Music Chamber

The Evropska Quartet: Rowena Kennally, Adam Hill (violins) Anisa Arslanagić (viola) Max Ruisi (cello)

 

L v Beethoven (1770-1827) String Quartet No 7 in F major, Op 59 “Razumovsky No 1”

Allegro ~ Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando ~ Adagio molto e mesto ~ Thème russe. Allegro 

 

Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) String Quartet No. 1 "Kreutzer Sonata" 

Adagio - Con moto ~ Con moto ~ Con moto ~ Con moto

 

This Beethoven work (published in 1806) is the first of three quartets commissioned by prince Andreas Razumovsky, then the Russian ambassador to Vienna. The first movement is an expansive opener in sonata form, with a fugato in the development. The opening features a cello melody and is tonally ambiguous. Delaying the grandiosity of the recapitulation for several bars after the establishment of the tonic key allows Beethoven to heighten expectation. The second movement has the character but not the form of a scherzo, like the corresponding movement of the Archduke Trio; it is formally one of the most unusual movements of Beethoven's middle period. The final movement is built around a popular Russian theme, likely an attempt to ingratiate the work to its Russian commissioner. On the last leaf of the sketches for the Adagio, Beethoven wrote, "A weeping willow or acacia tree on my brother's grave". Both of his brothers were alive when this work was written so these words are interpreted as having a masonic significance, for the acacia is widely considered the symbolic plant of Freemasonry.

 

Janácek wrote the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ in less than a month in 1923, after reading Tolstoy’s novella of the same name. It is about a man on a train recounting to a fellow passenger how he came to murder his wife who he suspected of having an affair with a violinist he had introduced her to. The catalyst was their performing Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. The music conveys Tolstoy’s vivid story of a failed marriage and jealous murderer through passionate melodic outbursts and intense rhythmic motifs. The melancholy first movement, with its opening rising motif, sets the tone of the work. The fragmentary second movement is a grim scherzo with a polka-like theme, a tremolo passage played ‘at the bridge’, and a motif somewhat related to the Beethoven theme quoted in the next movement. Its distortion and obsessive repetition suggest that we are hearing it through the ears of the jealous husband. In the fourth movement, we hear a reprise of the motif in the low strings and a violin theme marked "like in tears”, before the drama is brought to its terrible end.