Music Chamber

Béla Bartók (1881-1945)                     String Quartet No 1 in A minor Sz 40

Lento ~ Allegretto ~ Allegro vivace

 

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)   String Quartet No 11 in F minor 'Serioso' Op 95

Allegro con brio

Allegretto ma non troppo

Allegro assai vivace ma serioso

Larghetto espressivo; Allegretto agitato; Allegro

 

 

Canadian Warren Zielinski studied at the Royal College of Music winning an Exhibition scholarship, Concerto trials and numerous prizes while studying modern and Baroque violin. He has been working professionally since 1996 and has performed and recorded with the English Chamber Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia, BBC Symphony & Concert Orchestras, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the John Wilson Orchestra. As a Baroque violinist, Warren has performed with ensembles such as the New London Consort, La Serenissima, Gabrielli Consort, Musicians of the Globe, Avison Ensemble and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Warren is also in demand for session work. He has played on 500+ Pop tracks and over 100 of the biggest and well-known Hollywood film scores.

 

Patrick Kiernan studied at the Royal College of Music where he founded the Brindisi Quartet, which appeared at many of the world’s great concert halls and broadcast regularly on BBC radio. The Quartet’s CD recordings achieved international acclaim, winning a Gramophone award. Patrick has studied chamber music with the Prague, Guarneri and LaSalle Quartets and has coached ensembles at the Britten-Pears School, the University of Ulster and the Royal College of Music. He has played frequently with the Nash Ensemble and was a principal player with both the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the London Sinfonietta. He has appeared as guest leader with the City of London Sinfonia. Patrick plays on an early 19th century violin by Ceruti.

 

Martin Loveday was born in Zimbabwe and began his musical studies soon after moving to England in 1964. He was awarded a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music where he won numerous prizes for solo and chamber music performances as well as a scholarship to continue his studies with Pierre Fournier in Geneva. Martin was a founder member of the Hanson String quartet making several recordings – one of which was voted “record of the year” by the Guardian newspaper. He then joined the Hartley Piano Trio and now divides his time between his session work and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. His cello was made in 1724 in Naples.

 

Bruce White graduated from the Royal Academy of Music a major prizewinner both in chamber music and solo studies. Since leaving the academy, Bruce has played or been a member of many ensembles including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, The Michael Nyman Band, ‘Nigel Kennedy does Hendricks’, Ballet Rambert and the London Session orchestra. Bruce is a regular faculty member at the Apple Hill Centre for chamber music in New Hampshire, aiding the continuing efforts of 'Playing for Peace’.

 

In a letter to violinist Stefi Geyer, Bartók described the opening movement of this quartet as his "funeral dirge." The quartet's first four notes -- two descending minor sixths played imitatively by the first and second violins -- are nearly identical to the opening motif of the second, giocoso, movement of the Violin Concerto No. 1 (1908), Bartók's musical portrait of Geyer, with whom he was unrequitedly in love. Bartók dealt with the rejection of his love in a series of autobiographical works, of which this quartet is the culmination. Kodály called this quartet a "return to life," and its three accelerating movements plainly trace a course from the Liebestod-like anguish of the convoluted first movement to the heady, forceful finale. The Lento is marked by a hyper-chromatic Romantic mood characteristic of many works written around the turn of the century. Sadness and despair are the prevailing sentiments in this work, with wistful nostalgia expressed in passing episodes of Impressionistic delicacy that are quickly subsumed by the darker mood. After the first theme is explored, (the counterpoint is reminiscent of Beethoven's late string quartets), a funereal element is introduced with forceful, bell-like fifths on the cello, over which sounds a sobbing second theme, on viola and second violin harmonized in thirds, while the first violin muses detachedly in the upper register. The mood and style are reminiscent of the first violin concerto's opening movement. A hesitant bridge passage accelerates gradually to the next movement, which presents a delicate and witty theme, a stepwise motif that is subjected to a series of explorations in various settings suggestive of variation technique. The mood is ambiguous, despite light-hearted interplay among the instruments; when a distinct mood finally manifests itself toward the end of the movement, it is one of anger, driven by an insistent pulsing ostinato on a single note that begins as an ominous pizzicato on the cello and grows to fist-shaking open fifths arco. The mood is not resolved by movement's end. Another bridge passage leads to the finale, an accelerating Allegro vivace that is the longest of the three movements. In the first movement, there was only a brief suggestion of Hungarian folk music in the cello's soulful melody during the Impressionistic episode; here the character of folk music is more pronounced. Its use here, though not as organic as in later works, nevertheless seems central to the young composer's "return to life" after a period of despair. The main theme, which has a "scolding" quality (and is intervallically related to the descending sixths of the first movement), is developed through a series of episodes, one of which parodies European café music, after which it is treated, fugato-style, in a grotesque, scherzando section. The coda is fast and propulsive, the final, emphatic chords of open fifths barely able to block its momentum.

 

Ludwig van Beethoven's opus 95, his String Quartet No. 11 in F minor, is his last before his exalted late string quartets. It is commonly referred to as the "Serioso," stemming from his title "Quartett[o] Serioso" at the beginning and the tempo designation for the third movement. It is interesting that he chose to invent his own Italian word for this tempo marking. Beethoven is considered to be the first non-Italian composer to use his native language in his expressive markings. It is one of the shortest and most compact of all the Beethoven quartets, and shares a tonality (F) with the first and last quartets Beethoven published (Op. 18, No. 1, and Op. 135). In character and key, as well as in the presence of a final frenetic section in the parallel major, it is related to another composition of Beethoven's middle period — the overture to his incidental music for Goethe's drama Egmont, which he was composing in the same year he was working on this quartet. It premiered in 1814 and did not appear in print until two years later. Beethoven was quoted as saying "The Quartet [op. 95] is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public." Upon listening to the piece, it becomes apparent why he made that assertion. This piece would have been quite out of character in 1810: it is an experiment on compositional techniques the composer would draw on later in his life. (Techniques such as shorter developments, interesting use of silences, metric ambiguity, seemingly unrelated outbursts, and more freedom with tonality in his sonata form.) The historical picture of this time period helps to put the piece in context. Napoleon had invaded Vienna earlier that year, and this upset Beethoven greatly. All of his aristocratic friends had fled Vienna, but Beethoven stayed and dramatically complained about the loud bombings. The quartet includes harmonic experiments that look far forward into the Romantic era -- its third movement, for example, progresses from the home key of F minor through B minor, the most distant key relationship of all. Yet in the stark conciseness of its angry gestures it is anything but Romantic.