2010 Concert note: Concert with Vertavo and Hadland

Béla Bartók (1881–1945)
String Quartet No 3
Prima parte: Moderato –
Seconda parte: Allegro –
Ricapitolazione della prima parte: Moderato –
Coda: Allegro molto

Béla Bartók favoured the string quartet as a musical medium for most of his life. His early forays include two quartets from 1896 (both of which have been lost to posterity) and a third two years later, but the first of the six quartets which constitute his significant contribution to the genre took form in 1908. Bartók’s quartets are generally acknowledged as the most individual since those of Beethoven. Richard Drakeford points out the similarity with Beethoven’s late quartets in that they provide demanding but appealing challenges to performer and listener alike, while also summarising the composer’s musical development.

In 1927 Bartók heard a performance of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite in its original version – six movements for string quartet. Its innovative use of Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique may have provided inspiration for Bartók’s third and fourth quartets – the most audacious of the six.

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Carl Nielsen (1865–1931)
String Quartet in G minor, op. 13
Allegro energico
Andantge amoroso
Allegro molto
Allegro inquieto

Chamber music dominates Carl Nielsen’s compositions before 1900, and three of his four string quartets are from this period. He wrote his first quartet in 1881, after becoming familiar with the quartets of Haydn and Pleyel when learning to play the violin. On becoming a student at the Copenhagen conservatoire he wrote a further string quartet and several isolated movements, but they were never published.

The quartet on the programme was composed in 1887–88, and was first performed in 1889 for a private chamber music society. Ten years later Carl Nielsen revised the work for its first public performance in the winter of 1898. It is dedicated to the Norwegian composer/conductor Johan Svendsen, who was kapellmeister at the Copenhagen Opera, where Nielsen was a second violinist in the orchestra from 1889 to 1905.

Nielsen preferred short, pithy motifs to long, florid themes. In his biography of the composer, Jørgen I Jensen describes the quartet as ‘a significant work’ that ‘bores its way with short motifs into the dark key’, while retaining its ability to ‘move upward in astounding melodic and luminous arches’. The construction of the composition adheres to the conventions of the era with the exception of a section in the final movement with the description Resumé, in which thematic material from the first, third and final movements combine in counterpoint.

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Robert Schumann (1810¬¬–1856)
Piano Quintet in E flat major, op. 44
Allegro brillante
In modo d’una marcia: Un poco largamente – Agitato – Tempo I
Scherzo: Molto vivace
Allegro ma non troppo

In September 1840 Robert Schumann was finally able to marry Clara Wieck. Two years later, at the start of his ‘chamber music period’, he wrote the Piano Quintet for his wife – not only in acknowledgement of her consummate skill as a pianist, but also because they had studied the music of Johann Sebastian Bach together. The influence of the Baroque master is particularly evident in the final movement of this popular work, where two fugato passages are integrated in a rondo.

The quintet is the first masterpiece ever composed for string quartet and piano (Franz Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet from 1819 was written for violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano). The dominant virtuoso piano part was formed with Clara in mind, and is dedicated to her. In the decades she was active as a performing pianist she had the work on her programme hundreds of times in chamber music contexts. It has been described as a chamber concerto for piano, while remaining an intimate chamber music piece. Schumann’s musical inventiveness is consistently first-rate, with memorable tunes and rhythmic vitality in evidence throughout.

The funeral march, modelled on the equivalent movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, is the central feature of the work, as the brilliant introductory movement presages it, and the last two movements bring reminiscences of it. Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony – in addition to Bach – may have provided inspiration for the double fugue in the final movement.

Text: Hans H Rowe
English version: Roger Martin