Music Chamber

Callino Quartet: Sarah Sexton Héloïse Geoghegan violins Sarah McMahon cello Rebecca Jones viola

 

(Franz) Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) String Quartet in F minor Op 20 No 5

 

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) String Quartet, L. 85 (Op. 10)

Animé et très decidé

Assez vif et bien rythmé

Andantino, doucement espressif

Très modéré - Très mouvemente

 

The Callino Quartet formed at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in 1999. They have performed and collaborated with many interesting and diverse musicians including the Vogler and Belcea string quartets, the Bell Orchestre and jazz guitarist John Abercrombie. They have also worked with composers including Edgar Meyer, Peteris Vasks, and Kimmo Hakola. The quartet’s first CD of works by Ian Wilson on the Riverrun label was followed by a Louth Contemporary Music Society recording of music by Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. They have recently recorded Ben Dwyer’s guitar quintet with the composer, which will be released later this year. The quartet celebrated their tenth anniversary year in 2009 with numerous international performances including Prague and The Bordeaux festival. Since 2006 they have held their own chamber music festival at Easter in Bantry House, County Cork. In July 2009 they returned to the West Cork Chamber Music Festival where they were a resident quartet. Their name comes from the air ” Cailin cois tSuir a me” which means Girl by the River Suir. This song was the first Irish air to be notated in the late 16th century and became known as the Callino manuscript.

 

The six string quartets opus 20 by Joseph Haydn are among the works that earned Haydn the sobriquet "the father of the string quartet." The quartets are considered a milestone in the history of composition; in them, Haydn develops compositional techniques that were to define the medium for the next 200 years. The quartets, written in 1772, were composed at a time of tensions in Haydn's life, and also at a time when Haydn was influenced by new philosophical and political ideas that were sweeping Europe.This is the most emotionally intense of the opus 20 quartets. In the opening phrase, the violin sets the tone with a haunting melody. "Haydn, we might imagine, set out to test the limits of what the minor mode could express in this newly serious instrumental combination," writes Roger Parker. The finale is a fugue with two subjects. The main subject is a standard fugal motif, used frequently in the Baroque (it appears, among other places, in Handel's Messiah). While constructing a fugue in the strict, learned style, Haydn imbues the movement with an intense dramatic structure.

 

Debussy began work on the composition of his only string quartet in 1892 by August the following year he wrote to a colleague "I think I can finally show you the last movement of the quartet, which has made me really miserable!" It is a work preoccupied with timbre and sonority – offering a compendium of string-playing techniques and now considered a seminal impressionist work (along with Ravel’s quartet). Its fascinating and readily palpable thematic concentration seems all the more remarkable when one realizes that the very first theme of the opening movement  comes to furnish almost all of the diverse thematic components for the entire work. Another ingenious feature is that the quartet is less dominated by melodic or harmonic considerations than by a rhythmic flexibility which carries the potential for seemingly endless variety. In this respect, Debussy's quartet seems to strongly prefigure those by Bartók. Yet it remains unmistakably a work dominated by the sensuality and longueurs of French late nineteenth century Romanticism, a strong feature of the slow third movement. The work is also strongly predictive of the disjunctive and highly polarized new musical language that would assert itself in the two decades following its completion. The 3rd movement (a Scherzo) for example, makes use of the disruptive sonic confrontations that can occur when rapidly alternating pizzicato and bowed passages produce what one commentator has described as "a confusion that forces the listener to concentrate on the textures, rather than the linear form of the music." These apparently disparate elements are then welded together in a finale of striking economy of means, and only at the close does it become really clear that the opening gestures of the work have actually altered themselves and coalesced to produce an organic unity of some 25 minutes' duration.  The work was to be dedicated to Ernest Chausson, whose personal reservations eventually diverted the composer's original intentions. Debussy sold his score for a mere 250 francs to the publishers Durand & Cie, who, as he later recalled, "were cynical enough about it to freely admit that what they were paying me didn't cover all the labor this 'work' has entailed." Not surprisingly, the quartet was widely misunderstood at its premiere, given by the Ysayë Quartet on December 29, 1893. At the time, the composer Guy Ropartz was the lone voice in a wilderness of critical lack of interest; he described the quartet as a work "dominated by the influence of young Russia (interestingly, Debussy's patroness in the early 1880s had been Nadezhda von Meck, better known for her support of Tchaikovsky); there are poetic themes, rare sonorities, the first two movements being particularly remarkable.