Pacifica
String Quartet
Named Musical America's
2009 Ensemble of the Year, the Grammy-winning Pacifica
Quartet has received international acclaim as one of the
finest chamber ensembles performing today. Recent career
honors include appointment as quartet-in-residence at New
York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the position held for
43 years by the Guarneri String Quartet. In 2009 the
Pacifica was named Ensemble of the Year by Musical America
and received the 2009 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music
Performance.
The Pacifica Quartet
tours extensively throughout the United States, Europe,
and Asia and performs in the world’s major concert halls.
The ensemble can be also be heard on many of the nation’s
most prominent radio broadcasts, including Chicago’s WFMT,
Boston’s WGBH, New York’s WNYC, and American Public
Media’s Performance Today and St. Paul Sunday. Having
given highly acclaimed performances of the complete
Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Elliott Carter string quartets
in recent seasons, the Quartet will perform the monumental
Shostakovich quartet cycle in Chicago and New York during
the 2010-2011 season. In 2011-2012, the Pacifica will take
the Shostakovich cycle to London’s Wigmore Hall and will
also present the complete Beethoven cycle at New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
An ardent advocate of
contemporary music, the Pacifica Quartet commissions and
performs many new works each year. It has been widely
acclaimed for its single-concert performances of Elliott
Carter’s complete cycle of five string quartets since it
first gave them in 2002 and 2003 in New York, Chicago, San
Francisco, and abroad. Critics have called these
groundbreaking concerts “brilliant,” “astonishing,” and
“breathtaking.” In 2008 the Pacifica released its Grammy
Award-winning CD recording of Carter’s quartets Nos. 1 and
5 on the Naxos label, and its 2009 release of Carter’s
quartets Nos. 2, 3, & 4 completed the two-CD set. The
Pacifica’s other CD recordings, including Mendelssohn’s
complete string quartets and Declarations: Music Between
the Wars, have also attracted praise from critics in the
U.S and abroad.
Formed in 1994, the
Pacifica Quartet quickly won chamber music’s top
competitions, including the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music
Award. In 2002 the ensemble was honored with Chamber Music
America’s Cleveland Quartet Award and appointment to The
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s program for
gifted young musicians. In 2006 the Pacifica was awarded a
prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, becoming only the
second chamber music ensemble to be so honored in the
Grant’s long history. Also in 2006 the Quartet was
featured on the cover of Gramophone magazine and heralded
as one of “five new quartets you should know about,” the
only American quartet on the list.
PROGRAM NOTES FOR
PACIFICA STRING QUARTET CONCERT
Nikolai Myaskovsky
(1881-1950)
String Quartet No. 13 in A minor, Op. 86 (1949)
Born in a military
frontier town in 1881, Nikolai Myaskovsky seemed destined
to follow the military careers of his father and
grandfather. He was enrolled in a Cadet College at age
ten, followed by military high school in St. Petersburg
and the Imperial School of Military Engineering. However,
Myaskovsky had long wished to pursue a career in music. He
showed a high degree of musical talent at an early age,
and despite his father’s displeasure, he actively pursued
music instruction throughout his years of military
education. In 1906, after several years of military
service, he finally won the contest of wills with his
father and resigned from the military to prepare for the
St. Petersburg Conservatory entrance exam. He was admitted
to the Conservatory in 1907 at age 25.
The St. Petersburg
Conservatory was dominated by the Russian nationalist
tradition of The Five, a group of St. Petersburg composers
born in the 1830s and 1840s that included Mussorgsky,
Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov. They were dedicated to
producing a Russian style of music that incorporated folk
music and other music drawn from of daily life as well as
tonal features they considered distinctly Russian. After
graduation, Myaskovsky emerged as a superb craftsman and
prolific composer strongly rooted in the conservative
Russian nationalist idiom.
String Quartet No. 13,
Op. 86, is one of Myaskovsky’s final works, composed in
1949 shortly before his death. In 1951 the quartet and his
other final work, Symphony No. 27, Op. 85, were
posthumously awarded the Stalin Prize, the Soviet Union’s
highest musical honor. This award came despite
Myaskovsky’s official censure as a “formalist” in 1948
when the Communist Party launched its campaign against
‘anti-Soviet’ works of art. Unlike Shostakovich,
Prokofiev, and other leading composers denounced in 1948,
Myaskovsky’s conservative composing style had never fallen
from official favor, and throughout his career he had
dutifully composed music for official purposes. An
incident at the Moscow Conservatory in 1947 suggests that
professional jealousy on the part of envious colleagues
there may have played a role in his 1948 denunciation.
Myaskovsky’s late style
is marked by directness and clarity as well as a movement
away from his earlier chromaticism. Quartet No. 13 opens
with a lyrical, sweetly melancholy theme in the cello,
followed by a playful second theme. In what is basically a
rondo, these themes return in many variations while
maintaining the opening theme’s yearning quality. The
dynamic ‘fantastico’ second movement rushes through
its contrasting passages in the manner of an exciting folk
tale and ends with an elfin flourish. The singing
Andante is exquisitely tender and warmly nostalgic. In
the finale, the forceful opening theme and a rhythmic
strumming passage alternate with a return of the
Andante’s mood of lyrical melancholy. -- Program
note by Robert Strong
Dmitri Shostakovich
(1906 – 1975)
String Quartet No. 9 in E-Flat Major, Op. 117 (1964)
Though Dmitri
Shostakovich managed to survive the attacks upon him by
Stalin himself in 1936 and by Stalin’s goons in the
infamous Zhdanov Decree of 1948, the post-Stalin era saw
the composer struggling with a more insidious challenge to
his integrity. The following quote is from Elizabeth
Wilson’s excellent and moving biography of the composer
Shostakovich: A Life Remembered.
"During the 1930s, fear
became the uppermost emotion for Shostakovich and for our
intelligentsia. It was not only for their personal
existence, although that was real enough, but a fear for
their families, their work and their whole country.
When, after Stalin’s
death the lid was slightly off our hellish cauldron,
Dmitri Dmitriyevich went through an ordeal that was even
more terrible for an artist: temptation by official fame
and flattery, and identification with the prevailing
ideology, which was alien to him.”
Then the heavy hammer of
official honors, belated glorification, dealt Shostakovich
a much more terrible blow than all the criticism of the
1930s and 1940s. Taken under the aegis of the watchful
Party eye of the Union of Composers, Shostakovich
underwent the most anguished period of his life and art.
He was painfully torn between a sincere desire to repay
all the unsolicited honours through his work, and his real
artist’s view of what was going on in the country." This
from Fyodor Druzhinin, the violist who joined the
Beethoven Quartet (the Quartet that Shostakovich had given
exclusive rights for premiere performances of his String
Quartets. They premiered all of the Quartets, except for
the first and the last). Incidentally, Druzhinin’s first
session with "the Beethovens" in 1964, as a replacement
for his ailing teacher, was a read-through of the Ninth
and Tenth Quartets – in the presence of the composer.
Without getting too
bogged down in Soviet politics, the situation was this:
Khrushchev had gained power after the death of Stalin. He
then went on to condemn the Stalinist Regime in his
historic address to the 20th Party Congress. As part of
the façade he wished to create – that of progressive
reformer – he conned and coerced Shostakovich into joining
the Communist Party; something that the composer had
avoided doing all through the Stalinist era. Hoping
against hope that reforms would occur (they didn’t),
frightened and worn down by bad health (in the last decade
of his life he was afflicted with polio, heart disease,
approaching blindness, and lung cancer) in 1960 he
assented, much to the horror and disappointment of his
friends and supporters.
Shostakovich was greatly
pained by this. He had always believed that he could best
be of service to others by "rendering unto Caesar" and
using his personal influence to intercede for others who
were in danger from the regime. Wilson’s book cites many
instances of his doing just that.
Such was Shostakovich’s
genius that he composed his works fully in his mind. He
had no use of musical instruments to try out his ideas. He
did not make sketches or piano scores of his work, as most
composers do. His huge symphonies, as well as his other
works were written directly in orchestral scoring, bar by
bar. He rarely changed or revised anything. When
suggestions for "improvements" came, he would reply to the
helpful suggestor something like "You’re correct, but I’ll
fix it in the next work".
The Ninth String Quartet
was one of the few works that gave him trouble. Elizabeth
Wilson writes: "Shostakovich finished the first version of
the Ninth Quartet in the autumn of 1961. In a fit of
depression, or, to quote his own words, ‘in an attack of
healthy self-criticism, I burnt it in the stove. This is
the second such case in my creative practice. I once did a
similar trick of burning my manuscripts, in 1926’.”
It took Shostakovich
nearly three years to settle down and write another
Quartet. His ‘second’ Ninth Quartet was completed on 28
May 1964. Dmitri Tsyganov, the leader of the Beethoven
Quartet, recalled that Shostakovich told him that the
quartet that he had consigned to the flames was based on
‘themes from childhood’; the new Quartet was ‘completely
different’."
The Ninth Quartet is to
my mind an enigmatic work. It consists of five movements,
played without pause. The first four movements each last
about 3 ¾ minutes give or take a few seconds. They
alternate between fast and slow. The wry first movement
opens with an oscillating figure, and the materials
introduced in this movement can be found in varied form in
other movements. For instance the opening violin theme,
albeit transformed, appears in opening of the chorale-like
second movement. The third movement, one of Shostakovich’s
grotesque polkas, also contains material from the first
movement. The end of the third movement then provides the
opening figure for the fourth movement. This movement also
contains the oscillating figure from the first movement,
as well as striking chordal pizzicatos. In his liner notes
for the Manhattan String Quartet’s recording of the Ninth
Quartet, Richard Kassel suggests that the melody of this
movement is closely related to the opening of Mussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov, which Shostakovich had orchestrated in
1959. Who knows? The last movement is at least twice as
long as any other of the movements. It is made up of
episodes, often strident and grotesque, not the least of
which is a section which sounds like a musical
representation of malevolent poultry. This is followed by
a mess of counterpoint, a cello recitative including the
chordal pizzicatos, again based on the "Boris Godunov"
theme, as well as fragments of the polka and material from
previous movements.
The Ninth Quartet was
dedicated to the composer’s third wife Irena Supenskaya, a
young musicologist whom he married in 1962. As mentioned,
it was premiered by the Beethoven Quartet in Moscow on
Nov. 20, 1964. The next day it was premiered in Leningrad
(St. Petersburg). --Program note by Joseph Way, used with
permission
Ludwig van Beethoven
Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1
The first “Rasumovsky”
Quartet seems more like the consummation of a style than
the beginning, in chamber music, of Beethoven’s middle
period. The spacious conception, the high expressivity,
the sweep of formal structure, the beautiful melodies, the
rich harmonies, the surging rhythms, and the brilliant
string writing – all attest to surety, confidence, and
maturity.
The monumental Allegro
opens with a serene and noble first theme, starting low in
the cello and soaring up to the first violin’s highest
register. Several other distinctive melodic phrases round
out the first group of themes before the first violin
introduces the upward-stretching second subject. Again,
further themes fill out this second group. A codetta,
based on a melody obviously derived from the first theme,
concludes the exposition. The development, which starts
like a repeat of the exposition, is vast in size and
imaginatively varied, with a brilliant fugal center
section. The cello sneaks in to start the recapitulation
under a descending scale in the first violin. The building
and enriching process continues through the recapitulation
and concluding coda.
Musicians in Beethoven’s
day considered the opening rhythmic drumming on one note
in the second movement strange and oddly amusing. Although
the movement is lighter in mood than the Allegro, it still
is somewhat restless and ill at ease. As in the previous
movement, Beethoven uses many themes, some dancing and
gaily abandoned others more lyrical and songlike. The
structure can be interpreted either as a scherzo with two
trios or as sonata form; in any case it is a thoroughly
satisfying movement that grows organically and inevitably
from the melodic material.
Scholars suspect that the
enigmatic words, “A weeping willow or acacia tree upon my
brother’s grave,” penned by Beethoven on the sketches for
this movement, give an insight into the intent of this
great and profoundly moving slow movement. Some say that
the brooding intensity has to do with the composer’s
distress over his brother Casper Carl’s marriage to
Johanna Reiss, six months pregnant, and his belief that
Casper’s life had effectively ended. Others hold that the
sorrow was evoked by the memory of another brother, born
one year before Ludwig, who died in infancy. In any event,
the lament, written in sonata form, has two cantilena
themes, both characterized by wide intervals between the
notes. The first is stated at the outset by the first
violin; the second is sung by the cello while the violin
weaves a filigree accompaniment above. The rest of the
movement grows from these two melodies, as Beethoven
continuously reexamines, reworks, and recasts them until a
series of brilliant runs in the first violin brings the
movement to an end.
The Thème Russe (“Russian
theme”) of the finale follows without pause. No one is
sure whether Count Rasumovsky asked Beethoven to include a
Russian melody in the quartet, or whether the composer did
it to honor his patron. Nevertheless, it has been
determined that Beethoven derived the melody from a
collection of Russian folk songs published by Ivan Pratsch.
While the song was originally in minor and in a slow
tempo, it appears here in major and at double the speed.
In this sonata form movement, the dance-like rhythm of the
first theme is followed by a contrasting legato subsidiary
subject played by the second violin. At the very end
Beethoven slows down the last statement of the Thème Russe
by a factor of four before a brilliant flourish concludes
the quartet.
Notes from Guide to
Chamber Music, by Melvin Berger ©1985 (used with
permission).