University of Florida Performing Arts

Transcription

1 University of Florida Performing Arts presents attacca Quartet Sunday, january 24, 2016, 2 p.m. university auditorium

2 attacca quartet Amy Schroeder Violin Keiko Tokunaga Violin Nathan Schram Viola Andrew Yee Cello PROGRAM String Quartet in C Major, Op. 74, No. 1 Allegro moderato Andante grazioso Menuetto. Allegretto Finale. Vivace John s Book of Alleged Dances Toot Nipple Pavane Stubble Crotchet Alligator Escalator Joseph Haydn John Adams Intermission String Quartet No. 14 in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 131 Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo Allegro molto vivace Allegro moderato Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile Presto Adagio quasi un poco andante Allegro Ludwig van Beethoven PROGRAM SUBJECT TO CHANGE

3 program notes String Quartet in C Major, Op. 74, No. 1 Joseph Haydn Born March 31, 1732, in Rohrau; died May 31, 1809, in Vienna In 1793, while he was home in Vienna between his two long stays in London, Haydn composed a set of six string quartets for Count Anton Apponyi, who seems to have governed the huge Hungarian county of Tolna from Vienna, where he was a chamberlain at the Imperial Court. Apponyi was a relative of Haydn s patrons, the Esterhazys, and a member of Baron van Swieten s aristocratic Musicalische Gesellschaft. Apponyi would be the first patron to offer young Beethoven a string quartet commission in 1795, and in 1784, Mozart named his wife, Countess Apponyi, as a subscriber to his concerts in Vienna. As was the custom of the time, Haydn gave Apponyi exclusive rights to the six quartets included in the original grouping for a year, and then in the following year, 1795, divided the six into two sets of three that were published by different publishers. Now they are known as Op. 71 and Op. 74. Haydn gave dynamic expression to his string quartets in these years; he freely dealt with complex musical ideas, giving them form with ease and facility. His six Quartets, Op. 20, of 1772, had given him the moniker the father of the string quartet, and, as a result of his admiration for Haydn, in the early 1780s, Mozart, not yet 30 years old, affectionately and respectfully dedicated a set of six quartets to the older man. As time passed, Haydn added symphonic elements to his string quartets. Each quartet has a special introduction of some kind, like many of his symphonies; the quartet ensemble writing takes on a full-textured, almost orchestral quality. In this quartet, the introduction is a gesture, only two chords, after which the main tempo, Allegro, moderato, begins. Those two chords immediately focus attention on the home key, which Haydn wants to impress on the listener s mind for two reasons: one is that rather than following with a new theme in a contrasting key, which is what is expected that he would do, instead he restates this tense, close-knit main theme in the new key. The second reason is that there is so much chromatic harmony in the music that emphasizing the main key makes the listener aware of the significance of any deviation from it. The listener immediately notices something else new about this quartet: Haydn no longer gives the first violin quite as exposed a part as he had done in earlier works. Here the first violin is less flamboyant than it had been previously, and the ensemble, consequently, begins to take on a new cohesive quality. Next comes the tender and touching Andantino grazioso, a slow movement which Haydn follows with an extended and developed Minuet Allegretto in which he again experiments by moving into tonalities far removed from the home key. Making these bold harmonic innovations prompted the scholar Karl Geiringer to comment, The dawn of Romanticism is noticeable in the String Quartets of Op. 74. In the Finale the listener enjoys a clever musical romp, Vivace, full of playful sleight of hand rhythmically, utilizing syncopation, and texturally, polyphony is prominent. N.B. In some editions, the tempos of the first three movements are Allegro moderato, Andantino grazioso and Allegretto.)

4 John s Book of Alleged Dances John Adams Born February 15, 1947, in Worcester, Massachusetts The contemporary American composer John Adams spent his formative years in his native New England where he was much influenced by the performers and composers at the artistic and intellectual institutions there. His clarinet teacher and the conductor of the orchestra in which he played as a young musician were both members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Adams became proficient enough on his instrument to appear as soloist in the concerto by his neighbor, Walter Piston, and he studied composition at Harvard with the successor to Piston s faculty chair, Leon Kirchner. After his graduation, Adams settled in San Francisco, where he taught at the Conservatory for ten years and was an adviser and composer in residence with the Boston Symphony. In the music of his early maturity, Adams showed his discovery of a freer kind of advanced musical thought than he had learned at the university, and he took up many of the techniques and much of the aesthetics of the minimalist composers. It was not long, however, before he admitted himself to be a minimalist who is bored with minimalism and developed the balanced mixture of sustained repetition with either subtle or bold variation that distinguishes his work. Adams has conducted orchestras and opera companies in Europe and the United States, and he served as music director of the 1991 Cabrillo Festival, the 1994 Ojai Festival and as creative chair with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra from 1988 to He received the California Governor s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts and the Cyril Magnin Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts. For the Violin Concerto, he received the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. In 2002, Adams composed On the Transmigration of Souls for the New York Philharmonic, a work written in commemoration of the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. This work received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Another of Adams works, My Father Knew Charles Ives, had its premiere in 2003, performed by the San Francisco Symphony. It is a musical self-portrait of the composer s childhood in Concord, New Hampshire, where he played in marching bands with his father and first heard live jazz in the summer dance hall owned by his grandfather. In 2003, Lincoln Center presented John Adams: An American Master, the most extensive festival Lincoln Center ever devoted to a living composer. Adams is currently Composer in Residence at Carnegie Hall. He was also awarded the Centennial Medal of Harvard University s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for contributions to society in 2004, the same year in which he became the first recipient of the Nemmers Prize in Music Composition, which includes four weeks of residency and teaching at Northwestern University over two years. Doctor Atomic, an opera composed in 2005, is about Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project and the creation and testing of the first atomic bomb. In the light spirited work, John s Book of Alleged Dances, consisting of 11 short pieces, Adams combines music from many genres from popular music to the medieval, creating something novel but that still has a familiar sound. He composed this work

5 for a commission by the California Center for the Arts for the Kronos Quartet. Its world premiere was in Escondido, California, on November 19, For performance of the new work, Adams prepared a piano, attaching screws, bolts, rubber erasers, weather stripping, and other material to its strings. The key playing a given string would then produce a particular altered sound rather than a note. The composer sampled the prepared keys, organized the sound into loops, and set them up as short rhythm tracks. The idea was that a member of the quartet would trigger these loops to perform them for the six of the ten dances in which this sound is required, but this technique was too complex, so Adams recorded them. Now quartets frequently perform this piece with the pre-recorded prepared piano loops. The order of movements used in recording the work supervised by the composer sometimes dictates the order of movements in live performances, but essentially Adams prescribed no fixed order for these exuberant but technically demanding pieces. The overall effect is humorous, attractive, and sometimes quite wild. Adams describes these eclectic works: These dances, dedicated to my friends in [the Kronos Quartet], are alleged because the steps for them have yet to be invented. They cuss, chaw, hock hooeys, scratch and talk too loud. They are also, so I m told, hard to play. Further, The general tone is dry, droll and sardonic. Tonight you will hear the following selections; these four are the sections without prepared piano sound. The descriptions of the works are by the composer. Toot Nipple: Mrs. Nipple... You probably don t remember her husband, Toot. When he was young he was a big fellow, quick and clever, a terror on the dance floor. (From Postcards by E. Annie Proulx.) Furious chainsaw triads on the cello, who rides them like a rodeo bull just long enough to hand them over to the viola. Pavane: She s So fine: A quiet, graceful song for a budding teenager. She s in her room, playing her favorite song on the boom box. Back and forth over those special moments, those favorite progressions. She knows all the words. On her bed are books and friendly animals. High, sweet cello melodies for Joan Jeanrenaud [cellist of the Kronos Quartet when the piece was written], who s so fine. Stubble Crotchet: A sawed-off stump of a piece. Dry bones and hardscrapple attacks ( at the frog as stringers like to say). An early morning shave with an old razor. Alligator Escalator: The long, sluggish beast is ascending from the basement level of the local Macy s all the way to the top of the store and then back down again. Slow slithering scales, played flautando and sul [ponticello], leave invisible tracks on the escalator, splitting the octave in strange reptilian ways. Mothers are terrified, children fascinated. String Quartet No. 14 in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 131 Ludwig van Beethoven Baptized Bonn, Germany, December 17, 1770; died Vienna, Austria, March 26, 1827 Quartet No. 14 belongs with the group of Beethoven s final chamber masterpieces. While he was composing it, he considered writing other types of works, specifically large works with chorus, like an oratorio, a requiem, or an opera, but when he had completed

6 a commission for three quartets, he went on instead to write two more works for string quartet, this one and Op. 135, his last work. Beethoven made his earliest sketch for Op. 131 during the last few days of 1825 and he quickly completed it during July The writing of the quartet required an intense effort at a time when he was already totally deaf and deeply troubled by his failing health as well as the misadventures of his nephew, for whom he was responsible and who was then threatening to commit suicide. Beethoven s concern for his nephew was so great that he changed the dedication of the quartet, which he had intended for a personal friend, inscribing the work instead to Lieutenant Field Marshal Baron Joseph von Stutterheim, who took this problematic nephew into one of his regiments as an officer cadet. At the same time, the composer, for no reason apparent to history, spent much time cajoling a case of expensive old wine out of his publisher. In late summer, when he gave the completed score of this quartet to his publisher, he said that it was stolen and assembled from various bits of this and that. The publisher, in alarm, wrote to him demanding assurance that the work was, in fact, new and original. He had apparently not looked at the music, for if he had he would certainly have understood Beethoven s ironic jest. There could not have been anything as new as this quartet. It was totally without precedent. Huge in size and cast in entirely original shapes invented in the course of the writing, it was the final example of how far Beethoven had outgrown the forms he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart. To invent and assemble this composition in six or seven months had been an astonishing creative feat. Beethoven s notes and sketches for the work occupy three times as much paper as the finished work. This quartet seems somehow to be a leap forward into the expressive world of the early 20th century. Although only four instruments play it, it creates much of the same kind of grandeur and profundity that some larger works of Strauss and Mahler were striving for in their huge orchestral scores. In 1860, a German conductor even made a full orchestral version of this quartet with the good intention of expanding the audience for this great music, but it proved to be a clumsy travesty and thus the arrangement has disappeared. The quartet has seven distinct parts, knit together into a continuous whole. Some scholars have claimed to reveal a nearly traditional four-movement structure as its base, but it seems more reasonable to accept Beethoven s demarcations and consider the seven separately. The first movement is a sad but majestic, slow fugue, Adagio, ma non troppo e molto espressivo, which Wagner said, shows the most melancholy sentiment ever expressed in music. The second movement, Allegro molto vivace, begins with a key-shift that was astonishing at that time; its form still puzzles music analysts today looking for the mold in which it was cast. It has been variously identified as a truncated sonata-form or even a dance comparable to those in Baroque suites. All that remains important, however, is that it exists as a form of Beethoven s own devising, which contains lyrical, wistful music of great appeal. The third movement begins energetically, Allegro moderato, with two rapping chords, but it soon becomes an Adagio recitative introducing the glorious theme-and-variation fourth

7 movement. In the fourth movement, the music starts with a new, flowing theme, Andante, ma non troppo e molto cantabile, which goes through seven variations. Only some of them are elaborations; others concentrate and reduce the theme to its very essence. The fifth, an expanded scherzo, Presto, has savage force; following the Presto, a brief slow song, Adagio quasi un poco andante, runs into the finale, Allegro, the quartet s only more-or-less regular sonata-form movement. The finale, a wild, dancing movement, has as its ancestor the finale of Beethoven s Symphony No. 7. Some of the material also sounds distantly derived from this quartet s own opening fugue. Here, as elsewhere in the work, there are tempo changes within phrases that are labeled rubato (meaning with expressive and rhythmic freedom), but instead of leaving them to the performers emotion of the moment, Beethoven has actually written them into the music. Great themes simply flash by. The music races on until just before the end, when it slows, then speeds up again, closing with a few slashing chords. Program notes are copyright Susan Halpern, 2015 About the Attacca Quartet First Prize winners of the 7th Osaka International Chamber Music Competition in 2011, top prize winners and Listeners Choice Award recipients in the 2011 Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, and winners of the Alice Coleman Grand Prize at the 60th annual Coleman Chamber Ensemble Competition in 2006, the internationally acclaimed Attacca Quartet has become one of America s premier young performing ensembles. Praised by The Strad for possessing maturity beyond its members years, they were formed at The Juilliard School in 2003, and made their professional debut in 2007 as part of the Artists International Winners Series in Carnegie Hall s Weill Recital Hall. From they served as the Juilliard Graduate Resident String Quartet, and for the season the Attacca Quartet was named the Quartet in Residence for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Attacca Quartet recently completed a recording project of Haydn s masterwork The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross arranged by Andrew Yee and the Attacca Quartet. In his review for Gramophone, Donald Rosenberg wrote, The Attacca Quartet explore the works range of expressive moods with utmost sensitivity to nuance and interplay... They triumph in every respect, and are captured in such vivid sound that no telling Haydn detail is allowed to go unheard. Thewholenote.com wrote... It s easily the most satisfying string version of the work that I ve heard. In 2013, the Attacca Quartet released the complete works for string quartet by John Adams on Azica Records. It was praised by Steve Smith of The New York Times as a vivacious, compelling set, describing the Attacca Quartet s playing as exuberant, funky, and exactingly nuanced. The Boston Globe also praised the release, stating: Few [recent recordings] are as consequential as Fellow Traveler, superb performances. The album was the recipient of the 2013 National Federation of Music Clubs Centennial Chamber Music Award. The Attacca Quartet has been honored with both the Arthur Foote Award from the Harvard Musical Association and the Lotos Prize in the Arts from the Stecher and Horowitz Foundation.

8 marks the final seasons in New York and Canada of The 68, an ambitious self-produced project in which the Attacca Quartet will have performed all 68 of Haydn s string quartets. They will also perform in concerts around the United States, Canada, South America and parts of Europe. Their recent highlights include: appearances in Madrid performing all of John Adams works for string quartet, including his Absolute Jest for String Quartet and Orchestra, soloing with the Spanish National Orchestra under the composer s direction; tours of Ireland and Japan; a four-concert run at the Melbourne Festival in Australia; residencies at the Virginia Arts Festival and Bravo! Vail Music Festival. The Attacca Quartet has engaged in extensive educational and community outreach projects, serving as guest artists and teaching fellows at the Lincoln Center Institute, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, Vivace String Camp in New York, the Woodlands ChamberFest in Texas, and Animato Summer Music Camp at Florida International University in Miami. Since 2006, they have performed in yearly benefit concerts supporting the Parkinson s Disease Foundation s efforts. The members of the Attacca Quartet currently reside in New York City. They are represented by Baker Artists, LLC. BIOGRAPHIES Amy Schroeder Violin Hailed by The Washington Post as an impressive artist whose playing combines imagination and virtuosity violinist Amy Schroeder, was born in Buffalo, New York. She studied with Sally Thomas and the Juilliard String Quartet at The Juilliard School where she received her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees as well as an Artist Diploma. Ms. Schroeder has soloed with orchestras including the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Amherst Symphony Orchestra, the Clarence Symphony Orchestra, the Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra and the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra. A founding member of the Attacca Quartet, she has been a part of a wide array of festivals including the Spoleto Festival in Italy, Music@Menlo, the Pacific Music Festival Tokyo String Quartet Program, the Emerson String Quartet seminar, the Juilliard String Quartet Seminar, the Banff Summer Chamber Music Festival, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the Sitka Chamber Music Festival, the Highlands/Cashiers Chamber Music Festival, the Meadowmount School of Music and the Music Academy of the West. She was also the recipient of the Henrietta and Albert J. Ziegle, Jr. Scholarship, which provided the tuition for her studies at Juilliard. Growing up in Buffalo, Ms. Schroeder began her violin studies with Karen Campbell and Thomas Halpin. She currently plays on a violin made in 2012 by Nathan Slobodkin. Keiko Tokunaga Violin A passionate advocate of the chamber music of all eras, violinist Keiko Tokunaga has already established a formidable reputation as a soloist and a chamber musician across North America, Europe, Australia and in her native Japan. As a member of the New Yorkbased Attacca Quartet, Ms. Tokunaga has soloed with orchestras including the Spanish National Orchestra, Virginia Arts Fetival Chamber Orchestra, Amherst Symphony Orchestra and Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra. She has performed both as a soloist and a chamber musician in such major venues as Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the

9 Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rubin Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Banff Centre in Canada, Ohji Hall and Suntory Hall in Tokyo, and Izumi Hall in Osaka. When she is not touring with the quartet, Ms. Tokunaga enjoys her career as an educator. She has been on faculty at The Juilliard School s Pre-College Ear Training Division since 2008 and currently serves as a violin instructor at the Fordham University, while maintaining a private violin studio in Manhattan. Ms. Tokunaga holds an Artist Diploma, a Masters and a Bachelor of Music from The Juilliard School. She plays on Stefano Scarampella violin from Nathan Schram Viola Hailed by The New York Times as an elegant soloist with a sound devotional with its liquid intensity, Nathan is a sought after violist, composer and arranger. Working with many of today s great composers, he has premiered music by Steve Reich, Nico Muhly, Timo Andres, Gabriel Kahane and others. Nathan is also a founding member of Speed Bump, an ensemble devoted to improvisation and their own compositions. He has collaborated with many of the great artists of today including: Björk, Itzhak Perlman, Becca Stevens, Gil Kalish, Simon Rattle, Phil Setzer, Joshua Bell and others. Apart from performing, Nathan is the Founding Director of Musicambia, a New York based initiative establishing a network of music conservatories within prisons and jails in the United States. Musicambia currently runs a music conservatory at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York and is developing a school in South Carolina as well as programs overseas. Schram is a prize winner of the 2007 Primrose International Viola competition, the 2006 Corpus Christi Concerto Competition and a First Prize winner of the 2008 ASTA National Solo Competition. He studied at Indiana University with Alan de Veritch and at the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain with Diemut Poppen and Yuval

10 Gotlibovich. As an Ensemble ACJW Fellow he was documented by radio journalist Jeff Lunden for a two-year, four-part series for NPR s Weekend Edition. Andrew Yee Cello Andrew Yee, cello, has been praised by Michael Kennedy of The London Telegraph as spellbindingly virtuosic remember that you heard [his] name here first. He is a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Attacca Quartet, and received his Bachelor s and Master s degrees from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Fred Sherry, Darrett Adkins and Joel Krosnick. Mr. Yee has appeared with the International Sejong Soloists, and has played solo and chamber music recitals across the United States. His many engagements include the Concert Hall, Terrace Theatre and Millennium stages in the Kennedy Center of Washington, D.C., Alice Tully Hall, the Spoleto Festival, Carnegie Hall and other venues including solo performances of Popper s Hungarian Rhapsody, Vivaldi s Concerto for two cellos and Dvořák s Cello Concerto. Mr. Yee plays on a 2002 Nathan Slobodkin cello modeled after the 1731 Ex Messeas Guarneri del Gesu cello.