CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Brentano String Quartet

Weill Recital Hall
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Brentano String Quartet
·· Mark Steinberg, Violin
·· Serena Canin, Violin
·· Misha Amory, Viola
·· Nina Lee, Cello
Todd Palmer, Clarinet

MENDELSSOHN String Quartet No. 6 in F Minor, Op. 80
SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet No. 15
BRAHMS Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115

This concert is made possible, in part, by an endowment fund for young artists established by Mr. and Mrs. Anthony B. Evnin and the A.E. Charitable Foundation.

Program Notes:

FELIX MENDELSSOHN String Quartet No. 6 in F Minor, Op. 80
Born February 3, 1809, in Hamburg; died November 4, 1847, in Leipzig.

Composed in 1847, Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in F Minor received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Weill Recital Hall on April 4, 1997, with the Cavani String Quartet: Annie Fullard and Mari Sato, violins; Kirsten Docter, viola; and Merry Peckham, cello.

“It would be difficult to cite any piece of music which so completely impresses the listener with a sensation of gloomy foreboding, of anguish of mind, and of the most poetic melancholy, as does this masterly and eloquent composition.”

Thus Julius Benedict, who had known Felix Mendelssohn since they were both boys, described his friend’s last major composition, the Op. 80 F-Minor String Quartet. Composed during the final months of the composer’s life, during the period in which Mendelssohn described his mood to a visitor as “gray on gray,” the creative impetus for this most dark and barren of works was the death of Mendelssohn’s deeply beloved sister, Fanny. She had died during a rehearsal of her brother’s Erste Walpurgisnacht; upon learning of her death two days after the fact, Mendelssohn shrieked and collapsed to the ground. The loss was to saturate the short remainder of the composer’s life with grief.

To Fanny’s husband, Felix wrote “if the sight of my handwriting checks your tears, put the letter away for we have nothing left now but to weep from our inmost hearts.” Having been convinced to travel to Switzerland for a rest, Mendelssohn spent his time painting watercolors, often featuring the famed covered bridge of Lucerne, the roof of which housed scenes of the Totentanz, the dance of death. It is also during this stay that the F-Minor Quartet was composed. It was to be followed only by a few songs, the last of which closes with the lines “only I suffer pain, I will suffer without end, since, most beloved, you must part from me and I from you.”

It is surely no accident that the Op. 80 quartet is set in the key of Beethoven’s “Quartetto serioso,” Op. 95. It shares with that work an atmosphere of anguish and foreboding, although the enigmatic major key ending of Beethoven’s quartet finds no analogous music here, Mendelssohn’s work tenaciously clinging to the minor mode through its final chords, with no hint of catharsis to be had. Mendelssohn had always been a master of the agitato mood (for example the opening of the E-Minor Quartet, Op. 44, No. 2, or of either piano trio), but here it finds a new, more abstract quality, often divorced from melodic inspiration. The piece opens with a tremulous sense of portent, pure anxiety, and unease. It is an inner storm, and the themes that follow wrestle with despair. The defiance of denial in the face of death is felt, as well as the suffering that reality brings. The first movement is unremittingly driven, unstable even in more lyrical moments.

Mendelssohn is well known for his inimitable brand of scherzo, epitomized by the scherzo from the incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, evoking magical fairy dust and the dancing of sprites. The scherzo of the F-Minor Quartet betrays no hint of such lightness; it is full of almost brutal syncopations and jarring stabs. Here it again brings to mind Beethoven’s Op. 95 scherzo, with its comparable vicious sense of terror. The texture of the trio section is spare and desolate, with the lower instruments playing in octaves an almost passacaglia-like line, while the violins play a ghostly tune above. If there is dancing of spirits here, it is the dance of chthonic demons, gruesome and dark.

The deeply felt slow movement may have been modeled after the monumental slow movement of Beethoven’s quartet Op. 59, No.1, sharing its breadth and spacious sense of sadness. It is interesting to ponder whether Mendelssohn knew of the words Beethoven had written over the sketch for this movement, “a weeping willow or acacia tree on my brother’s grave.” It opens with a sinking bass line answered by a shivering sigh which begins the melodic material in the first violin. Melancholic acceptance and tender memory permeate the movement, with prevalent dotted rhythms resonating as the heartbeat of forsaken love.

Rarely is any solidity to be found in the finale of this quartet, with menacingly rumbling figures underscoring the darting melodic lines. In fact the rumbling takes over the movement entirely at several points, an abstract trembling of the soul. This is distilled psychological disquiet, bereft of any human voice. Eventually a wild triplet rhythm appears in the first violin, a final desperate attempt to break free of the bleakness. The quartet ends, however, with anger and fist-shaking, raw and untransformed.
—Mark Steinberg


DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet No. 15 in E-flat Minor, Op. 144
Born September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg; died August 9, 1975, in Moscow.

Composed in 1974, Shostokovich’s String Quartet in E-flat Minor was first performed on November 15, 1974, by the Taneyev Quartet. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Zankel Hall on October 21, 2005, with the Borodin Quartet: Ruben Aharonian and Andrei Abramenkov, violins; Igor Naidin, viola; and Valentin Berlinsky, cello.

Common perception of Shostakovich’s music is deeply rooted in the external, in the relationship of his art to the asphyxiating political climate in which he had to survive. Without a doubt, irony and bitterness in response to the repression of Stalinist Russia inform the music. Yet so much of the response to calamity and pain winds up being an external reflection of internal states common to all mankind: anger, fear, mistrust, caution, alienation. Because of this we find that a great artist such as Shostakovich, even if he may write in response to his immediate personal situation, creates music that is also universal, that touches and moves us through an empathy born of our common knowledge of suffering.

The 15th Quartet, Shostakovich’s final work in this form, comes from the end of his life and takes on the quality of a personal requiem. A glance at the movement titles (including, among others, an Elegy and a Funeral March) immediately suggests such an idea. The composer’s final period postdates Stalin’s death, and thus the music is in a sense freed to focus inward at long last. The work is in six connected slow movements, reminiscent of Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ, which is similarly meditative in spirit. However, whereas the Haydn work deals with suffering as a source of eventual redemption, this bleaker work offers only a blossoming of doubt as it nears its conclusion.

The opening Elegy has the severity of an etching rather than the opulence of a painting. Spare and cold, one hears here the traditional chanting of the Russian Orthodox church, intoned more than sung. This is mourning without self-pity, a sense of loss that is ancient and eternal. The length and monotony of the movement oppress us with a Chekhovian ennui.

When the music progresses at long last to the Serenade, we may expect the change to bring with it a sense of relief, of lightening. Yet whatever more casual song may be yearning to be heard, it is utterly obscured by 12 throat-tearing screams, such as might escape the mouths of figures in Picasso’s Guernica. When a waltz-tune does arrive, its accompaniment is mechanistic and inhuman; so often in Shostakovich we are made aware of the brutality of an uncaring response to heartfelt wishes.

The following Intermezzo picks up on the idea of a painful dichotomy between utterance and response, and takes it to its extreme. A wild cadenza for the first violin, almost rent asunder by its own turbulence, is met by frigid indifference in the cello. It is a powerful juxtaposition, perhaps the sense of the individual not understood by society, perhaps the extreme tension between what is felt and what it is safe to express. The well-known words of Dylan Thomas come to mind here: “Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

The ensuing Nocturne gives a relative sense of crepuscular serenity, featuring a haunting viola theme adorned with glistening spider-web-like arpeggios. Still, there is unease beneath the surface, an inability to release into the potential calm. Perhaps this is a nocturnal rest such as is invoked in Chekhov’s story Sleepy, where a sleep-deprived nanny finally experiences restorative slumber after strangling the screaming infant in her care.

Announcing a movement together for the first time in the piece, all four instruments proclaim a heavy dotted rhythm at the start of the Funeral March. These statements alternate with individual recitatives that build toward a sense of wailing. If this were a film, these interspersed meditations might be portrayed as internal emotional experiences of the pallbearers, alternating and contrasting with the solemn, inevitable procession.

The Epilogue bursts out with a passage that is an expansion, even an explosion, of a trill. This trill becomes the major player in this final movement, used as an obfuscating veil. There are many glances backward, reminiscences of the Elegy and the Funeral March, yet they are enshrouded in a fog of trills. This is an anti-cathartic piece. Whatever solace, whatever certainty may have been felt in the chanting of the Elegy and in the inexorable tread of the Funeral March is now infected with doubt and trembling.

Among Shostakovich’s never-to-be-fulfilled projects were plans for an opera on Gogol’s tale The Portrait. At the conclusion of this story, a man reveals to the crowd gathered at an auction that he must destroy the painting on display. It is a diabolical portrait painted by his father, bringing torment and misery to all who own it; his father has exhorted him to eradicate the painting at all costs. As the man, nearing the conclusion of his tale, turns to gaze upon the painting again he sees that it has been stolen. Here, too, in Shostakovich’s final quartet we are left feeling our chance to face the mysteries revealed has been thwarted. Any hope of resolution is stolen away; all is emptiness.
—Mark Steinberg


JOHANNES BRAHMS Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115
Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg; died on April 3, 1897, in Vienna.

Composed in 1891, Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet in B Minor was first performed on December 12, 1891, in Berlin. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere in the Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on March 10, 1939, with Simeon Bellison, clarinet, and the Perolé Quartet: Joseph Coleman and David Mankovitz, violins; Lillian Fuchs, viola; and Ernst Silberstein, cello.

Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet is one of his final works, written as part of a surprising re-emergence from retirement. In 1890, with the completion of his superb Viola Quintet in G Major, he declared that his creative output was at an end, and that (at age 57) he would spend his remaining days ordering his affairs and his earlier compositions, and relaxing. However, on a visit to Meiningen, he heard an amazing clarinetist, Richard Mühlfeld, and was inspired by this artist to return to composing. It is to Mühlfeld, whom Brahms affectionately named “Fräulein Klarinette,” that we owe the Clarinet Trio, the Clarinet Quintet, the two Clarinet sonatas, and indirectly the other music from this time—the sublime piano music of opp. 116–119 and the Four Serious Songs.

Many have argued that the Clarinet Quintet is Brahms’s most profound chamber work, despite a number of awe-inspiring rival claimants (the Horn Trio, the G Major Sextet, and the C Minor Piano Quartet spring to mind, among others). The work as a whole possesses a unique collection of affects. It is an oversimplification to describe it as melancholy and autumnal, although this is part of the truth; in fact, there is a great depth of sadness in the piece, which may not be felt in every bar but is never far from the surface. At the same time, though, the music is constantly energized by rhapsodic, wild gestures and flickering textures; our tragic hero, if there is one, is driven to wander restlessly, not stay at home. The most obvious example of this energy is the extraordinary “gypsy” section in the middle of the slow movement, where the clarinet rhapsodizes over tremolandos in the strings; but this element is elsewhere as well—quicksilver arpeggios in the third movement, buzzing triplet textures in the first movement—and the agonized climax at the end of the first movement is anything but autumnal.

Another striking feature of the work is its constant sliding between major and minor modes. Even at the opening, it is not immediately clear if we will be in D major or B minor, and in fact the first entrance of the clarinet is a tantalizing, upward D-major arpeggio, a gleam of light in a minor phrase. Later in the movement, before the return of the opening material, a phrase between the clarinet and cello in B major offers a brief Elysian vision before the two instruments spiral hopelessly downwards to the parallel-minor home key, and we are back where we started. The major-minor dialectic of the second movement speaks for itself, the luminous major outer section contrasted with its wild-eyed, Bohemian alter ego in minor. In the uniquely structured third movement we are treated to a major-key idea and then immediately presented with a free variation, in minor on that material. The way in which this minor section dances its way back to its major counterpart, slipping right into the final cadence of the movement without a formal divide or sense of return, underscores Brahms’s conception, in this piece, of how close the major and minor “states” are, how poignantly they symbolize different aspects of the same situation.

Perhaps most amazing of all, in spite of the freedom of gesture and emotion, in spite of the immense textural palette that is brought to bear, there is no mistaking the tightly bound quality of the work, the sense that there is no escaping fate here. The main themes from all four movements can be seen to be closely related in their basic contours—particularly the first and last movements—and the middle movements are each monothematic, as the middle sections of each are variations on the opening materials. The key structure, also, has a rigorous feel—the movements are in B minor, B major, D major (strongly tending towards B minor), and B minor, respectively. Most dramatically, the final movement, a carefully unfolding set of variations, reverts suddenly and shockingly, at the end, to the music of the first movement; and after a recitative-like passage where a crucial question seems to be asked, ends almost exactly as the first movement ends. Thus we have no sense of having arrived at any kind of solution or victory—the usual idea in an evolving four-movement 19th-century form—but quite the opposite, of having been brought fatefully back to earth, where we started, albeit deeper and richer for the experience.
—Misha Amory


Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Brentano String Quartet
·· Mark Steinberg, Violin
·· Serena Canin, Violin
·· Misha Amory, Viola
·· Nina Lee, Cello
Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim. 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 UK 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 US 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, DC; 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 (Finland), the Taos School of Music, and the Caramoor Festival.

In addition to performing 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 Elliott Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Chou Wen-chung, Steven Mackey, Bruce Adolphe, and György Kurtág. The Quartet has commissioned works from Wuorinen, Adolphe, Mackey, David Horne, and Gabriela Frank. The Quartet celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2002 by commissioning 10 composers to write companion pieces for selections from Bach’s The 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 US, Europe, and Japan.

The Quartet has recorded the Op. 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 Department.

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.

Todd Palmer, Clarinet
Originally from Hagerstown, Maryland, clarinetist Todd Palmer has spent his entire adult musical life living in New York City. Beginning his instrument at age 16, he later entered the Mannes College of Music under the tutelage of renowned British clarinetist Gervase de Peyer and graduated with highest honors. Having been involved in an array of creative and diverse artistic presentations throughout his career, he has appeared as concerto soloist, recitalist, chamber music collaborator, educator, arranger, and presenter in a variety of musical endeavors around the world. He has maintained a close and special relationship with composer Osvaldo Golijov since they were first introduced to one another in 1997. Since then, he has championed Golijov’s quintet The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind in numerous performances with the St. Lawrence String Quartet in the US, Canada, and in Europe. As editor-in-chief of the piece for its publication, Mr. Palmer has worked extensively with Golijov on the score as well as on the newly orchestrated version that he will premiere in California in April with conductor Jeffrey Kahane as part of the Magnum Opus commissioning project of the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2001 Mr. Palmer was awarded a $20,000 recording grant from the Foundation for Jewish Culture to make the premiere recording of Golijov’s outstanding chamber music works for EMI Classics. This disc, which included Isaac the Blind, became one of the top-ten bestselling classical CDs of 2003, as well as received two Grammy nominations and the Prelude Award from the Netherlands for best chamber music recording of 2004.

In addition to Osvaldo Golijov, Mr. Palmer has had a long standing association with song and theater composer Ricky Ian Gordon, for whom he commissioned the song cycle / monodrama Orpheus and Euridice in 1997. Original in its concept, this work was initially conceived as a small chamber music piece for clarinet, soprano, and piano. Since then, it has grown and evolved into not only one of the major contributions to the clarinet and chamber music literature of the 20th century, but a one-of-a-kind piece of music, theater, and dance for all performers involved. It had its world premiere in this version at the Rose Theater in October 2005 on the New Visions series of Great Performers at Lincoln Center.

Mr. Palmer has annual chamber music collaborations with a variety of artists, such as the St. Lawrence, Borromeo, and Brentano quartets, and for eight years has been a member of the extremely successful touring group Spoleto Chamber Music USA. He been a participant for 13 years at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston SC as well as many other summer music festivals in the US and Canada, and has also served as principle clarinetist of the Minnesota and Grand Teton festival orchestras. An avid arranger, Palmer has had many of his arrangements performed at various venues around the country, in addition to many annual broadcasts on NPR’s Performance Today—most notable of them being his two chamber nonets of Weber’s Invitation to the Dance and two suites from André Messager’s ballet The Two Pigeons.