–The Tempest, William Shakespeare
“For Mendelssohn, Beethoven was the new point of departure, and a German composer could not afford to ignore him, as Chopin and Verdi were able to do. Gradually a body of classical work had been assembled from Mozart and Beethoven. That is why composers like Hummel, Schubert and Mendelssohn not only learned from their forerunners but display that learning proudly; they deliberately quote from the new classical cannon just as poets of the eighteenth century displayed quotations from the classical Latin poets for the pleasure of connoisseurs. Later, with Brahms, this was to become a basic principle of composition. It did not, however, prevent the creation of works of great individuality.”
–Transforming Classicism, The Romantic Generation, p. 582, Charles Rosen (1995)
Our fourth program of the BCMS 40th Anniversary Season and first of 2023 presents three ‘quartets’ with no two using the same combination of drawn from six players of different instruments.
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778–1837) was one of the most prominent and influential composers of the Classical era whose music we have never played at BCMS. By age 10 he was encouraged to embark on a public performing career by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who had taught the young prodigy for two years at no charge. By age 14 he had earned a reputation for being the most surprising performer ever to visit England with the possible exception of the young Mozart! Later in life he had the attention and respect of Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Liszt. The Clarinet Quartet (1808), although appearing early in his output, reveals a deep familiarity with chamber music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Its melodies, harmonies and textures seem like the “deliberate quotes” from a classical canon that Charles Rosen referred to. The third movement Scherzo (i.e., joke) that Beethoven was known to enliven from the earlier, more sedate Minuet becomes for Hummel La Seccatura (the annoyance) in part because each of the four parts is notated in a different meter: 2/4, 12/8, ¾, and 6/8. On paper this can be a nuisance for players, but for the listener, an energetic delight.
Street Antiphons, commissioned by the BCMS Commission Club from award-winning composer Pierre Jalbert, is making its first re-appearance on our series since the 2015 world premiere by BCMS and subsequent performances around the country by other ensembles.
The work is also written for a quartet, albeit one that includes piano with violin, clarinet and cello, but not viola. Jalbert describes how his piece is drawn from some of the oldest melodic sources of Western Music and refreshed through variation, as composers and improvisers have done ever since:
“Street Antiphons attempts to present and contrast secular and sacred music. The “secular” music (music of the street) comes in the form of rhythmically driving sections, while the “sacred” music is often lyrical and suspended. The first movement is set up by each instrument entering and adding to a very syncopated groove (with many mixed meter changes). After a clarinet and violin canon-like duo over the rhythmic accompaniment of pizzicato cello and piano, the initial process reverses itself and the instruments exit one by one. The second movement really contains two movements in one – it begins as a lyrical and ethereal slow movement, with the use of many string harmonics, but gradually transitions into a rapid scherzo-like movement, with the use of the bass clarinet. The final movement is a set of variations – the theme is a Gregorian Chant entitled “O Antiphon.” The variations become more and more animated and after the final, extremely disjunct, variation, there is a reprise of music from the first movement, only to dissipate and once again recall the more “sacred” music from the piece.“
We are grateful to our Board of Trustees for its recent commitment to record and release each of our commissioned works over the next three seasons.
Our program concludes with Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 2 in A major, Op. 26 for violin, viola, cello and piano. It is the longest chamber music of his output. Like his first and second symphonies and late sonatas for clarinet and piano, it appears to fall within a lifelong pattern of publishing in pairs important works in a new medium. More than just generating interest and income, the pattern affords additional time to explore the range and character of each new combination. By all accounts the A major Quartet is magisterial in scope, lyrical in tone reflecting his familiarity with part-singing in early music, using the piano in cooperation with and response to the strings, and his ability to extend the basic thematic material through continuing motivic and rhythmic variation that would become the hallmark of his music, the means for creating and sustaining the size and scope of his upcoming symphonies, and the very foundation of music of the new Viennese School composers—Schoenberg, Webern and Berg—into the following century.
Enjoy.
