An Orchestral Evening • Thursday, August 31, 2023 • 7:30pm • Arkell Pavilion, SVAC

String Quartet in F major, Op. 96, “American”
(Arr. for String Orchestra by Curtis Stewart)
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)

In 1892, Antonín Dvořák accepted the invitation of the philanthropist Mrs. Jeanette Thurber to take up the directorship of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York, which she sponsored. While the composer was intrigued by the possibilities of the venture, he found America strange and suffered extreme homesickness for his native Bohemia. To feel more at home, he spent the summer of 1893 in Spillville, a small Czech community in Iowa. He was happy there, playing the organ for the settlers in their little church and quartets with his students. But coming from the small farms of his native land, the vastness of the Iowa landscape overwhelmed him: “We often went to visit Czech farmers 4-5 miles away. It is very strange here. Few people and a great deal of empty space. A farmer’s nearest neighbor is often 4 miles off, and especially in the prairies (I call them Sahara) there are only endless acres of fields and meadows and that is all you see, you don’t meet a soul.” he wrote to a friend back home.

Dvořák put his stay in Spillville to good use, and within a month composed what was to become his most popular chamber work, the String Quartet in F, Op. 96. Usually known as the “American” Quartet, it makes use of a pentatonic scale (a mode that has only five notes to the octave and no semitone intervals). Pentatonic scales were common in the African-American music he heard in New York. Nonetheless, they can be found all over the world, from China to Scotland, including in Dvořák’s native Bohemia. Whatever the ethnic source of the scale, Dvořák uses it as a unifying quality for this quartet. Pentatonic themes also feature prominently in the Symphony No. 9 (“New World”). The quartet was premiered in Boston in 1894.  

The quartet opens with the pentatonic theme on the viola, accompanied by a syncopated violin accompaniment. The flowing second theme is distinctly Bohemian, far removed from any American influence. Most of the development involves the first theme.

The plaintive, soaring violin melody of the slow movement is considered the highlight of the quartet. It is a beautiful love song without words. During the course of the movement the other instruments take up the melody one by one over a delicate accompaniment.

The vigorous theme of the Scherzo again makes use of the pentatonic scale, but the rhythm and shape of the theme imitate the song of the scarlet tanager, a bird common to Iowa woodlands. The Trio, however, is a plaintive cantilena in the minor mode, harking back to the mood of the second movement.

The high-spirited finale is a sonata-rondo structure recalling lively country dances and music-making. The rondo theme and first episode are pentatonic, but Dvořák subtly darkens the mood with an inexact but still recognizable reference to the melancholy violin theme of the second movement. In the middle the movement he sharply suspends the merrymaking with a sad variant of the Trio in the third movement. Although one always walks on dangerous ground trying to relate the events of a composer’s life with his or her music, it is a fact that Dvořák was homesick during his sojourn in the United States. This somber diversion has its parallel in the Finale of the Ninth Symphony.

Concerto in D minor for Two Violins and String Orchestra, BWV 1043
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Johann Sebastian Bach composed the bulk of his instrumental secular music during his employment at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen from 1717 to 1723. Since the court was Calvinist, there was no call on Bach to compose church music. From that period came the Brandenburg Concertos, the first book of the Well-tempered Clavier, the Orchestral Suites and many of the works that appear to have been lost in their original versions but crop up later as concertos for one, two, three and four harpsichords.

Bach was an accomplished violinist. During his late teens he earned badly needed money as “lackey and violinist” to Duke Johann Ernst, the younger brother of the Duke of Weimar (whose employment Bach entered five years later). We know that during his years in Cöthen he composed at least four concertos for one violin and two for two violins. After his death, however, half his manuscripts went to his son Wilhelm Friedemann, who, perennially short of money, probably sold them for scrap paper, a valuable commodity at the time. The other half of the manuscripts, including those of the A minor and E major violin concertos and the D minor concerto for two violins, ended up in the hands of his more fastidious son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, who took good care of them. We do not know when and by whom the Concerto for Two Violins was first performed, but it probably was at the court of Cöthen with its modest orchestra. 

In the Concerto, Bach seems to have delighted in the many ways he could make the two soloists interact in dialogue intertwining and playing tag with the melodies. In fact, all three movements are short on thematic material in order to emphasize the flexibility of the main themes, which are shared equally by the two violins. The Concerto is composed in the high Baroque style “invented” by Antonio Vivaldi. Bach was a great admirer of the Italian composer, adopting his style and even resetting his Concerto for Four Violins as a concerto for four harpsichords.

The first and third movements have strong, driving ritornellos (thematic refrains), while the violin dialogue plays the intervening episodes. But the second movement belongs to the soloists alone, playing a gentle, serpentine melody in imitative counterpoint. It is among the most sensuous and emotive of all Bach’s concerto movements. The themes assiduously avoid tonic cadences in order to increase the harmonic tension. The movement includes a number of repeats, as if the young composer had been reluctant to release them.

Around 1739, while Kantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Bach transcribed this Concerto for two harpsichords, to be performed by the Bachisches Collegium, the weekly concert of secular vocal and instrumental music held in Zimmermann’s Coffee House, a high-class bourgeois establishment spacious enough to accommodate a large ensemble.

Shorthand
Anna Clyne (b. 1980)

London-born Anna Clyne is a prolific composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, who began composing at the age of 11. She holds a first-class Bachelor of Music degree with honors from Edinburgh University and a Master of Music from the Manhattan School of Music. Clyne currently serves as Composer-in-Residence with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, as well as the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. She nowadays resides in the US.

Clyne’s work has been championed by some of the world’s finest conductors, and she has been a passionate collaborator with many of today’s most inventive choreographers, visual artists, filmmakers, and musicians worldwide. She is also deeply committed to music education and teaching. Her music is romantic and often refers back to themes from earlier centuries. 

Clyne composed Shorthand during the lockdown in 2020 for cello and string quintet, as well as for cello and string orchestra. One of three works she composed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth, it is based on themes from Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata for violin and piano. The Sonata, in turn, inspired Leo Tolstoy's novella by the same name, in which he writes: “Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.” The novella, in turn, inspired Leoš Janáček's String Quartet No. 1, subtitled "Kreutzer Sonata", a theme of which also appears in Shorthand.

The work starts as an elegy, impassioned, based on the Kreutzer Sonata theme. Then, in the middle, it suddenly veers into Eastern Europe, the recurring theme – the Idee fixe – from Janáček's Quartet and bits of klezmer. The elegiac tone returns to close the work.

Romanian Rhapsody in A major, Op. 11, No. 1
George Enescu (1881-1955)

Except for the two Romanian Rhapsodies, composer, conductor and violinist George Enescu is not a household name outside his native country. A man of divided loyalties, he spent a good part of his life studying and working in France, and much of his music reflects the musical trends of his adopted country during the turn of the twentieth century.

Enescu was an amazingly versatile musician. Besides being an outstanding violinist (He was Yehudi Menuhin's teacher, and the two made one of the first recordings of the Bach Double Concerto discussed above – a recording still extant) and conductor, he was a virtuoso pianist, and also played the cello and viola; he once took part in a string quartet where he played each instrument in turn. According to Noel Malcolm he once conducted Wagner’s Siegfried in Bucharest, singing the role of Wotan from the podium when the singer became ill.

The two Romanian Rhapsodies, composed in 1901-02, pay homage to Romania’s native music and dance and do not reflect the style of the bulk of Enescu’s compositions. Returning home from studies in France, he was captivated by the Roma (Gypsy) style of violin playing that he heard around Bucharest, especially that of the Dinicu family (Grigoras Dinicu’s “Hora Staccato” for violin and piano was a popular encore made famous by Jascha Heifetz.) Although he became familiar with the folk dances and melodies of Romania’s many ethnic groups, he did not laboriously record them for scholarly purposes as did Béla Bartók.

In the Romanian Rhapsody in A major Enescu tried, through imaginative orchestration, to imitate the techniques and unique sounds of the native instruments used in folk dances, especially the lute-like cobza. The work is episodic, going through a series of dances from various rural festivals, including the popular ciocalia, in which the musicians try to imitate the sounds of birds. Typical of dance rhapsodies, the music becomes increasingly frenetic.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com