The "B" IDENTITY III
(QUARTETS)
Monday, February 6, 2012 8pm
William Noll, Music Director & Conductor
The Jasper Spring Quartet
Barber - Adagio for Strings
Borodin - Quartet #2 in D Major
Beethoven - Opus 59, #1
Barber:
Adagio for Strings
Samuel Barber (1910-1981) was born in
His Adagio for Strings was taken from the second movement of his String Quartet, opus 1, completed in 1936, and has become one of the best known pieces of 20th century American classical music. It has been used in the soundtrack of the movies Platoon, Elephant Man, and Lorenzo’s Oil, played at many sad occasions, such as the death of Theodore Roosevelt in 1945 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and at many memorial concerts, including that of Barber himself, and several heard soon after September 11.
When Arturo Toscanini was anxious to play some new music by American
composers, colleague Artur Rodzinski suggested Barber. According to
Wikipedia, “In January 1938
Barber sent an orchestrated version of the Adagio to Arturo
Toscanini. The conductor returned the score without comment, which
annoyed Barber. Toscanini then sent word through Menotti that he was
planning to perform the piece and had returned it simply because he had
already memorized it. It was
reported that Toscanini did not look at the music again until the day
before the premiere. On November 5, 1938, a selected audience was
invited to Studio 8H in
According to program notes by Bruce Brown, composer in residence with
the Jacksonville Symphony, “The music was reportedly inspired by the
great Roman poet Virgil, who described in verse how a tiny rivulet can
grow into a mighty stream. Barber’s music certainly begins with a tiny
trickle, and grows steadily, little by little, until it reaches a
stunningly powerful and moving climax.”
Alexander Borodin (1833-1887) was the illegitimate son of a nobleman, Prince Luka Gedianishvili, and a peasant girl, and as such grew up in privileged environment, with opportunities to study subjects that interested him. These included music, where he showed particularly affection for the cello, and fireworks, which lead to a career as a military surgeon and later as a professor of chemistry.
Borodin became involved with a small group of fellow composers, who became known as “The Five”. Interestingly, only one of the five, Mili Balakirev, was a professional musician. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Cesar Cui were military officers, and Modest Mussorgsky was a civil servant. Borodin called himself a “Sunday composer”, and said in a letter, “As a composer seeking to remain anonymous I am shy of confessing my musical activity. This is intelligible enough. For others it is their chief business, the occupation and aim of life. For me it is a relaxation, a pastime which distracts me from my principal business, my professorship. I love my profession and my science. I love the Academy and my pupils, male and female, because to direct the work of young people, one must be close to them."
Beethoven: Quartet
Opus 59, #1
While the Barber and Borodin pieces were later
adopted for popular use, the three Opus Beethoven Opus 59 quartets were
“popularized” from their beginning. They were commissioned by Count
Andreas Razumovsky, then Russian ambassador to
These quartets differ from the previous quartets of opus 18, in being much longer (more than 40 minutes as opposed to 25 or 30 minutes), and much more demanding technically. In an interview with producer Leslie Gerber, members of the Colorado String Quartet talk about how exhausting and almost impossible to play the Beethoven quartets are. Of the Opus 59, No. 1, violinist Julie Rosenfeld of the quartet says, “They’re all so incredible. Of the four quartets we have on these CDs, we start with Op. 59, No. 1 which was such a ground-breaker. It’s the very first quartet that has no exposition repeat in the first movement. It’s the first quartet that attempts to have orchestral sonority. He’s breaking the bounds of what the quartet can actually play. He’s changing ideas of structure with the enormous development sections of the first movement and of the second movement, although it’s a Scherzo. The third movement is incredibly sad music that supposedly depicts a weeping willow tree over his brother’s grave, although his brother wasn’t dead yet…Then the last movement with the Russian theme for Count Rasumovsky announces that he is starting a new way of writing quartets with this massive piece, almost 45 minutes long. It’s an amazing achievement.”
Links to performances:
Borodin:
Quartet #2 in D Major
II. Scherzo: Allegro
III. Notturno: Andante
Beethoven:
Quartet Opus 59, #1
I. Allegro
II. Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando
III. Adagio molto e mesto
