CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Takács Quartet

Zankel Hall
Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 7:30 PM

Takács Quartet
·· Edward Dusinberre, Violin
·· Károly Schranz, Violin
·· Geraldine Walther, Viola
·· András Fejér, Cello

SCHUMANN String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 41, No. 1
WOLFGANG RIHM Quartet No. 11 (NY Premiere)

BEETHOVEN String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1, "Razumovsky"

Program is approximately 2 hours, including one intermission

Program Notes:

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810–1856)
String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 41, No. 1


About the Composer
“I am at the height of my powers and must make use of my youth while it lasts,” Schumann confided to his diary in September 1842. Despite its ups and downs—the composer had begun to complain of worrisome bouts of despondency and depression—his 32nd year had truly been a wonderful year in terms of chamber music. A surge of creativity had already produced, in quick succession, the three string quartets of Op. 41. Schumann was deeply immersed in his great Op. 44 Piano Quintet, and before the year was out he finished both the Piano Quartet, Op. 47, and the Op. 88 Phantasiestücke for piano trio.


About the Work
Schumann was a keen student of music history, and the Op. 41 quartets reflect his deep immersion in the chamber music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. In dedicating the set to his contemporary, Felix Mendelssohn, he acknowledged their common debt to the masters of the first Viennese school, as well as his decision to refocus his energies on compositional technique rather than the literary models that had inspired so much of his earlier music.

Schumann was justifiably proud of the quartets, which marked his return to chamber music composition after a hiatus of several years. In September 1842, he made a wedding-anniversary present of the scores to his wife, followed by a private performance. Clara noted in her diary that everything in the three works was “new, along with being clear, well worked out, and always appropriate for a quartet.”


A Closer Listen
The quartet begins with an expansive introduction, the plaintive theme stated by each of the four instruments in turn. A surprise modulation to the key of F major introduces a perky melody in a lilting 6/8 meter, which embarks on a sequence of venturesome harmonic excursions. A countersubject of a markedly different character gives Schumann an opportunity to display his contrapuntal prowess. In the second movement—a fleet Mendelssohnian scherzo in the home key of A minor—stabbing sforzandi echo the middle-of-the-bar accents of the preceding Allegro.

The richly expressive Adagio is almost fantasia-like in its construction, the languorous, typically Schumannesque melody supported by rippling arpeggiated figures. Both harmonically and rhythmically, this is the freest and most overtly “Romantic” of the four movements. A hushed F-major cadence sets the stage for a spitfire finale built on chains of interlocking thirds, laced with reminiscences of thematic material from earlier movements.


Performance Time: approximately 27 minutes


WOLFGANG RIHM (b. 1952)
String Quartet No. 11


About the Composer
Born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1952, Wolfgang Rihm is one of the most prolific and versatile German composers of his generation. Under the banner of the “New Simplicity” movement of the late 1970s and early ‘80s, he pushed back against the highly intellectualized compositional procedures embraced by the European postwar avant-garde, declaring that it is “not what is systematically derived but what arrives unexpectedly [that] gives life to art.”

After making his mark in 1974 at the prestigious Donaueschingen Music Festival, Rihm cemented his reputation with his frequently performed chamber opera Jacob Lenz, depicting the poet’s descent into madness, and the ballet Tutuguri, a kind of late-20th-century Rite of Spring. Although Rihm has a special affinity for drama, his vast catalogue runs the gamut of genres, including a wide array of symphonic works and a dozen string quartets.


About the Work
Rihm began writing his String Quartet No. 11 in 1998 but only finished it in 2007, six years after the completion of his 12th Quartet. The Takács Quartet gave the world premiere performance in January 2009 at the Philharmonie in Essen, which commissioned the work in collaboration with the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Rihm’s style has been described as neo-romantic or postmodern, but neither adjective does justice to the kaleidoscopic range of influences that are absorbed and reflected in his work. An encyclopedic knowledge of music history has guided him toward an eclectic idiom in which past and present coexist in fruitful unity. Rihm is particularly drawn to Schumann as an exemplar of what he calls musical “free prose,” or “music that renews itself in every moment.”


A Closer Listen
A single, uninterrupted stretch of music lasting about half an hour, the 11th Quartet falls into several discrete sections that flow into (and out of) each other in a continual process of osmosis and transformation. The operative principle is flux rather than traditional thematic development; Rihm exhorts us to “think of music in the shape of a river, as the forward movement of sound substance, as emotion in form.” The interplay of the four instruments is by turns intimately conversational and aggressively excitable, almost violent, in its tautly wound rhythms and angular, slashing gestures. Yet there is an oasis of calm at the center of the quartet: an intensely quiet interlude of sustained, slow-moving chords affords a brief glimpse of harmonious peace before pandemonium breaks loose again.


Performance Time: approximately 35 minutes

Premiere: This evening’s performance marks the New York and Carnegie Hall premiere of Rihm’s String Quartet No. 11.



LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)
String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1, “Razumovsky”


About the Composer
Roughly contemporaneous with the Fourth Symphony, Violin Concerto, and Coriolanus Overture, Beethoven’s three “Razumovsky” quartets illustrate the bold, “heroic” style of his so-called middle period. As such, they form a kind of stylistic bridge between the Mozartean classicism of his Op. 18 quartets and the more introspective, convoluted language of his late period. The composer’s most recent biographer, Lewis Lockwood, calls the Op. 59 set a “continental divide” in the history of the string quartet. It exerted a seminal influence on composers like Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms later in the 19th century.


About the Work
The Op. 59 quartets were commissioned by Count Andreas Razumovsky, Russia’s ambassador to the court of Vienna. An enthusiastic amateur violinist, the count was an ardent champion of both Beethoven and Haydn. Beethoven set to work on May 26, 1806, and completed the commission by the end of the year. Reaction to the F-Major Quartet—the most expansive and formally unconventional of the three—ranged from bemusement to outright hostility. The great Russian cellist Bernhard Romberg, upon discovering that he had nothing to play at the beginning of the second movement but repeated B-flats, hurled the score to the floor and trampled it underfoot. Beethoven was not overly perturbed by his contemporary’s failure to appreciate the quartets. “Oh,” he is said to have responded to one of his critics, “they are not for you, but for another age.”


A Closer Listen
The cello takes the lead in the opening Allegro, introducing a surging eight-bar melody, handing it off to the first violin against a backdrop of quietly pulsing eighth notes in the middle voices. Bits and pieces of the theme recur throughout the movement in an endless variety of moods, registers, and instrumental groupings—a wonderful example of Beethoven’s highly compressed thematic development. The second movement is an explosive scherzo whose generative motif (which so infuriated Romberg) is an insistent tapping on a single note, like a telegraph signal. Beethoven adds thematic material by way of contrast and weaves it into a musical fabric that is both intricate and richly dramatic.

The emotional core of the quartet is the magisterial slow movement, marked Andante molto e mesto (mournful). A tragic tone is established at the outset, as the first violin’s plangent C-minor melody is elaborated, fragmented, and recombined in dense patterns of increasing rhythmic complexity. Just as the movement seems to be winding down, the violin cuts loose in a brilliant cadenza that ends in a sustained trill on middle C. All of a sudden, we are in a different world as the finale pivots into the key of F major, its genial “Russian” theme presented once again by the cello.


Performance Time: approximately 40 minutes


Schumann freely acknowledged his debt to Beethoven, writing: “Like a divinity he lived on in a few rare spirits, admonishing them not to miss the propitious moment for tumbling the idols to whom the masses, for so many empty years, had paid homage. He commended to those, if they were to prevail, not the soft, suave diction of poetry, but the free, uninhibited language with which he had often expressed himself.”

Commentators have noted many instances of Beethoven’s influence in Schumann’s music, including an echo of the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony in the corresponding movement of the A Minor Quartet.

Like Beethoven, Schumann took pride in being a loner. “I feel that my path is fairly solitary,” he wrote to an admirer. “No acclaiming crowd inspires me to fresh effort, but I keep my eyes fixed on my great examples, Bach and Beethoven, whose far-off images give unfailing help and encouragement.”

Unlike Schumann, who told his wife that he devoted “several hours daily to the serious study of Bach and Beethoven,” Rihm takes an unabashedly pragmatic and postmodernist attitude toward his predecessors. He once said, “Tradition can only ever be ‘my tradition.’”

More Information:

Three German composers make up this concert: one classic, one restless and romantic, the other modern and highly charged. After the high-voltage expression of Schumann and Rihm, Beethoven’s first mature quartet takes us to an expansive world that ranges from the eternal to the exuberant, but is still not quite predictable.

Takács Quartet
·· Edward Dusinberre, Violin
·· Károly Schranz, Violin
·· Geraldine Walther, Viola
·· András Fejér, Cello
Takács Quartet
Edward Dusinberre, Violin
Károly Schranz, Violin
Geraldine Walther, Viola
András Fejér, Cello

Recognized as one of the world's great ensembles, the Takács Quartet plays with a unique blend of drama, warmth, and humor, combining four distinct musical personalities to bring fresh insights to the string quartet repertoire.

Based in Boulder at the University of Colorado, the Takács Quartet performs 90 concerts a year worldwide. The 2009–2010 season includes cycles of the complete Beethoven quartets in London, where the quartet members are Associate Artists at the South Bank Centre, and in Madrid. The quartet will play a series of two Beethoven concerts in Amsterdam's Concertgebouw and give their first concert in St. Petersburg. The Takács Quartet’s series of three concerts in Zankel Hall feature the Schumann quartets and works that were composed last year for the Takács by Wolfgang Rihm, James Macmillan, and John Psathas. The quartet will perform over 40 concerts in North America and open the season of the San Diego Symphony with performances of Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro, and Handel-Schoenberg’s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra.

The quartet's award-winning recordings include the complete Beethoven cycle on the Decca label. In 2005, the late Beethoven quartets won Disc of the Year from BBC Music Magazine, a Gramophone Award, and a Japanese Record Academy Award. Their recordings of the early and middle Beethoven quartets collected a Grammy, another Gramophone Award, a Chamber Music of America Award, and two additional awards from the Japanese Recording Academy.

In 2006, the Takács Quartet made its first recording for Hyperion Records—Schubert's D804 and D810. A disc that featured Brahms's Piano Quintet with Stephen Hough was released to great acclaim in November 2007 and was subsequently nominated for a Grammy. A recording of Brahms's Op. 51 and Op. 67 quartets was released in the fall of 2008, and a disc that featured the Schumann Piano Quintet with Marc-André Hamelin is scheduled to be released later this year.

The quartet is known for its innovative programming. In 2007, it performed Everyman with Academy Award–winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in Carnegie Hall, inspired by the Philip Roth novel. The group collaborates regularly with the Hungarian folk ensemble Muzsikas, performing a program that explores the folk sources of Bartok's music. The Takács performed a music and poetry program on a fourteen city US tour with the poet Robert Pinsky.

At the University of Colorado, the Takács Quartet has helped to develop a string program with a special emphasis on chamber music, where students work in a nurturing environment designed to help them develop their artistry. The Quartet's commitment to teaching is enhanced by summer residencies at the Aspen Festival and at the Music Academy of the West, Santa Barbara. The Takács is a Visiting Quartet at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London.

The Takács Quartet was formed in 1975 at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest by Gabor Takács-Nagy, Károly Schranz, Gabor Ormai and András Fejér, while all four were students. It first received international attention in 1977, winning First Prize and the Critics’ Prize at the International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France. The Quartet also won the Gold Medal at the 1978 Portsmouth and Bordeaux Competitions and First Prizes at the Budapest International String Quartet Competition in 1978 and the Bratislava Competition in 1981. The Quartet made its North American debut tour in 1982. Violinist Edward Dusinberre joined the Quartet in 1993 and violist Roger Tapping in 1995. Violist Geraldine Walther replaced Mr. Tapping in 2005. Of the original ensemble, Károly Schranz and András Fejér remain. In 2001 the Takács Quartet was awarded the Order of Merit of the Knight’s Cross of the Republic of Hungary.