THE BRENTANO STRING
QUARTET

MARK STEINBERG, VIOLIN
SERENA CANIN, VIOLIN
MISHA AMORY, VIOLA
NINA MARIA LEE, CELLO

GUEST ARTIST SERIES
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2007 • 7:30 PM
KATZIN CONCERT HALL

M U SIC
erberg College
of the Arts
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

Program
Franz Josef Haydn
(1732-1809)

String Quartet in D Major, Op. 76, No. 5
Allegretto-Allegro
Largo (Cantabile e mesto)
Menuetto (Allegro)
Finale (Presto)

Bela Bartok
(1881-1945)

String Quartet No. 6

Mesto-Vivace
Mesto-Marcia
Mesto-Burletta (Moderato)
Mesto

***There will be a 10 minute intermission***

String Quartet in E-flat Major,
Op. 127

Ludwig van Beethoven

Maestoso-Allegro
Adagio, ma non troppo e molto cantabile
Scherzo. Vivace - Presto
Finale: Allegro con moto

(1770-1827)

The Brentano String Quartet appears by arrangement with
David Rowe Artists, Marblehead, MA
The Brentano String Quartet record for AEON
(distributed by Harmonia Mundi USA)
www.brentanoquartet.com

******************************
Out of respect for the performers and those audience members around you,
please turn all beepers, cell phones and watches to their silent mode. Thank you.

The Berntano String Quartet
Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared
throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim. "Passionate,
uninhibited and spellbinding," raves the London Independent; the New
York Times extols its "luxuriously warm sound [and] yearning lyricism";
the Philadelphia Inquirer praises its "seemingly infallible instincts for
finding the center of gravity in every phrase and musical gesture";
and the Times (London) opines, "the Brentanos are a magnificent
string quartet...This was wonderful, selfless music-making." Within
a few years of its formation, the Quartet garnered the first Cleveland
Quartet Award and the Naumburg Chamber Music Award; and in 1996
the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center invited them to be the
inaugural members of Chamber Music Society Two, a program which
has become a coveted distinction for chamber groups and individuals
ever since. The Quartet had its first European tour in 1997, and was
honored in the U.K. with the Royal Philharmonic Award for Most
Outstanding Debut. That debut recital was at London's Wigmore Hall,
and the Quartet has continued its warm relationship with Wigmore,
appearing there regularly and serving as the hall's Quartet-in-residence in
the 2000-01 season.
In recent seasons the Quartet has traveled widely, appearing all over
the United States and Canada, in Europe, Japan and Australia. It has
performed in the world's most prestigious venues, including Carnegie
Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York; the Library of Congress in
Washington; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the Konzerthaus in
Vienna; Suntory Hall in Tokyo; and the Sydney Opera House. The
Quartet has participated in summer festivals such as Aspen, the Music
Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, the Edinburgh Festival, the
Kuhmo Festival in Finland, the Taos School of Music and the Caramoor
Festival.
In addition to performing the entire two-century range of the standard
quartet repertoire, the Brentano Quartet has a strong interest in both
very old and very new music. It has performed many musical works
pre-dating the string quartet as a medium, among them Madrigals of
Gesualdo, Fantasias of Purcell, and secular vocal works of Josquin.
Also, the quartet has worked closely with some of the most important
composers of our time, among them Elliot Carter, Charles Wuorinen,
Chou Wen-chung, Steven Mackey, Bruce Adolphe, and Gyorgy Kurtag.
The Quartet has commissioned works from Wuorinen, Adolphe,
Mackey, David Horne and Gabriela Frank. The Quartet celebrated its
tenth anniversary in 2002 by commissioning ten composers to write
companion pieces for selections from Bach's Art of Fugue, the result
of which was an electrifying and wide-ranging single concert program.
The Quartet has also worked with the celebrated poet Mark Strand,
commissioning poetry from him to accompany works of Haydn and

Webern.
The Quartet has been privileged to collaborate with such artists as
soprano Jessye Norman, pianist Richard Goode, and pianist Mitsuko
Uchida. The Quartet enjoys an especially close relationship with Ms.
Uchida, appearing with her on stages in the United States, Europe, and
Japan.
The Quartet has recorded the Opus 71 Quartets of Haydn, and has
also recorded a Mozart disc for Aeon Records, consisting of the K. 464
Quartet and the K. 593 Quintet, with violist Hsin-Yun Huang. In the area
of newer music, the Quartet has released a disc of the music of Steven
Mackey on Albany Records, and has also recorded the music of Bruce
Adolphe, Chou Wen-chung and Charles Wuorinen.
In 1998, cellist Nina Lee joined the Quartet, succeeding founding
member Michael Kannen. The following season the Quartet became
the first Resident String Quartet at Princeton University. The Quartet's
duties at the University are wide-ranging, including performances at
least once a semester, as well as workshops with graduate composers,
coaching undergraduates in chamber music, and assisting in other classes
at the Music Depat tment.
The Quartet is named for Antonie Brentano, whom many scholars
consider to be Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved", the intended recipient
of his famous love confession.

Program Notes
Haydn: String Quartet in D-Major, Op. 76, No. 5
By the time he wrote his opus 76 Quartets, Joseph Haydn was over sixty,
widely traveled, and probably the most renowned living composer in
Europe. After thirty years of a cloistered existence as the court composer
at Esterhazy, he "went public" upon the death of his patron, Count
Nicholas, in 1790; assisted by the impresario Johann Peter Salomon, he
made his name enduringly in London and in Vienna. This shift had a
palpable effect on his compositional style. In his last twelve symphonies,
and his last four sets of string quartets, the gestures and the soundsense are more robust and self-assured as the composer plays to the
public concert-hall; while the composer sacrifices none of his capacity
for innovation and surprise, we feel that we have left the arena of
experimentation and discovery that characterized the Esterhazy years.
In fact, the six opus 76 Quartets were not written for the public, but
were commissioned by the Hungarian Count Erdody, who enjoyed
having them to himself for two years (in the meantime, Haydn cannily
sold them to two separate publishers in London and Vienna). As a set,
they are unquestionably the most popular and most often performed of
his many quartets, and some would say his greatest quartet masterpieces
as well. Number five follows on the heels of three giants: number two,
the "Quinten", number three, the "Emperor", and number four, the
"Sunrise", all relatively traditional works in regard to form and key
structure.
This fifth quartet, then, is more of a maverick quartet. The first
movement is cast not in the usual "sonata allegro" aim, with its
emphasis on momentum and drama, but rather in a kind of variation
form that uses alternation between major and minor, with a fleeter, more
buoyant coda. Despite some stormy, turbulent writing in the minor
section, the movement as a whole gives an impression of lightness and
grace.
By contrast, the extraordinary slow movement becomes the emotional
and substantive center of the work. Marked "Cantabile e mesto"
– songful, sad – the movement is cast in the exotic key of F-sharp major,
a key that seems to lift off the ground, to occupy a separate plane quite
distant from the more friendly and ordinary D major of the preceding
movement. This is gliding, exalted music, hymnlike but also tender
and intimate. This music evokes, partway, the world of "The Seven
Last Words of Christ", Haydn's earlier masterpiece, but here there is
no bowing of the head in resignation; if anything, the entire movement
occupies some afterlife, free already of any restraint.
With the minuet, we are back with jolly Papa Haydn, playing his usual
tricks: sudden dynamic changes and contradictions of the expected 3/4
meter rule the day. The cello counters with a more shadowy texture in

the minor-key Trio. Then comes the Finale, which begins, startlingly,
with movement-ending chords and pauses – a trick, perhaps, picked up
from London's unruly public spaces, a way of getting attention for what
is to follow? This movement is distinguished by its accompanimental
device: an rapidly repeated interval shared by a pair of instruments, over
which the lighthearted main melody is played out. One of the most
joyous and fun-loving finales of his entire output, there is no end to the
high jinks to be heard here: games of leapfrog, passages that dwindle to
almost nothing, outbursts of mock-rage, surprise arrivals, and finally a
triumphant, exuberant ending.
© 2007 Misha Amory
Bartok: String Quartet No. 6
In 1939, haunted by both the looming specter of the Second World War
and burgeoning personal difficulties (first and foremost his mother's
grave illness and death), Bela Bartok produced what was to be his final
string quartet, his sixth. It is a curious and powerful work, seemingly two
distinct quartets amalgamated into one: a poignant lament which reveals
its full dimensionality in stages as the piece progresses, and, sandwiched
between occurences of the lament, a more conventional set of tripartite
movements, ranging in character from playful to bitterly sarcastic.
Although it is the music of the lament that gives this piece its
truest profile, we know now that at the start of his work Bartok had
not yet included it in his plan. He began with a contrapuntally alert
movement (now the main, fast section of the first movement), filled
with quicksilver exchanges of material, replete with clever inversions
and intertwinings. There is folk-like music here as well and, although
the music is consistently characterful, ranging from good-natured
teasing to agitated muttering, it is rather more objective than personal.
The second movement is a march, reminiscent of the Recruiting Dance
of the Contrasts for piano, clarinet and violin. It has a nasty, pompous
edge to it, a caricature that brings to mind the military horrors growing
in Europe at that time, the start of a war that was to displace Bartok
from his beloved Hungary forever. Bartok sets up a foil for this rigid,
sometimes oddly limping march with a wild, rhapsodic trio section.
The third movement proper is a Burletta, or burlesque, distorted, ironic
and sarcastic. It displays all the trappings of comedy, yet there is bile
just beneath the surface (think Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator,
perhaps). In this case the trio section is a gentle, folk inspired, brief
reprieve, a moment of innocence recalled.
The formal plan of the piece is most often described as an introduction
preceding each of the first three movements, with the introductory
material becoming the driving force of the entire fourth movement. The
introductions explore what I have called the lament, marked Mesto, or
sad. This starts as a solo viola (single) line. Before the second movement

it is in two parts: the 'cello primary, colored by a quiet but richly textured
contrapuntal line shared by the other three instruments. Prefacing the
third movement it comes as a three part texture. The last movement
then explores the material at greatest length, and with four independent
lines. For me, the experience of performing the piece suggests a slightly
different relationship between materials. It has never felt to me that the
Mesto material is introductory in any sense, but rather that it is turned
away from time and time again, a sadness that is temporarily pushed
aside, eyes averted, by engagement with some more outer world. Upon
the return to this material it feels like the real music, the true topic of
the work, is found anew. Finally the last movement completely inhabits
this world, as well as exploring the shadow it casts looking backward
at the "real" world of the main part of the first movement. It is a feeling
somewhat echoed by Bartok's actual working process. He had originally
planned for the fourth movement to have a four part version of the Mesto
followed by another quick movement, folk inspired and dance-like, and
even sketched out a good deal of music for this version. But this final
time he found himself unable to turn away from the world of the Mesto.
Whether this is due to his mother's death, the horrors of the war, his
impending exile, or to purely artistic compulsion we will probably never
know. The piece is unimaginable today in any other form, so powerfully
does its trajectory speak to our way of living in the midst of grief and
loss.
It is telling to examine the final three notes of the Mesto theme as
first stated by the viola, for they give us a quotation from Beethoven's
final quartet, Op. 135, under which Beethoven writes "es mu13 sein:"
"it must be." And so it must; despite all that is to follow, it is the
Mesto material that reveals the genuine soul of the piece, the truest
and only possible worldview at that moment. A further Beethoven
reference follows, when the full quartet responds in unison to the
alienated solo viola line. For anyone who is familiar with the earlier
work, this response will inevitably bring to mind the Overtura of the
GroBe Fuge, that monumental final movement of the original version
of Beethoven's Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 130. Not only does this
Beethoven movement represent mighty wrestling with the forces of
chaos we encounter in the world, but it shatters the world of the previous
movement, the famous Cavatina, the movement Beethoven claimed he
couldn't recall without its summoning a tear to his eye. Thus in retrospect
the opening of the Bartok may take on the emotional resonances of
the Cavatina, an exploration of immense vulnerability and, quite
significantly, the inability fully to give voice to our very most significant
and intense emotions. (For those familiar with the Beethoven, I refer to
the "beklemmt" section of that movement.) Ultimately the Mesto music
gives us not passionate wailing, but sadness beyond comprehension and
beyond expression. It cries out not to another soul, but into the abyss,

speaking of immeasurable loss but without loss of dignity.
For all its contrasts, the Sixth Quartet is not a dramatic, narrative
piece (like the Second Quartet, with which it shares the idea of a slow,
emotionally difficult final movement). Instead it has the aspect of a
villanelle (such as Dylan Thomas' Do not go gentle into that good night),
circling around its central idea until its most direct and potent revelation
at the close of the work. There is continual reclaiming of and reengaging
with the powerful opening mood. In this case the fullest unveiling of
the Mesto material, in four voices and significantly extended in length,
is followed by a reflecting back upon the material of the first movement
proper. This last movement then becomes also an expression of memory
in the midst of despair, the games of the first movement now muted and
transformed by mature reflection, disengaged yet arrestingly poignant.
Any trace of artifice is now dissolved.
At the very close of the work, following the introduction of eerie,
otherworldly gasps and whispers, the viola, lonely once again, sings
out the opening of the Mesto theme, still where it was at the start of the
piece. Finally, under a hollow sustained fifth the 'cello gives only the first
five notes of the theme, pizzicato, in chords. Strangely, the device is most
akin to the ending of Haydn's Joke Quartet, where we are conditioned to
expect a certain continuation and are left in the lurch, as it were. Here,
however, we are left with infinite expectation and a sense that the Mesto
theme cannot, in fact, be complete. Its resonance trails off into memory,
into emptiness.
2007 by Mark Steinberg
Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet in Eb-Major, opus 127
Stylistic evolution is a major theme in any discussion of Beethoven's
oeuvre, as it is with artists such as T.S. Eliot and Picasso. For a man
whose uncanny perception of the profundities of the human condition
shone through his music from the very start, from a larger-than-life soul
and intellect, it is deeply meaningful to see how life experience and
philosophical questioning over time comes to be reflected in the art work.
Beethoven is in fact the quintessential example of the idea of a late style
in music, of a broadening of insight and the willful manipulation of form
and rhetoric to accommodate that insight.
Coming out of his "middle" period, the so-called heroic style
epitomized by works such as the Eroica Symphony or the Op. 59
quartets, Beethoven's vision of the world and of his, and by extension
mankind's, place in it underwent a radical metamorphosis. Ego, the
primacy of effort and the battle of ideas begin to dissolve and make way
for a vision of wholeness, of a sacred order. All that he had explored with
the sense of a human protagonist in his music shifts so that the composer
no longer seems so much in the world as of it. Beethoven was deeply
interested in Hindu and Brahman philosophy at this point in his life (as

was fashionable at the time) and copied into his notebooks numerous
statements from their sacred texts. The relationship with time, will and
vision all move in new directions in the late quartets.
In the E-flat Major quartet, Op. 127, in particular we find a spiraling
inwards, a refutation of earlier models of drama and struggle. There
is an omnipresent sense of dissolving into acceptance and clarity, and
for Beethoven it is an uncommonly tender and introverted work. The
quartet opens with a curious framing device. It begins with a grand
chordal announcement (marked Maestoso), one which, due to the key, it
is hard not to associate with the Eroica Symphony. As the phrase reaches
upwards it comes to rest not on the expected dominant harmony but on
the sub-dominant. In emotional terms this means that instead of reaching
up toward a chord that will validate the strength of the home key the
phrase falls gently back into a more subjective, even subjunctive, key
area which is a release from the key in which we begin. It is a pulling
back, a turning away from the expected outer triumph toward selfacceptance and a ruminative kind of exploration. This first harmonic
move very much sets the stage for the way the piece will operate as a
whole, and in fact turns out to point also to the key of the otherworldly
slow movement as well as to a central pitch of the finale. The main
theme of the first movement appears at this moment, dissolved into with
all the voices either keeping their previous pitch or actually sustaining
through the moment of arrival. The boundary is a watery one, that of
entering into a meditative state, and the flow of the music is simplicity
itself, with tenderly falling phrases. At the moment of expected dramatic
contrast, the second theme, Beethoven thwarts these expectations and
gives us a theme of a sadder cast but refusing to engage in dialectic with
the first theme. The opening Maestoso music returns two more times in
the movement, the first announcing the development section. But the
second comes early in the structure of the whole and then fails to appear
to announce the recapitulation, the moment when we should feel a true
sense of arrival and coming to terms with built up conflict. Instead the
music subsides into the return of the first theme in a way that suggests
a refusal to wrestle with the material and instead melts into serenity.
The coda of the movement could hardly be more filled with intimate
tenderness, the public music of the Maestoso having been left far in the
past.
The second movement is a set of variations on a prayerful theme
introduced with hesitant half gasps that echo the harmonic ploy of the
opening of the piece, once again gently descending into the subdominant.
A theme of infinite patience and grace opens up into an extraordinary set
of transformations. Already in the first variation the climaxes, looking
forward and somehow prescient, give us a pre-echo of the climax of the
entire work in the coda of the Finale. The second variation enters the
world of play, evoking the natural joy and wonder in children's games,

in this case an acrobatic game of leapfrog between the violins. The
center of the movement rises up to a distant, unexpected and radiant
key area where the theme achieves a sense of religious ecstasy sung out
in operatic style. It is a simple shift, and yet it reveals an entire world
tangential to the one in which we typically dwell, as if Beethoven is
able to lift us out of the plane of our existence. I am reminded of the
moment in Edwin Abbott's Flatland where a sphere lifts the protagonist,
a square, out of the plane in which he lives and suddenly, with dizzying
and overwhelming insight, our hero can see the insides of seemingly
impenetrable figures from his world. The sense of clarification from a
distance is as if we been privileged to see into the beyond. As we are
gently placed back in the mortal sphere the illumination of this insight
continues to glow; the beauty of our world glimmers and grows more
rarefied. Despite a dark interlude, the theme eventually gets spun out into
a gossamer line, initially in the first violin, accompanied by undulating
pulsations derived from the introductory gesture of the movement. The
coda of the movement recalls the parallel universe shift of the middle of
the movement within the space of three measures, a final reminder both
of Elysium and of the reflection of its splendor in our own world.
The Scherzo again has an introductory gesture, but this one is finally
straightforward and playfully announces a movement which is filled
with clever contrapuntal games and serves as a foil to the depth of the
previous movements. Lines that skip upwards are answered by others
that flip them upside down, reminiscent of the leapfrog variation in the
previous movement. The music gallops and flirts with the idea of a more
graceful dance without ever giving in to it. Again in this movement we
find a boundary dissolving device, a single chord that stutters, changes
to minor, then begins to pulsate and whirl, leading into a tornado-like
torrent, transporting us to an Oz where there is a folkish, perhaps pagan
stomping dance. This whirling music teases with a brief reappearance at
the end of the movement, just enough almost to throw the main rhythm
of the movement off course, but all is righted at the final moment for an
enthusiastic ending.
The Finale begins with a curious opening gesture, vigorously
emphasizing the A-flat sub-dominant that has been so important earlier
in the piece. It is an arresting moment, rich with personal struggle
and striving; it wends its way downwards in curious curves, tempted
in many directions at once. Yet when it lands at the bottom it is in the
home key of the piece, with a melody that is both gentle and folk-like in
its quiet yodeling. The theme itself emphasizes the A-flat twice before
lifting it upwards so that it can gently topple over and find its way back
home. This rising idea of A-flat to A-natural to a B-flat dominant that
can release into the home key is an encapsulation of the function of this
movement, a lifting out of contemplation back into the world with a
renewed sense of harmony with what is. The most touching and exalted

boundary dissolution comes in the coda of this final movement, where
Beethoven holds time prisoner with an ellipsis that blossoms into a trill.
The trill contains the A-flat once again and then releases that pitch, and
with it the tether of self-hood, into a visionary reflection of the perfection
that surrounds us. The great painter Mark Rothko said "all teaching
about self-expression is erroneous in art...knowing yourself is valuable
so that the self can be removed from the process." For Beethoven in the
late quartets, as evidenced in Op. 127 and particularly in this lustrous
coda (and like in Rothko's mature paintings), the self is dissolved into a
broader and more inclusive vision. Effort is replaced with acceptance and
the profoundest love.
2007 by Mark Steinberg

Performance Events Staff Supervisor
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Event Mangers:
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