Kind Currier), a violinist/violist father (Robert Currier), and his younger brother the prominent composer Nathan Currier.  Early on, Sebastian studied violin, but branched off into playing guitar and writing rock songs as a teenager.  He has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell and Yaddo Colonies and at the American Academies in both Rome and Berlin.  He studied with Milton Babbitt at Juilliard and with George Perle at the Tanglewood Festival.

Among Sebastian Currier’s many recognitions have been a Berlin Prize, Rome Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, Friedheim Award, a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Tanglewood Fellowship, and several awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He has written commissions for Meet the Composer, Fromm Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, Barlow Endowment, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, and the American Composers Orchestra.  He earned his doctorate in music from Juilliard.  He has taught at Juilliard, the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, and Columbia University.  In 2007, he was awarded the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for his quintet Static.

About Next Atlantis, Sebastian Currier has kindly provided the following notes:

“The overall character of Next Atlantis, for string quartet and pre-recorded sound, is generally one of sustained quietude, peacefulness, and serenity, but with a sense of emptiness and loss not far off.  It is an elegy for a future that must not happen:  New Orleans has been submerged under water.  Sounds of water, both above and below the surface, pervade the piece.  The water is an idealized water, often electronically sculpted into melodies and chords.  The string quartet maintains a dialogue with these muted sounds.  The quartet imitates the sounds of water and the water itself takes on vestiges of the players' harmonies.  Intertwined with these sounds is the faint, ghostly echo of fragments from Bourbon Street Parade, here subdued into quiet disembodied strains that rise to the surface like bubbles from a sunken shipwreck.  It is a new Atlantis, not of the mythic past, but one of the too possible future.”

Ludwig van Beethoven (born Bonn, December 16, 1770; died Vienna, March 26, 1827)

Quartet in C-sharp minor, op. 131 (composed 1826)

Legend holds that the very last time Beethoven signed his name, two days before his death on March 26, 1827, was to assign to the publisher Schott & Sons the rights to the Quartet, op. 131.  When he had completed the work in July 1826 after spending most of the previous six or seven months almost exclusively on it, he had sent it to Schott with a jocular annotation that translated roughly as, "A putting together of various stolen odds and ends."  This was a playful reference to the seemingly fragmented construction of a seven-movement quartet that was as startlingly original in expression as it was in form.  Ironically, Opus 131 may be Beethoven's most thoroughly integrated work, the clearest instance in his oeuvre where first and final movements are thematically connected.

Not two weeks after Beethoven completed the quartet, his nephew and ward Karl attempted suicide, an act that left the composer emotionally devastated.  Karl soon recovered and, with the help of Baron Joseph von Stutterheim, was inducted into the Baron's army regiment, as much to get him out of Beethoven's hair as to serve his nation.  In appreciation, Beethoven dedicated Opus 131 to the Baron.

Superficial appearances to the contrary, the seven uninterrupted movements resolve into a structure very much like any other traditional four-movement quartet upon closer examination.  The mournful opening adagio, the only full-scale fugue Beethoven ever wrote in so leisurely a tempo, can be heard as the slow introduction to the more upbeat Allegro molto vivace.  It starts out basically homophonic but grows more polyphonic as it develops.

The brief, modulatory Allegro moderato passage, dominated by the violin, serves to introduce the slow variations movement.  Here, the theme finds the two violins in dialogue, employing the medieval technique called hocket, where each instrument alternately sounds and rests.  In variation one, a rhythmic alteration of the theme is heard in the second violin.  Variation two (Più mosso) is a violin and cello duet.  The third variation (Andante moderato e lusinghiero) begins as a canon between the cello and viola.  Variation four (Adagio) features violin duets and pizzicato punctuations, but bears little resemblance to the theme.  The fifth variation (Allegretto) is scattered with multiple stops.  Variation six (Adagio, ma non troppo e semplice) highlights an ascending then descending first violin.  Recitative-like and incomplete, the seventh variation leads directly to the highly ornamented Allegretto coda that serves as a final variation.

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