Jasper String Quartet

Program Notes

BENJAMIN BRITTEN

Three Divertimenti (1936)

Benjamin Britten’s three numbered string quartets (written in 1941, 1945, and 1975) conceal an astonishing array of earlier entries for these instruments. As a teenager his precocious efforts included a jolly String Quartet in F; the touching Rhapsody for String Quartet; and a spritely, three-movement “Quartettino.” His first major achievement after he entered the Royal College of Music in 1930 was a “Phantasy” Quintet for Strings, which won him a school prize and a BBC broadcast, and around the same time he wrote an accomplished String Quartet in D that he revised for publication at the end of his life. Later in his studies, he worked on a suite that he tentatively called “Alla quartetto serioso,” or “Toward a serious quartet,” playfully alluding to the number of attempts it was taking him to write an official first string quartet. Britten completed three movements of this suite—a March, Waltz, and Burlesque—and gave the collection the subtitle “Go play, boy, play!”, a jocular reference to some friends from boarding school whose characters loosely inspired him. The movements were performed once, right before he graduated in late 1933, and in 1936 he edited them under the heading of Three Divertimenti, which he presented at a concert at Wigmore Hall in London.

One of the great disappointments of Britten’s post-college years was that his parents kept him from studying with Alban Berg in Vienna, probably at the behest of some conservative school administrators. Nonetheless, Berg’s Lyric Suite, a 1926 set of movements for string quartet that is full of harmonics, ghostly whispers, and aggressive, noisy instrumental techniques, had a clear influence on Britten’s writing in his Divertimenti. Britten’s dark-hued March is framed by a pleasingly chaotic array of slides, bursts of energy, and strange sounds, and in the middle of the Burlesque, cascades of special effects lead to a striking, high violin solo accompanied by violent, guitar-like pizzicatos in the viola part. Throughout his career, Britten generally avoided writing atonal compositions. But from Berg’s works he gleaned some of the many ways that a composer can artfully incorporate harsh dissonances and surprising, strident sonorities into music that remains emphatically rooted in familiar tonal expectations.

GABRIELA LENA FRANK

Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout (2001)

Gabriela Lena Frank has provided the following note to accompany Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout:

Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout (2001) mixes elements from the Western classical and Andean folk music traditions, drawing inspiration from the idea of mestizaje as envisioned by the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, wherein cultures coexist without the subjugation of one by the other. Toyos depicts one of the most recognizable instruments of the Andes, the panpipe. The largest kind is the breathy toyo, which requires great stamina and lung power and is typically played in parallel fourths. Tarqueada is a forceful and fast number suggestive of the tarka, a heavy wooden duct flute that is blown harshly in order to split the tone. Tarka ensembles typically play in casually tuned fourths, fifths, and octaves. Himno de Zampoñas takes its cue from a particular type of panpipe ensemble that divides up melodies through a technique known as hocketing. The characteristic sound of the zampoña panpipe is that of a fundamental tone blown flatly so that overtones ring out on top. Chasqui depicts the legendary runner of the same name from Incan times who sprinted great distances to deliver messages across Andean peaks. The chasqui needed to travel light, so I imagine his choice of instruments to be the charango, a high-pitched cousin of the guitar, and the lightweight bamboo quena flute, both of which influence this movement. Canto de Velorio portrays another well-known Andean personality, a professional crying woman known as llorona. Hired to render funeral rituals (known as velorio) even sadder, the llorona is accompanied here by a second llorona and an additional chorus of mourning women (coro de mujeres). The Dies Irae chant is quoted as a reflection of the llorona’s penchant for blending verses from Quechua folklore and Western religious rites. Coqueteos is a flirtatious love song sung by men known as romanceros and is direct in its harmonic expression, bold, and festive. The romanceros sang in harmony with one another against a backdrop of guitars, which I think of as a vendaval de guitarras (storm of guitars).

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK

String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat Major, Op. 51, “Slavonic” (1878-1879)

In 1865, the violinist Jean Becker met three musicians while on a trip to Florence and together they founded the Quartetto Fiorentino. It is notable that they chose to name the quartet after a city. It would have been common practice in that era to brand the ensemble with the moniker of a headlining first violinist like Becker, who was quite a virtuoso and previously worked as orchestral concertmaster in Mannheim. Instead, the group became one of the first to present themselves not as a soloist with three other players attached, but as a cohesive team that could act as a single, performing instrument. They built an international reputation—on a trip to London, Becker was advertised as a member of “one of the finest continental quartet parties”—and they collaborated with many living composers in order to expand the string quartet repertoire. When Antonín Dvořák burst to prominence with the success of his Slavonic Dances in 1878, Becker wished to capitalize on the popularity of the folk-infused style of music Dvořák was developing and so the violinist asked him to write a “Slavonic Quartet.” The composer obliged, and in 1879 he completed and published the Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 51, with a dedication to Becker.

The first melody of the quartet begins with a warm, arpeggiated embrace that builds upwards from the lower strings in steady eighth-notes, but it ends with a playful sixteenth-note figure in the first violin. That little tag runs throughout the opening movement, lending this outwardly lush music an energetic, danceable undercurrent. The piece contains no central scherzo or minuet, nor does it have a traditional slow movement. Instead, the second movement is a Dumka, a form of lament associated with the tradition of Ukrainian epic ballads. The strummed open strings in the cello allude to the sound of the bandura, a Slavic plucked instrument. The Romanze is an exercise in emotive simplicity, which musicologist Otakar Šourek described as “one of the pearls of Dvořák’s intimate lyrics, a movement of bewitching variety of mood, whose expressive and formal transparency reflects all the more clearly the composer’s fertility of invention.” The finale takes as its refrain an infectious skočná, a Czech comedic dance that also appears in the composer’s sets of Slavonic Dances, in which voices chase one another in close canon, racing to a joyous end.

Program Notes by Nicky Swett