BRENTANO STRING QUARTET - sfperformances.orgQuartet No. 2 in F-sharp minor, for string quartet and...

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presents…

BRENTANO STRING QUARTETMark Steinberg | Violin Misha Amory | ViolaSerena Canin | Violin Nina Lee | Cello

DAWN UPSHAW | Soprano

Wednesday, December 4, 2019 | 7:30pmHerbst Theatre

MOZART String Quartet No. 18 in A Major, K. 464 Allegro Menuetto & Trio Andante Allegro

RESPIGHI Il tramonto (The Sunset), for voice & string quartet, P. 101

Dawn Upshaw, soprano

INTERMISSION

SCHOENBERG Quartet No. 2 in F-sharp minor, for string quartet and soprano, Opus 10 (text by Stefan AllegroGeorge) Scherzo (Molto Allegro) Theme and variations (Litanei) Finale (Entrueckung)

Dawn Upshaw, soprano

The Brentano String Quartet is represented by David Rowe Artists24 Bessom St., Marblehead, MA 01945 davidroweartists.com

Dawn Upshaw is represented by Colbert Artists Management307 Seventh Ave., Ste. 2006, New York, NY 10001 colbertartists.com

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ARTIST PROFILES

San Francisco Performances presents the Bren-tano String Quartet for the sixth time. The Quar-tet made its SF Performances debut in March 2008. Dawn Upshaw returns for her ninth ap-pearance since her recital debut in May 1990.

Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim. “Passionate, uninhibited and spellbind-ing,” raves the London Independent; the New York Times extols its “luxuriously warm sound [and] yearning lyricism.”

Since 2014, the Brentano Quartet has served as Artists-in-Residence at Yale Uni-versity. Formerly, the Quartet served as the collaborative ensemble for the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and were Artists-in-Residence at Princeton Univer-sity for many years.

The Quartet has performed in the world’s most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York; the Library of Congress in Washing-ton; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the Konzerthaus in Vienna; Suntory Hall in Tokyo; and the Sydney Opera House. The Quartet had its first European tour in 1997 and was honored in the U.K. with the Royal Philharmonic Award for Most Out-standing Debut.

In addition to their interest in perform-ing very old music, the Brentano Quartet frequently collaborates with contemporary

composers. Recent commissions include a piano quintet by Vijay Iyer, a work by Eric Moe (with Christine Brandes, soprano), and a viola quintet by Felipe Lara (performed with violist Hsin-Yun Huang). In 2012, the Quartet provided the central music (Beethoven Opus 131) for the critically ac-claimed independent film A Late Quartet.

The Quartet has worked closely with other important composers of our time, among them Elliott Carter, Charles Wuo-rinen, Chou Wen-chung, Bruce Adolphe, and György Kurtág. The Quartet has also been privileged to collaborate with such artists as soprano Jessye Norman and pia-nists Richard Goode, Jonathan Biss, and Mitsuko Uchida.

The Quartet is named for Antonie Bren-tano, whom many scholars consider to be Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved,” the intend-ed recipient of his famous love confession.

Joining a rare natural warmth with a fierce commitment to the transforming

communicative power of music, Dawn Upshaw has achieved worldwide celeb-rity as a singer of opera and concert rep-ertoire ranging from the sacred works of Bach to the freshest sounds of today. In 2007, she was named a Fellow of the Mac-Arthur Foundation, the first vocal artist to be awarded the five-year “genius” prize, and in 2008 she was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Her acclaimed performances on the op-era stage comprise the great Mozart roles as well as modern works by Stravinsky, Poulenc, and Messiaen—from Salzburg, Paris and Glyndebourne to the Metropoli-tan Opera, where she has since made near-ly 300 appearances.

In her work as a recitalist, and particu-larly in her work with composers, Dawn Upshaw has become a generative force in concert music. From Carnegie Hall to large and small venues throughout the world she regularly presents specially designed programs composed of lieder, contempo-rary works in many languages, and folk and popular music. She furthers this work in master classes and workshops with young singers and is the Head of the Vo-cal Arts Program at the Tanglewood Mu-sic Center and was the founding Artistic Director of the Vocal Arts Program at the Bard College-Conservatory of Music.

A five-time Grammy Award winner, Dawn Upshaw is featured on more than 50 recordings, including the million-selling Symphony No. 3 by Henryk Gorecki for Nonesuch Records. Her most recent Grammy was the 2014 Best Classical Vocal Solo Grammy for Maria Schneider’s Winter Morning Walks on the ArtistShare Label.

Ms. Upshaw holds honorary doctorate degrees from Yale, the Manhattan School of Music, the Juilliard School, Allegheny College, and Illinois Wesleyan University. She began her career as a 1984 winner of the Young Concert Artists Auditions and the 1985 Walter W. Naumburg Competition and was a member of the Metropolitan Op-era Young Artists Development Program.

PROGRAM NOTES

String Quartet No. 18 in A Major, K. 464WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART(1756–1791)

Mozart and Haydn were well acquainted, and each was fully cognizant of the other’s


genius—not always the case among great contemporaries in music history. Haydn told Leopold Mozart that his son Wolfgang was the greatest living composer known to him. Mozart, for his part, upon hearing Haydn’s opus 33 string quartets, penned six great quartets of his own which were an explicit homage to the older composer, his so-called “Haydn Quartets”; they are considered to be his first mature works in that genre.

The Quartet in A Major, K. 464, is the fifth of these, written in the winter of 1785. It was later to command the admiration of the young Beethoven, and to influence directly his own A Major Quartet, Opus 18, No. 5. Mozart’s quartet is a paradigm of High Classical style, combining as it does a perfect command of form, a sophisticated sense of counterpoint, and an effortlessly galant demeanor.

The first movement is sunny, engaging, and fluidly paced. Each idea is presented in a simple manner at first, and then revis-ited at once in a more complex form, with voices overlapping one another contra-puntally. In the central development sec-tion, surprising modulations and changes of texture offer a darker contrast to the movement’s essentially radiant character; here the music seems to have more diffi-culty progressing, halting completely on two occasions and having to feel its way gradually back to familiar ground.

The Minuet is simple and clever at the same time. Its main idea is in two con-nected parts—a unison statement, and a dancing reply, which are then combined and intertwined all throughout the main section, in every imaginable permutation. The result is a diverting variety of ideas and textures, achieved with great econ-omy of means. A Trio section, in a differ-ent key, provides a smoother-textured, less learned contrast.

The slow movement, a theme and varia-tions, begins sotto voce with a tender melody in the first violin, simply accompanied; the theme is largely confined to a low register, which lends it an intimate, whispered qual-ity. Although the shape and texture of this theme are quite simple, and the harmoniza-tion is not replete with chromatic motion, it presents a starting point of great richness. Six extraordinary variations and a coda fol-low. Each instrument of the quartet is fea-tured in its own variation, and interspersed between these there are two others, one a shadowy, dramatic minor variation, one a luminous return to major that emphasizes rhythmic simplicity and imitation. Perhaps the most notable variation is the cello varia-

tion, where an almost drum-like bassline supports gently moving upper lines.

The finale lies poised between two worlds, having on the one hand the fa-miliar Mozartean playfulness, on the other a more introverted, gentle sighing character. Marked Allegro non troppo, this ambivalent movement features a falling chromatic figure, followed immediately by a flirtatious reply; amazingly, these two snippets are the sum total of thematic material for the entire movement, a full-length sonata-allegro form. Because they are used in such a variety of ways, in se-quences, stretti, over pedal points, com-bined and recombined, inverted, and so forth, the music is fresh and surprising throughout. Somewhere before the return of the opening material, an extra motif is picked up, a bouncing 8th-note idea, which happily accompanies the original material when it reappears. A hushed, teasing pia-nissimo brings the movement to a close.

©2004 by Misha Amory

Il tramonto (The Sunset), for voice & string quartet, P. 101

OTTORINO RESPIGHI(1879–1936)

In 1816 the 24-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley married 19-year-old Mary Woll-stonecraft, who would write Frankenstein two years later. That spring, Shelley wrote a poem titled The Sunset, which touches many themes central to the romantic imag-ination: the mingling of love and death, the power of grief, the longing for rest, and the effect of time. Though parts of the poem had appeared before Shelley’s drowning in 1822, the complete poem was not pub-lished until his widow gathered a number of works as his Posthumous Poems in 1824.

Exactly a century after The Sunset was written, it attracted the attention of Ottorino Respighi, who knew it—in an Italian transla-tion by R. Ascoli—as Il Tramonto. At this time Respighi was still virtually unknown as a composer. In 1913, at the age of 34, he had be-come a professor of composition at Saint Ce-celia’s in Rome, and over the next few years he composed the work that would bring him fame, The Fountains of Rome. At the same time as he was writing Fountains, Respighi made a setting of Il Tramonto for the unusual ensemble of soprano and string quartet, and both works were first heard in February 1918.

Those who know Respighi only as the composer of the splashy Roman trilogy will be in for a surprise with Il Tramonto, for here the Italian master of orchestration writes with subtlety and refinement for this much more restrained palette. Respighi subtitles this work “poemetto lirico,” and he is quite sensitive to Shelley’s text: the soprano sings virtually throughout, with only the briefest instrumental interludes, and in fact the en-tire work is shaped by the evolving moods of Shelley’s poem. Just as the events of the poem change sharply, moving from the pas-sion of the lovers to the aging woman’s plea for release, so Respighi shifts tempo and har-mony constantly. The mood remains gener-ally restrained: only occasionally does the dynamic rise above mezzo forte, and the cli-max—on the word “Pace”—is marked triple piano before Il Tramonto fades into silence on a postlude that Respighi marks dolcissimo.

Note by Eric Bromberger

Quartet No. 2 in F-sharp minor, for string quartet and soprano, Opus 10

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG(1874–1951)

Arnold Schoenberg’s Second String Quar-tet, Opus 10, is widely considered to be a visionary work. But whereas it is oft re-marked about this work that it sees into and points the way toward the future of musical rhetoric, it is interior seeing that lends it power and mesmerizing depth.

Schoenberg, active as a painter as well as a composer, produced a series of haunting paintings which he called “Visions.” These are portraits whose searing eyes gaze in-tensely at, through, even into the viewer, searching for truth. This spirit is felt as well in the Second Quartet, a piece search-ing for a new world of self-expression. A hearing of this work convinced Wassily Kandinsky that he and Schoenberg were kindred spirits. Having attended a perfor-mance of the quartet, Kandinsky initiated a correspondence and a friendship with the composer. Like Kandinsky, Schoenberg was concerned with the primacy of intro-spection and emotion in art. Form was to arise out of the inner compulsion for self-expression; if necessary, the boundaries of the art form would shift to accommodate understanding won through interior ques-tioning. In the case of this piece the gravi-tational relationships inherent in the tonal


system, writing in a key, begin to yield to a freer treatment of pitch. Kandinsky writes to Schoenberg:

In your works you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent prog-ress through their own destinies, the inde-pendent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am try-ing to find in my paintings….I am certain that our own modern harmony is not to be found in the “geometric” way, but rather in the anti- geometric, antilogical way.

Certainly, there is much of interest in the artistic links between these two great figures. However, one might argue that in terms of emotional sensibility Schoenberg may be closer to painters such as Kokosch-ka and Schiele, as well as to a writer such as Strindberg, in whose plays Schoenberg had great interest. This work not only occupies a pivotal place in the history of music but is as well very much a child of its own his-torical period, pre-war Vienna. This is the Vienna of Freud, of Klimt, of Kokoschka, of Wittgenstein, a simmering cauldron of intellectual and artistic ferment. Dialogue between disciplines was commonplace and highly stimulating.

One may see here connections to Mahler, a composer with whom Schoenberg had a complicated relationship. Like Mahler’s First Symphony, this quartet features a quo-tation of a popular folk tune (more on this soon), and like Mahler’s Second Symphony it features vocal writing in the third and fourth movements. More importantly, the expressive seed from which this quartet germinates finds itself firmly planted in Mahlerian soil. The rich, dark palette and late Romantic sensibility of Mahler inform the overall effect of the piece.

Much has been made of the progression of this piece from relative tonal stability to the instability of atonal writing, but in fact there is more ambiguity here than such a view suggests. The first movement starts firmly in F-sharp minor, but somewhat ten-tatively, quickly collapsing into a single, foreign pitch, catapulting the music into breathless uncertainty. (This quick move away from the opening material is remi-niscent of Brahms’ first string quartet.) The second theme we encounter evokes the world of the Viennese waltz, but fraught with anxiety, an early suggestion of the hallucinatory waltzes to be found in the String Trio, Opus 45, much later in the com-poser’s life. Herein can be felt the central issue of the piece, familiar steps in an unfa-

miliar landscape. The movement ends tem-porarily at rest, but with a feeling of defeat.

The second movement, a scherzo, opens disembodied, drum-like on a single low cello pitch, perhaps an echo of the paral-lel movement in Beethoven’s Quartet Opus 59, No. 1. As various spectral themes are brought in the movement takes on a maca-bre cast. One of the two most famous mo-ments in the piece comes when the second violin begins the popular tune “Ach, du lieber Augustin, alles ist hin,” music that would ordinarily be accompanied by the simplest of harmonies. However here it finds itself out of place, torn from its natu-ral milieu. Schoenberg remarked to a stu-dent of his that the “alles ist hin” (all is lost) was “not ironical [but has] a true emotional significance.” As the tune fades away frag-mented wisps of the waltz theme from the first movement are heard, disoriented. Af-ter a wild unison passage for all four instru-ments a quickened version of the drum mo-tive from the start of the movement flashes by as the music seems almost to vaporize.

The Litany that follows is a setting of a Stefan George poem, one where the speaker pleads for solace, for release from worldly passions in order to find peace. Significant-ly, all the musical material is drawn from

the earlier movements; for example, the lonely viola line that starts the movement is a distended version of the opening theme of the piece, accompanied by a prolonged sigh in the first violin drawn from the waltz theme from that movement. Thus there is a sense of looking backwards, reflecting on one’s past while searching for a way forward. The music unfolds as a continu-ous set of variations, embodying the feel-ing of wrestling with ideas. This is music of heart-wrenching drama, featuring one of the largest vocal leaps in the literature, a plummeting from the highest register to the soprano’s lowest (“take from me love,” after which the singer continues “and give me thy peace”). The brief answering coda for the quartet alone grows to a shattering cry which is choked off at its peak.

As if in shock from this suffocated out-burst the final movement takes this pas-sionate human cry and answers it with mu-sic that is cold and spare. There is no sense of anchor, of tonal underpinnings, and this introductory texture leads to the entrance of the soprano in what is one of the most fa-mous lines in musical history: “I feel the air of another planet.” Here is embodied a vi-sion of a whole new space, having wandered

continued on page 5


Brentano Notes continued from page 4

far from the Viennese waltzes, the societal references of the first part of the piece. It is a world of subjectivity, of sensitivity to the sometimes-alienated feelings of the indi-vidual. The poem, however, ends “Carried aloft beyond the highest cloud,/I am afloat upon a sea of crystal splendor,/I am only a

sparkle of the holy fire,/ I am only a roar-ing of the holy voice.” Schoenberg saw this piece as the gateway to the next stage of his development as a composer. The initial performance of the quartet created a scan-dal, the cries of the public eventually com-pletely obliterating the music. But the piece itself ends in an earned state of tranquility, a turn to F-sharp Major, having traveled far

from the ending of the first movement. De-spite the fear of the new acted out by the Vi-ennese public, we can see now that there is much beauty here, much imagination and color, and much profundity.

Note by Mark Steinberg


Il tramonto

Già v’ebbe un uomo, nel cui tenue spirto(qual luce e vento in delicata nubeche ardente ciel di mezzo-giorno stempri)la morte e il genio contendeano. Oh! quanta tenera gioia,che gli fè il respiro venir meno(così dell’aura estiva l’ansia talvolta)quando la sua dama, che allor solo conobbe l’abbandonopieno e il concorde palpitar di due creature che s’amano,egli addusse pei sentieri d’un campo,ad oriente da una foresta biancheggiante ombratoed a ponente discoverto al cielo!Ora è sommerso il sole; ma linee d’oropendon sovra le cineree nubi,sul verde piano sui tremanti fiorisui grigi globi dell’ antico smirnio,e i neri boschi avvolgono,del vespro mescolandosi alle ombre. Lenta sorge ad orientel’infocata luna tra i folti ramidelle piante cupe:brillan sul capo languide le stelle.E il giovine sussura: “Non è strano?Io mai non vidi il sorgere del sole,o Isabella. Domani a contemplarlo verremo insieme.”

Il giovin e la dama giacquer tra il sonno e il dolce amorcongiunti ne la notte: al mattingelido e morto ella trovò l’amante.Oh! nessun creda che, vibrando tal colpo,fu il Signore misericorde.Non morì la dama, né folle diventò:anno per anno visse ancora.Ma io penso che la queta sua pazienza, e i trepidi sorrisi,e il non morir… ma vivere a custodia del vecchio padre(se è follia dal mondo dissimigliare)fossero follia. Era, null’altro che a vederla,come leggere un canto da ingegnoso bardointessuto a piegar gelidi cuori in un dolor pensoso.Neri gli occhi ma non fulgidi più;consunte quasi le ciglia dalle lagrime;le labbra e le gote parevan cose morte tanto eran bianche;ed esili le mani e per le erranti vene e le giunture rossadel giorno trasparia la luce.La nuda tomba, che il tuo fral racchiude,cui notte e giorno un’ombra tormentata abita,è quanto di te resta, o cara creatura perduta!

The Sunset

There late was One within whose subtle being,As light and wind within some delicate cloudThat fades amid the blue noon’s burning sky,Genius and death contended. None may knowThe sweetness of the joy which made his breathFail, like the trances of the summer air,When, with the lady of his love, who thenFirst knew the unreserved of mingled being,He walked along the pathway of a fieldWhich to the east a hoar wood shadowed o’er,But to the west was open to the sky.There now the sun had sunk, but lines of goldHung on the ashen clouds, and on the pointsOf the far level grass and nodding flowersAnd the old dandelion’s hoary beard,And, mingled with the shades of twilight, layOn the brown massy woods – and in the eastThe broad and burning moon lingeringly roseBetween the black trunks of the crowded trees,While the faint stars were gathering overhead.“Is it not strange, Isabel,” said the youth,“I never saw the sun? We will walk hereTo-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.”

That night the youth and lady mingled layIn love and sleep – but when the morning cameThe lady found her lover dead and cold.Let none believe that God in mercy gaveThat stroke. The lady died not, nor grew wild,But year by year lived on – in truth I thinkHer gentleness and patience and sad smiles,And that she did not die, but lived to tendHer aged father, were a kind of madness,If madness ’tis to be unlike the world.For but to see her were to read the taleWoven by some subtlest bard, to make hard heartsDissolve away in wisdom-working grief;Her eyes were black and lusterless and wan:Her eyelashes were worn away with tears,Her lips and cheeks were like things dead – so pale;Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veinsAnd weak articulations might be seenDay’s ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead selfWhich one vexed ghost inhabits, night and day,Is all, lost child, that now remains of thee!

Il tramonto (The Sunset), for voice & string quartet, P. 101

OTTORINO RESPIGHI1879–1936


“Ho tal retaggio, che la terra non dà:calma e silenzio, senza peccato e senza passione.Sia che i morti ritrovino (non mai il sonno!) ma il riposo,imperturbati quali appaion,o vivano, o d’amore nel mar profondo scendano;oh! che il mio epitaffio, che il tuo sia: Pace!”Questo dalle sue labbra l’unico lamento.

—Text by Roberto Ascoli fl. 1891–1930 [translation of Percy Bysshe Shelley]

“Inheritor of more than earth can give,Passionless calm and silence unproved,Where the dead find, oh, not sleep! but rest,And are the uncomplaining things they seem,Or live, a drop in the deep sea of Love;Oh, that like thine, mine epitaph were – Peace!”This was the only moan she ever made.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

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Quartet No. 2 in F-sharp minor, for string quartet and soprano, Opus 10ARNOLD SCHOENBERG1874–1951

Litanei

Tief ist die trauer die mich umdüstert,Ein tret ich wieder, Herr! in dein haus.Lang war die reise, matt sind die glieder,Leer sind die schreine, voll nur die qual.Durstende zunge darbt nach dem weine.Hart war gestritten, starr ist mein arm.Gönne die ruhe schwankenden schritten,Hungrigem gaume bröckle dein brot!Schwach ist mein atem rufend dem traume,Hohl sind die hände, fiebernd der mund.Leih deine kühle, lösche die brände.Tilge das hoffen, sende das licht!Gluten im herzen lodern noch offen,Innerst im grunde wacht noch ein schrei.Töte das sehnen, schliesse die wunde!Nimm mir die liebe, gib mir dein glück!

Litany

Deep is the sadness that gloomily comes over me,Again I step, Lord, in your house.Long was the journey, my limbs are weary,The shrines are empty, only anguish is full.My thirsty tongue desires wine.The battle was hard, my arm is stiff.Grudge peace to my staggering steps,for my hungry gums break your bread!Weak is my breath, calling the dream,my hands are hollow, my mouth fevers.Lend your coolness, douse the fires,rub out hope, send the light!Fires in my heart still glow, open,inside my heart a cry wakes.Kill the longing, close the wound!Take my love away, give me your joy!


Entrückung

Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten.Mir blassen durch das dunkel die gesichterDie freundlich eben noch sich zu mir drehten.Und bäum und wege die ich liebte fahlenDass ich sie kaum mehr kenne und du lichterGeliebter schatten—rufer meiner qualen—Bist nun erloschen ganz in tiefern glutenUm nach dem taumel streitenden getobesMit einem frommen schauer anzumuten.Ich löse mich in tönen, kreisend, webend,Ungründigen danks und unbenamten lobesDem grossen atem wunschlos mich ergebend.Mich überfährt ein ungestümes wehenIm rausch der weihe wo inbrünstige schreieIn staub geworfner beterinnen flehen:Dann seh ich wie sich duftige nebel lüpfenIn einer sonnerfüllten klaren freieDie nur umfängt auf fernsten bergesschlüpfen.Der boden schüffert weiss und weich wie molke.Ich steige über schluchten ungeheuer.Ich fühle wie ich über letzter wolkeIn einem meer kristallnen glanzes schwimme—Ich bin ein funke nur vom heiligen feuerIch bin ein dröhnen nur der heiligen stimme.

—Text by Stefan George’s collection Der siebente Ring (The Seventh Ring), 1907

Rapture

I feel air from another planet.I faintly through the darkness see facesFriendly even now, turning toward me.And trees and paths that I loved fadeSo I can scarcely know them and you brightBeloved shadow—summoner of my anguish—Are only extinguished completely in a deep glowingIn the frenzy of the fightWith a pious show of reason.I lose myself in tones, circling, weaving,With unfathomable thanks and unnamed praise,Bereft of desire, I surrender myself to the great breath.A violent wind passes over meIn the thrill of consecration where ardent criesIn dust flung by women on the ground:Then I see a filmy mist risingIn a sun-filled, open expanseThat includes only the farthest mountain hatches.The land looks white and smooth like whey,I climb over enormous canyons.I feel as if above the last cloudSwimming in a sea of crystal radiance—I am only a spark of the holy fireI am only a whisper of the holy voice.

—Translation provided by Colbert Artists Management

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