Belfast Music Society Celebrity Concerts 9/791 Programme

ŠKAMPA QUARTET PROGRAMME Pavel Fischer Jana Lukášová Radim Sedmidubsky Jonas Krejci Quartet in D minor, Op. 76, No. 2 Five Pieces Op. 5 Quartet No. 1 in E minor 'From My Life' Supported by the ARTS COUNCIL Saturday, 9th March 1996 Elmwood Hall at 7.30 pm CITY FA ST violin violin viola 'cello COUNCIL HAYDN WEBERN SMETANA NATIONAL FEDERATION OF MUSIC SOCIETIES NEMS

String Quartet in D minor, op 76/2 'Fifths' Joseph Haydn 1732-1809 allegro andante minuet and trio vivace assai Once he had returned from his second visit to England, in 1795, Haydn started work on a set of six string quartets. When they were published, in 1799, the English musician Burney congratulated Haydn on their 'invention, fire, good taste and new effects.' The D minor quartet is unusual in that all four movements are in D, and tension results from a degree of conflict between major and minor throughout. The first movement is an excellent example of Haydn's preferred use of one main theme to provide all the material for the movement (rather than the normal two 'subjects'.) In this case everything derives from the falling fifths of the opening bars - hence the nickname. The gentle Andante opens in D major, but D minor returns, albeit briefly, before a central section in B flat. The opening melody then returns in a varied form, before an ornate coda ends the movement. The minuet - or is it a scherzo? - displays typically Haydnesque ingenuity. It is an exact canon, the viola and cello following the two violins at one bar's distance, and is sometimes nicknamed the Witches' Minuet, though Tovey likened the movement to a couple of flat-footed clowns dancing. The contrasting trio builds up strikingly from unison D's. The tensions continue in the finale, which remains in the minor until the very end, when D major breaks through. It is in Haydn's most extrovertly Hungarian style. Five movements op 5 Anton Webern 1883-1945 Regular patrons will already be aware of the brevity and concentration of Webern's music, music pared down to its barest essentials. He was one of a number of composers who, dissatisfied by the inflated nature of late 19th century music, felt the need to 'de-emotionalise' it, and return to what they saw as 'purity'. Their various attempts tended to be somewhat haphazard until Schoenberg's development of serial technique (basically a mathematical approach to composition) in the 1920's. En route to this, Schoenberg gradually 'let go' of tonality, a pioneering work being his 2nd string quartet. Webern had attended its premiere in December 1908 and, unlike most of the audience, found it 'exceedingly beautiful'. Within six months he had completed a quartet of his own. His own description of the work, in a letter to Schoenberg, is succinct: 'It has five movements - the first fast, the second very slow, the third very fast, the fourth slow, the fifth a slow 6/8 metre. The movements are all short.' In fact, the whole score is only 130 bars long, but the slow speeds of much of it make it seem positively Mahlerian in comparison with the cello pieces heard earlier in the season! The score times the work at 'about 8 minutes', but in practice most performances take a couple of minutes longer. The quartet is full of brief motifs and constantly changing textures and timbres, but the sympathetic listener may be able to detect short melodic fragments that still hint at an earlier Romantic idiom. The briefest, and most immediately accessible movement, is the central scherzo that begins ppp over a repeated bass C sharp, and ends, 35 seconds

1 later, with a dramatic outburst in octaves, and a final C sharp, fff. If you find the work not to your taste, reflect that at a performance at an ISCM festival in 1922, the pros and cons in the audience started hand-to-hand fighting, the performers fled the stage, and police rushed in and cleared the hall! String quartet No. 1 in E minor allegro vivo appassionato allegro moderato a la Polka largo sostenuto vivace Bedřich Smetana 1824-1884 Smetana composed little chamber music in his maturity - just four works were published; the piano trio, 'From My Homeland' for violin and piano and two string quartets. The first, subtitled Z mého života - From my Life is a rare (though not unique) example of a programmatic chamber work (in a century where programme music - and notably the symphonic poem - had a high profile). Both quartets are late rks, composed when the effects of syphilis were progressively affecting his health, both physical and mental. Of the first quartet (1876) Smetana wrote: 'it is a more or less private composition deliberately written for 4 instruments conversing among themselves about the things that torture me, and no more.' The first movement, the composer said, 'depicts my youthful love of art, the Romantic atmosphere, the indescribable longing for something intangible that I could not express in words, and a foreboding of future misfortune. The second movement is a scherzo - a 'quasi- polka' the composer calls it. It reminds him of his love of dancing, while the contrasting trio section pictures 'the aristocratic circles in which I used to move.' The slow movement is a love song, recalling his courtship and marriage. In the finale, the composer's nationalism is proudly celebrated. But suddenly a piercing high note rings out; 'the fateful ringing in my ears which announced the beginning of my deafness. Although the music at first reflects the hope that the ailment will be but temporary, hope of recovery soon fades, and all that is left is 'a sensation of nothing but pain and regret.' The Prague Chamber Music Association rejected the quartet as being formless and unplayable, and it was left to a group of friends, including Dvořák on viola, to give the work its first performance in 1878. Alec Macdonald 1996

Tonight's Artists Few chamber groups have established themselves as rapidly and successfully on the international concert platform as the Škampa Quartet. They were founded in 1989 at the Prague Academy of Music under the guidance of Antonin Kohout and Milan Škampa of the Smetana Quartet and have also studied with Piero Farulli of the Quartetto Italiano and with members of the Amadeus Quartet. The Quartet made their highly successful debut in the Wigmore Hall in February 1994 and were described by Michael White of the Independent on Sunday as being 'on the brink of greatness'. Such was their success that they were immediately re-invited for a concert in June and in September took part in one of the opening concerts of the Wigmore Hall season. The Quartet returned in December and gave a recital at Harewood House and subsequently made two major UK tours. The Skampa Quartet were winners in 1990 of the 'Best Quartet' prize in the Premio Vittorio Gui competition in Florence and in 1992 of the Charles Hennen competition in the Netherlands. In 1994 they received the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for the best debut concert of the year. NEXT CONCERT Saturday, 23rd March 1996 HAGAI SHAHAM~ violin ARNON EREZ ~ piano Elmwood Hall - 7.30pm