Ying Quartet

Ying Quartet

Ying Quartet
Robin Scott, Janet Ying, violin • Phillip Ying, viola • David Ying, cello

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809)
String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 20, No. 3, Hob. III:33

BILLY CHILDS (b. 1957)
String Quartet No. 2, “Awakening”

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)
String Quartet No. 8 in E Minor, Op. 59, No. 2

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Program Notes

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809)

String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 20, No. 3, Hob. III:33 

In November of 1772, the music historian Charles Burney attended a dinner and soiree at the Vienna home of the British diplomat David Murray, the Seventh Viscount of Stormont. Burney was particularly impressed with a performance of new quartets by Joseph Haydn, in which the violinist Joseph Startzler “played the Adagios with uncommon feeling and expression.” In his travelogue, Burney describes how “all who had any share in this concert … were animated to that true pitch of enthusiasm, which, from the ardor of the fire within them, is communicated to others and sets all around in a blaze.”

Haydn’s quartets were written for intimate occasions like this, in which social contagion causes an active, engaged listening orientation to spread through a crowd. Naturally, not all such “quartet parties” were this successful, but the potential of having a devoted, attentive audience for chamber music contributed to the experimental approach that Haydn took in his quartets. He composed his groundbreaking Op. 20 Quartets in 1772, and though they were only published two years later, it is likely that they circulated right away in manuscript form and could well have been heard on the program that Burney so cherished.

The Poco adagio from the Quartet in G Minor, Op. 20, No. 3 certainly contains “uncommon feeling and expression” of the sort he noted. In it, the cello has an emotion-laden line of sixteenth notes that forms a determined contrast to the pristine chorale sung by the other voices. This figure is repeated in the first violin and varied over the course of the movement to astonishing effect, until eventually it acts as an accompaniment for a new theme heard in the cello. In the other movements, Haydn plays with phrase lengths, using lopsided groups of seven measures in the first subject of the opening Allegro con spirito and units of five in the Menuetto. In the finale, the primary theme fits into a square, four-measure frame, but the instruments enter and exit at separate times as if they are trying to conceal a rendezvous, giving the music a thrilling and off-kilter quality.

BILLY CHILDS (b. 1957)

String Quartet No. 2, “Awakening”                                                                  

Music is a stalwart conveyor of grief. Many of history’s greatest pieces are requiem masses, tragic symphonies, elegiac piano trios, and prayers of gratitude for recovering from an illness. Usually, such works take the listener through a retrospective process after a loss has occurred, touching on various stages of sadness, anger, nostalgia, and perhaps redemption or hope. It’s rarer to find music that tangles with the viscera of illness and death as they are happening. For example, Richard Strauss, in his 1889 tone poem Death and Transfiguration, creates musical analogs for the irregular heartbeat, labored breathing, and writhing pain of a dying man, though in the second half of the work he pivots to reverie and transcendence.

Billy Childs’ String Quartet No. 2, “Awakening,” is another work that does not spare the details of an encounter with mortality. He composed it for the Ying Quartet in 2012, soon after his wife suffered a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. Childs bases the first movement, “Wake Up Call,” on a set of angular melodic bursts that are first found in the context of a 12-tone row shouted out by the first violin. He aims to drop the listener into the moment when he received the phone call from the hospital about his wife’s embolism and express the shock, fear, and frantic cognitive reorganizing that this kind of news prompts. At various points in the second movement, a depiction of a hospital room, one musician holds down a mournful tune while the others play cyclic, machine-like harmonics — the sterile beeping of the monitors that help keep the patient alive. In the final movement, a “Song of Healing,” the murmuring, syncopated refrain recalls Strauss’ seminal depiction of the uneven breaths of a convalescent. Here, these figures underwrite a dialogue between Childs and his wife as she begins to recover and they discuss how to reconfigure their lives in response to these events.

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LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)

String Quartet No. 8 in E Minor, Op. 59, No. 2                                     

Ludwig van Beethoven had a generally positive relationship with Count Andrey Razumovsky, a Russian diplomat who sponsored many musicians of the era and had a string quartet in residence at his palace in Vienna. In 1808, Beethoven’s housemate Ignaz von Seyfried commented that the composer was “as much at home in the Razumovsky establishment as a hen in her coop. Everything he wrote was taken warm from the nest and tried out in the frying pan.” Beethoven dedicated many works to Count, but only his 1806 String Quartets, Op. 59, have acquired the subtitle “Razumovsky.”

In all of the “Razumovsky” Quartets, the composer included a thème russe — a quotation from a Russian tune. In the Quartet in E Minor, Op. 59, No. 2, this theme occurs in the alternating trio section of the Allegretto, when Beethoven turns a Russian hymn of praise into an oddly bubbly and scrappy fugue that only becomes appropriately solemn at the end of the passage. Some scholars have interpreted this choice as a biting jab at Razumovsky himself, but Beethoven engages in similar bouts of contrapuntally chipping away at a musical idea until it yields something prettier in many other works, so it isn’t necessarily an indication of a sarcastic disposition.

The quartet’s first movement is quite operatic. Declamatory chords and rhetorical pauses are built into the structures of the themes and several climactic passages have the frothy energy of finales by the likes of Gioacchino Rossini. In the magnificent Molto Adagio, Beethoven writes a series of sustained chorales but almost always has one voice play gasping staccatos, as if a member of the choir is quietly stuttering with some private grief. In most of Beethoven’s large-scale works in minor keys, including all of his other minor-key string quartets, he makes a cathartic move to the parallel major key at the last minute. This quartet is a notable exception. He sets the refrain of the finale in C Major, a surprising choice for a piece that is ostensibly in E Minor, and then at the eleventh hour he writes an aggressive coda that concludes on an emphatic, unapologetic E Minor chord.

Program Notes by Nicky Swett