Mozart, Shaw, & Stravinsky

Mozart, SHAW, & Stravinsky

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, K. 478                                             
Robin Scott, violin • Melissa Reardon, viola • Ahrim Kim, cello • Julian Martin, piano

CAROLINE SHAW
Boris Kerner
Keiko Ying, cello • Luke Rinderknecht, percussion

IGOR STRAVINSKY
The Rite of Spring                                                  
Soyeon Kate Lee, Ran Dank, piano

Program Notes

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, K. 478 (1785)

It was long thought that Mozart’s two piano quartets — the first of which was performed earlier this week — were part of a commission for three such quartets by Franz Anton Hoffmeister, one of Vienna’s most successful publishers. Mozart, it was said, sent Hoffmeister the first quartet, K. 478, only for the publisher to complain that it was far too difficult for the general public to perform. Unwilling to dumb himself down, Mozart kept his advance, sent the second quartet to another publisher, and never composed the third.

While Mozart’s refusal to capitulate to marketplace considerations might appear noble, there is one snag: the story appears to be untrue. While the tall tale circulated widely for nearly two centuries, it was definitively snuffed out in 2010 by Rupert Ridgewell, whose 70-page journal article — complete with examinations of printers’ plate numbers, penmanship, and glyphs — reads more like a forensic case file than music history. The story appears to have been little more than a game of telephone based on a dim recollection, perhaps calculated to bolster Mozart’s reputation for artistic integrity. In reality, the available evidence suggests that Mozart’s K. 478 quartet was received rather warmly by publisher and public alike. To be sure, the quartet was not to be performed by casual amateurs: it is something like a cross between a piano concerto and a string quartet, with moments of teamwork interspersed with soloistic virtuosity.

Mozart’s unfailing wit shines through in a detail of the first movement that I particularly enjoy — seldom noticed even by seasoned performers of this work. After the presentation of the first theme, with its distinct rhythmic profile, and an extensive transition in which the first theme’s rhythm is passed around the players, we arrive at the second theme, in the relative major key, introduced first by the piano alone and then joined by the strings. Listen for the unusual accent on the fifth note of this theme, marked, counterintuitively, on the fourth beat of the measure. This idiosyncratic stress is not arbitrary: it encodes that distinct rhythm of the first theme into the second half of the second theme, displaced by a beat.

CAROLINE SHAW

Boris Kerner (2012)

Caroline Shaw has provided the following note to accompany Boris Kerner:

Boris S. Kerner lives in Stuttgart and is the author of Introduction to Modern Traffic Flow Theory and Control: The Long Road to Three-Phase Traffic Theory. We’ve never met, and we probably never will. But the serendipity of the internet, through some late night research and musing on the idea of friction and flow in baroque bass lines, led me to his name and his work. Boris begins with a fairly typical 17th-century continuo style line in the cello that leans and tilts, sensitive to gravity and the magnetism of certain tendency tones, before getting stuck in a repeated pattern. The flower pots enter the scene as an otherworldly counterpoint to this oddly familiar character, introducing a slightly cooler temperature to the baroque warmth, and sometimes interrupting and sometimes facilitating the cello’s traditional flow of melodic traffic. 

IGOR STRAVINSKY

The Rite of Spring (1913)

In June 1912, nearly a full year before the storied premiere of The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, a more intimate unveiling of Stravinsky’s piece took place in Bellevue, a village halfway between Paris and Versailles. The setting was the salon of Louis Laloy — musicologist, critic, and close friend of Debussy’s. Laloy later recounted the episode:

“On a bright afternoon, I was strolling in my garden with Debussy. We were expecting Stravinsky. As soon as he saw us, the Russian musician, with arms outstretched, ran to greet the French master… He had brought the reduction for piano four-hands of his new work, Le Sacre. Debussy agreed to play the bass part on my Pleyel piano. Stravinsky asked for permission to remove his collar. With his gaze fixed through his glasses, his nose pointing toward the keys, occasionally humming a part which had been left out, he led his companion’s agile hands into a flood of sound, the latter following without a hitch and seeming to enjoy the challenge. When they finished, there was no question of congratulatory hugs or compliments… We were silent, floored as if by a hurricane risen from the depths of the ages to tear up our lives.”

Debussy and Stravinsky each carried their own lasting echoes of the encounter. Debussy wrote to Stravinsky half a year later, “I still have in my memory the execution of your RitechezLaloy. It haunts me, like a beautiful nightmare, and I am trying in vain to replicate that terrifying impression.” Stravinsky, meanwhile, was most dazzled by the extraordinary pianistic skill Debussy showed in tackling the work at first sight.

The reduction of the gargantuan score for piano four-hands was initially a matter of practicality rather than preference. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most substantial orchestral music was published in four-hand reduction as a matter of course, to allow for broader dissemination and familiarisation in an era before mass recording. In the case of ballet music like the Rite, reductions would also have been used to prepare dancers to align choreography with music. The tradition of performing the four-hands version began in the 1960s, when the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who had been mentored by Stravinsky in Los Angeles, asked the composer’s permission to record the reduction with Ralph Grierson in what has become a landmark disc. Indeed, the feat of compressing the orchestral textures and polyphony onto a piano creates a spectacle in its own right, demanding physicality from the performers who must overlap limbs, interlock rhythms, and differentiate superposed voices and timbres.

Program Notes by Peter Asimov