Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill 8855 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, Friday, September 19, 7:00 PM
Old Pine Street Church, 412 Pine Street, Philadelphia, Sunday, September 21, at 2:00 PM
Martinů: Madrigals for violin and viola
Beethoven: Serenade in D major for flute, violin, and viola, Op. 25
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Quartet for oboe, violin, viola, and cello
Smetana: String Quartet No. 1 in E minor (“From My Life”)
THE PHILADELPHIA CHAMBER ENSEMBLE
Friday, September 19 at 7pm, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Sunday, September 21 at 2pm, Old Pine St. Presbyterian Church
PROGRAM NOTES
Bohuslav Martinů
Three Madrigals
Born in a church bell tower in the town of Polička, Bohuslav Martinů combined his Czech musical heritage with the Neoclassicism he encountered in Paris when he moved there in 1923. After the German invasion in 1940, Martinů fled to the United States and spent most of the rest of his life in this country and in Switzerland. Though he was an expatriate for most of his career, he was the most prolific and important Czech composer of the mid-twentieth century. His remains were reinterred in his native town twenty years after his death.
Hearing one of Mozart’s duets for violin and viola performed by the brother/sister team of Joseph and Lillian Fuchs inspired Martinů to write one of his own for them in 1947. Though he called the work “Three Madrigals,” it is really a three-movement piece like the Mozart duets that inspired it. At times Martinů uses every means at his disposal to make the two instruments sound like a larger group. He alternates the lushly scored passages with ones in which the two instruments answer each other, often in rapid-fire alternation, taking advantage of the difference in tone quality between the instruments. The layout of the three movements is fast-slow-fast.
A drum-like rhythmic tattoo opens the piece, becoming the accompaniment to the melody. The meter devolves into galloping irregularity — a masterful bit of deconstructing and reassembling before the opening returns. The second madrigal starts with mysterious flutters, creating a kaleidoscopic effect which resolves into a courtly dance of reciprocating gestures. A hint of Roma music appears in the middle section with lusty strummed pizzicato chords in the viola. The final madrigal begins with an imitation of hunting music and later, Czech folk music. The instruments eventually join forces in a rich Brahmsian texture and the trills of the second movement, leading to a return of the energy of the allegro opening of the movement and a brilliant close.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Serenade in D major
The Serenade dates from 1801, falling between the first two symphonies in Beethoven’s oeuvre. As one might expect from the title and the scoring, this is one of the composer’s most light-hearted works.
Instead of a large, complex opening movement, the Serenade begins with a little march, opening with two measures of solo flute before the strings accept its invitation to join in. The following Minuetto has the form ABACA; the flute rests in the B episode. The third movement is a quick number in D minor, with a contrasting middle section. Next comes a theme with three variations, each featuring one of the three instruments. The fifth movement reverses the pattern of the third movement, with the outer sections in D major and the middle portion in D minor. The finale consists of a slow introduction leading into a cheerful rondo.
Ellen Taafe Zwilich
Oboe Quartet
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich was born in Miami. She showed talent performing on both trumpet and violin, concentrating on the latter instrument while receiving her undergraduate and Master’s degrees at Florida State University. She played violin under Leopold Stokowski in the American Symphony Orchestra as well as other venues in New York, but her interests shifted and in 1975 she became the first woman to receive a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from the Juilliard School of Music. When her Symphony no. 1 won the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1983 she also became the first woman to receive that signal recognition. Zwilich has enjoyed a long career with many further honors and has created a large catalog of works: all sorts of instrumental compositions and a variety of vocal and choral music, though she has not composed for the stage. Her early style was, like much of the music of its era, rather difficult for the listener, but in keeping with the trend of the times it has become more approachable over the years.
This quartet for oboe and strings was commissioned by the Saratoga Chamber Music Festival and premiered at the 2004 festival with Richard Woodhams playing the oboe part. It has two movements, equal in length, but they lack titles or tempo markings. The opening movement begins with a quiet passage in long, sustained notes; a middle section is more active, though the activity comes in accompaniment figures in the strings, and the ending returns to the opening mood. The second movement begins with a pizzicato (plucked strings) dancelike section, later switching to using bows mixed with pizzicato chords; about halfway through, it becomes more dramatic and refers back to the material from the opening movement to provide a satisfying conclusion.
Bedřich Smetana
String Quartet no. 1, “Z mého života” (From My Life)
Smetana was the father of the Czech national school of composition, particularly of Czech opera. Outside the Czech lands, however, only the comedy The Bartered Bride is well known, and audiences are more familiar with Smetana’s cycle of symphonic poems Má Vlast (My Country), especially the second of them, The Moldau. This quartet from 1876 is his best-known chamber work, and it not only uses an operatic language but has a story line.
Smetana’s life had spectacular ups and downs. His first marriage was happy, but his wife died after only ten years together, and only one of their four daughters lived to grow up. A second marriage was less successful. For years the Austrian authorities hindered his efforts to promote Czech music. Once the political situation improved it became possible to establish a Czech-language opera house in Prague in 1866 with Smetana as principal conductor, and despite considerable opposition he was able to fulfill much of his dream of creating a national school of opera. He was, however, suffering from syphilis, and in 1874 began to experience neurological symptoms that started with severe acoustical problems and rapidly proceeded to complete deafness. Retired from active duties on a small pension, he threw himself into composition and produced some of his finest music in the next few years, including Má Vlast and this quartet. Gradually his physical and mental condition deteriorated and he died in an asylum at the age of 60.
In letters Smetana explained what he had in mind in his quartet. The first movement represents his youthful aspirations and the beginning of his struggle to realize them. The second recalls one of the great pleasures of his youth, the polka, a Czech dance that had turned into a world-wide craze when Smetana was a boy. In the third movement, the longest, he remembers his courtship and marriage to his first wife. The finale begins in rejoicing, commemorating Smetana’s triumph in establishing Czech opera; when the festivities are at their height, however, a piercing high note in the first violin interrupts the proceedings, and the mood changes instantly. After some reminiscences of the earlier movements the music dies away into a few pizzicato notes and silence.
Besides its autobiographical elements, the high emotional content of the music, and its failure to follow some of the formal conventions of the genre, the quartet is also unusual in its treatment of the instruments. There is little of the type of interplay among the four parts that one expects in a quartet; instead, one instrument usually has the leading part while the others provide a dense accompaniment. Frequently the leading role falls to the viola. It took several years for such a strange quartet to receive a public performance, though there was a private reading in 1878 in which the viola was played by a man who had played that instrument under Smetana’s baton in the opera orchestra for several years, an aspiring composer named Antonín