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Guillaume Sutre, violin
Luc-Marie Aguera, violin
Miguel Da Silva, viola
Yovan Markovitch, cello
Formed in 1984 by four students at the Paris Conservatory, the Ysaÿe Quartet
takes its name from the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931),
who also happened to be the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
from 1918 to 1922. The Ysaÿe was the
first French quartet to win the Grand Prize at the Evian Festival in 1988.
Since its first North American tour in 1990, the Ysaÿe Quartet has
returned to the continent numerous times.
The Ysaÿe also performs regularly at such European summer festivals
as Lockenhaus, Stresa, and Salzburg.
The Ysaÿe has played at such European venues as Théâtre de la Ville and
Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, Wigmore Hall and South Bank in London,
the Musikverein in Vienna, at the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg, and at the
Schleswig-Holstein Festival. The
Ysaÿe Quartet’s discography includes recordings of works by Mozart,
Mendelssohn, Debussy, Ravel, and Fauré for various recording companies
including Harmonia Mundi, Phillips, and Decca.
In 2003, the Ysaÿe Quartet founded
its own record label, Ysaÿe Records/Aeon, and more recent releases feature
repertoire by Haydn, Schumann, Mozart, Albéric Magnard, Fauré, Beethoven,
and Franck. In 2001, the Ysaÿe
Quartet was awarded the Grand Prix de l'Académie Charles Cros for their
recording of the complete quartets by André Boucourechliev.
Since 1994, the Ysaÿe Quartet has developed a keen interest in
teaching, and they have founded a string quartet class at the Conservatoire
Supérieur de Paris.
The Ysaÿe Quartet previously appeared under the auspices of Chamber Music
Columbus on February 15, 1997.
The Ysaÿe Quartet appears through arrangement with Arts Management Group,
Inc., 37 West 26th Street, Suite 403, New York, New York 10010.
Gabriel Fauré
(born
Pamiers, Ariège, May 12, 1845; died Paris, November 4, 1924)
Quartet in E minor, op. 121 (composed 1923-1924)
Allegro moderato
Andante
Allegro
At the
École Niedermayer in Paris, Gabriel Fauré's earliest musical training
concentrated on plainsong and the church modes. Not until 1861, when he
began piano studies with Camille Saint-Saëns, was Fauré introduced to music
of his own time. By 1871 he had
joined with Vincent D'Indy, Edouard Lalo, Henri Duparc, and Emmanuel
Chabrier to form the Société Nationale de Musique, the organization that
would premiere many of his works.
In April
1877, Fauré became choirmaster at the fashionable Paris church, the
Madeleine, and in July became engaged to Marianne Viardot, daughter of the
celebrated singer Pauline Viardot.
For five years he had loved Marianne, so when she broke with him that
October, Fauré was devastated.
Perhaps as a consolation, he launched on a series of musical tours soon
thereafter, but it took him years to fully recover from Marianne’s
rejection. In December 1877 in
Weimar, he met Franz Liszt. Over the
next few years he deliberately sought out productions of Wagner's operas in
Cologne, Munich, and London, yet he resisted the influence of the German
giant.
In 1891,
an ecstatic visit to Venice and Florence revived Fauré’s spirit, sparking a
productive period for the composer.
He took over as chief organist at the Madeleine in June 1896, and then in
October began to teach composition at the Paris Conservatoire, succeeding
Jules Massenet. This appointment was
a vindication for Fauré, who had been rejected for the same post four years
earlier. The Conservatoire director
at the time, Ambroise Thomas, had considered Fauré too radical a composer.
Among Fauré’s many radicalized students at the Conservatoire were
Louis Aubert, Nadia Boulanger, Maurice Ravel, and Florent Schmitt.
Further vindication came in October 1905 when Fauré became director
of the Conservatoire, where he remained until his increasing deafness
convinced him to step down in 1920.
From
then on when health permitted, he devoted himself to composition, including
that of his final work and only string quartet, the
Quartet in E minor, op. 121.
He began working on it in the summer of 1923 and, as his energies
declined and revived, finished in September of 1924.
For the themes of the Allegro
moderato, Fauré resurrected the discarded fragments of a violin concerto
he had given up on in 1878-1879, altering the rhythms and (returning to his
earliest training) giving the first theme a modal flavor that the original
lacked. Of the
Andante, Fauré biographer Jean
Michel Nectoux has written, “From start to finish it bathes in a
supernatural light. … There is nothing that is not beautiful in this
movement with its subtle variations of light-play, a sort of white upon
white.” Although Fauré apparently
contemplated writing a short scherzo to place between the first and second
movement, he abandoned the idea. The
Allegro finale, however, has the
spirit of a scherzo, opening with the cello over pizzicato accompaniment.
The Quartet op. 121
premiered on June 12, 1925, more than seven months after Fauré’s death, at a
concert of the Société Nationale de Musique, fittingly enough.
Béla Bartók (born Nagy-szent-miklós, Hungary, March
25, 1881; died New York, September 26, 1945)
Quartet no. 6 (composed 1939)
Mesto; Vivace
Mesto; Marcia
Mesto; Burletta: Moderato
Mesto
If the
Quartet no. 6 has a somber,
pessimistic tone, consider the events that surrounded its composition, both
personally for Béla Bartók and politically for Europe.
His beloved mother, Paula, fell seriously ill in the summer of 1939
and died in December. The spread of
Nazism, especially the growing fascism of the Hungarian government, drove
Bartók to despair. He had begun his
vocal opposition as early as 1931, when he defended Toscanini from fascist
attacks. He refused to perform in
Germany after January 1933, prohibited broadcasts of his music in Italy and
Germany beginning in 1937, and then eventually refused to allow any
performances in his native Hungary.
In October 1940, he exiled himself from Hungary and made his way to New
York, where he spent the rest of his life.
Bartók
had begun work on the Quartet no. 6,
commissioned by the first violinist of the Hungarian String Quartet, Zóltan
Székely, in August 1939 while in Saanen, Switzerland, and completed it in
November in Budapest. It was the last
major work he would compose in Europe and ended up being dedicated to the
Kolisch Quartet, which premiered the work in New York in January 1941.
The
first three of the four movements of the
Quartet no. 6 are introduced by
the Mesto (sadly) theme, which
grows in complexity with each return.
It is played by the solo viola in the first movement, in a two-part setting
led by the cello with the other strings playing in octaves in the second,
and in a three-part version initially without the viola in the third.
For the fourth movement, the
Mesto takes over entirely, now with four independent voices.
Bartók had considered a more hopeful finale in the form of a rustic
dance but was apparently unable to write one in that season of anguish.
Following the Mesto in the first
movement, the Vivace section is
in sonata form with two themes, one in swift triplets, the other folksy with
dotted rhythms. The
Marcia of the second movement is
sardonic and again full of dotted rhythms.
The middle section features a high cello melody with pizzicato and
tremolo accompaniment. The
Burletta of the third movement is
a burlesque explosion of Bartókian effects from on-purpose “wrong” notes to
stomping rhythms to string-driven laughter.
Although as noted, the Mesto
dominates the finale, there are points at which two recollections of the
first movement Vivace appear.
As Bartók biographer Halsey Stevens writes about this finale,
“Nowhere in all Bartók’s other music is there a movement so restrained and
at the same time with such powerful impact.
It is as if this music had always existed, requiring only to be drawn
up from the collective unconscious of mankind, not to be composed.”
César
Franck (born Liège, December 10, 1822; died Paris,
November 8, 1890)
Quartet in D major (composed 1889)
Poco lento; Allegro
Scherzo: Vivace
Larghetto
Finale: Allegro molto
In his
monumental Remembrance of Things Past,
Marcel Proust created the character of the composer Vinteuil.
Although Vinteuil represents an amalgam of several prominent French
composers of Proust’s era (the novel’s recurring “little phrase” from one of
Vinteuil’s sonatas bears a close resemblance to a theme by Saint-Saëns), the
fictional composer’s real life model is generally thought to have been
César Franck. As an inspiration to
write, Proust commissioned the Poulin Quartet of Paris to perform Franck’s
Quartet in D major in his rooms
at Boulevard Haussmann.
Unlike
Proust, who devoted much of his creative life to the writing of that single
novel, Franck covered the range of music from operas, songs, and oratorios
to works for organ, for piano, and for orchestra.
But like Brahms and Fauré, Franck found the specter of Beethoven’s
string quartets so daunting that he waited many years before publishing one
of his own. And like those of Ravel,
Debussy, and Fauré, Franck’s quartet would be his sole venture into the
genre. For Franck, Beethoven inspired
as much as he intimidated. Visitors
to Franck’s workspace during the long gestation period of the
Quartet in D major reported that
his bench was strewn with the scores of Beethoven as well as Bach and
Schubert.
Regarding texture, the Quartet
owes as much to the late Beethoven quartets as to Franck’s own
polyphonically dense organ pieces.
Regarding form, no one since the death of Beethoven – not even Brahms – had
composed so complex a quartet. That
form is cyclic, wherein a solitary germ motif serves as the basis for much
of the rest of the work. Like
Beethoven again, the formulation of the motif was an often laborious
process. Franck rewrote the first
movement three times over the course of the first ten months of 1889.
The main theme received even more extensive revisions.
Nonetheless, the Quartet in D
major turned out to be Franck’s belated first popular success, in the
very last of his 68 years. Following
the enthusiastic reception to the premiere on April 19, 1890, Franck
suggested that “now the public is beginning to understand me.”
Among
the most intriguingly structured of its era, the first movement was
described by Vincent d’Indy as “sonata form within a lied.”
The germ motif with its falling thirds dominates the
Poco lento introduction, the
fugal central section, and the coda.
But intertwined with this ABA song form is a complete sonata form movement.
After the slow introduction is the sonata’s
Allegro exposition, consisting of
a D minor and an F major theme joined by a soon-to-be-important linking
figure. Rather than a development,
the fugal section appears followed by the return of the
Allegro, a recap, and the
lied-based coda.
--
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).