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54th Dubrovnik Summer Festival
2003
Croatia
BORODIN STRING QUARTET
Ruben Aharonian
violin
Andrei Abramenkov
violin
Igor Naidin
viola
Valentin Berlinsky
cello
Rector's Palace Atrium
14 August
9.30 p.m.
Aleksandar Porfirjevič Borodin:
2. gudački kvartet u D-duru
String Quartet No. 2 in D major
Allegro moderato
Scherzo (Allegro)
Notturno (Andante)
Finale (Andante – Vivace)
Dmitrij Dmitrijevič Šostakovič:
8. gudački kvartet u c-molu, op. 110
String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110
Largo
Allegro molto
Allegretto
Largo
Largo
*****
Petar Iljič Čajkovski:
2. gudački kvartet u F-duru, op. 22
String Quartet No. 2 in F major, Op. 22
Adagio – Moderato assai
Scherzo (Allegro giusto)
Andante ma non tanto
Finale (Allegro con moto)
One of the most prestigious string quartets today, the Borodin String Quartet was
formed in 1945 by the students of the Moscow Conservatoire under the name the
Moscow Philharmonic Quartet. In 1955 the Quartet got its present name. Particular
Quartet’s interest in Russian music resulted from the collaboration with Dmitry
Dmitryevich Shostakovich who himself supervised the Quartet’s work on his String
Quartets. The cycle of these Shostakovich’s pieces performed by the Borodin String
Quartet is nowadays considered a model and definitive interpretation and they have so
far performed it in Vienna, Zürich, Madrid, Lisbon, London, Paris, Seville and New
York. In 2000 the Quartet celebrated two major anniversaries: the 75th birthday of its
cellist Valentin Berlinsky and the 55th anniversary of the Quartet. That same year the
Quartet started to perform with a great success the project Beethoven & Shostakovich:
Parallels and Diversities at the major concert halls. 2001 saw a cooperation of the
Quartet with Christoph Eschenbach and the NDR Symphony Orchestra in a series of
splendidly prepared concerts, which juxtaposed the symphonic and chamber works of
Beethoven and Shostakovich. This year the Quartet appears in Europe, the USA and
the Far East at the concert stages of London, Amsterdam, Zurich, Vienna, Salzburg
and Madrid performing the pieces by Schubert, Borodin, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky.
The Quartet will also perform Martinů’s Concerto for string quartet and orchestra
with the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra in Monte Carlo. In addition to great
critical acclaim for the recordings of Schubert’s String Quartets, Haydn’s Seven Last
Words and the works of the Russian Miniaturists, the Quartet received the
Gramophone Award for its CD with the music of Tchaikovsky.
Commenting the masterpiece from his not so huge but precious opus, the folk
historical opera Prince Igor, the Russian composer and chemist Alexander
Porfiryevich Borodin (1833-1887) emphasized: “My understanding of the opera has
always been different from those of my colleagues. The mere recitative style
disagrees both with my will and my nature. I strive to achieve cantability, cantilena
and not the recitative... Besides, I am attracted to the forms that are more closed,
rounded and wide. I have a different way of approaching the opera. I believe that in
opera, like in decoration, there is no place for small forms, details and trifles;
everything should be great in proportions, clear and, if possible, practical for
performance, both for the voices and the orchestra. The voices should be in the
foreground and the orchestra in the background.” The Prokofiev’s entire artistic credo
seems to be comprised in these few words. In his symphonies, but also in the string
quartets, he just continues to move in the indicated direction. More and more
opposing the influences of the European cosmopolitan academism, Borodin is
intensively infatuated with the Slavic feeling of musical colour and width. Unlike
Musorgsky, Borodin does not conjure up the tense dramatic conflicts, but the
sonorous situations that come as a consequence of the decisive events in the past. The
result is a strict but masterful invention of the symphonic cluster, often deeper and
far-reaching than that with the majority of his contemporaries. Borodin’s themes are
composed out of the rare interval shifts, encouraged by a flexible and spontaneously
irregular rhythmic pulse, full of sudden turning points. The discipline of the outer
form structure never diminishes the power of the internal organization and
authenticity of expression.
Borodin worked on his String Quartet No. 2 in D major from 1881 to 1885. He
filled it with the liveliness of the Russian folk music but also applied the models of
the European cultural heritage. The melodic, originating from the colourful folk
idiom, is thus impregnated with baroque elements, which is felt already in the
appearance of the first theme of the first movement introduced by the cello. The
Beethoven influence is unavoidable here, which is most notable in the motive. (This is
not happening for the first time: in the subtitle of his String Quartet No. 1 in A major
Borodin clearly states tat the piece was inspired by a theme by the immortal genius
from Bonn.) Instead of a clearly outlined thematic, the Scherzo is developed from
apparently rash and quick but skilfully balanced quivering of the quaver. The slow
movement is (according to its title) a slow night music. Its melodic is filled with
sentimentality and the metric and rhythmic originality of Russian romances. The final
movement is built on the duality of the same thematic structure. The first theme is a
recitative in a very slow tempo, and the second one moves joyfully in a tense rhythm.
Such variety first composes greater units and later becomes denser; it gradually starts
to limit itself on certain bars, and creates the more and more exciting contrasts by the
interchange of their loud and quiet variants, in order to reach the almost orchestral,
monumental climax.
In his music language, the classic of the 20th Century symphony Dmitry
Dmitryevich Shostakovich (1906-1975) united the directness of the audio dramatics,
the persuasiveness of the rhythmic and the contrasting quality of the effect with the
individuality of realistic transparency and the sensitive lyrics of neo-expressionism.
The Shostakovich’s theme is connected with the skilful motive game, which never
seems imposed in art-for-art’s-sake terms. His music has three main features: concise
thematic contents, inner tension of the form, and the richness of the counterpoint
treatment. Everything is dialectically mobile: the occasional con sordini mood
interchanges with the dramatic perturbations and scherzo gradations, during which the
exquisiteness of the atmosphere is achieved by a spiritual symbiosis of humorous
motor rhythm and a gentle, sometimes sentimental, sometimes almost mocking,
cantilena. The unity of the idea’s tension and experience of the form are ensured by
firmly set orchestration manner, occasionally leaning on the classicist-romantic
tradition of the symphony of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Every Shostakovich’s
symphony, concert, sonata or chamber piece is characterized by a different but
consistent cyclic unity of the musical tissue.
Shostakovich visited Dresden in the summer of 1960 and was deeply moved by the
traces of the destruction in World War II. In July that same year he composed his
String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Opus 110 within three days. On the original
scores there is a hand written a dedication “To the victims of the war and fascism”.
(The experts claim this not to be Shostakovich’s handwriting, but the dedication was
preserved and published in all later editions). The piece has Shostakovich’s favourite
form: one-movement in five parts. Composed almost as a mosaic, in one breath, like a
grand vault the String Quartet No. 8 rises from the mysterious calm of the
introductory Largo to the vehement rush of Allegro and the fantastic dance apotheosis
of Allegretto in order to slowly return to the quietness and final resignation of the two
closing Largos. The fact that Shostakovich does not only quote the themes form his
previous pieces but also employs the motifs resulting from his own (according to
German orthography) initials DSCH (he does a similar thing in the Symphony No. 10)
proves his intention to express his sympathy for the priceless human victims, i.e. to
implant his human message in the tonal images. Already in the introductory
movement he quotes his own initials and connects them with the themes of his
Symphonies Nos. 1 and 5. The further quotes include the Piano Trio (with particularly
accentuated famous Jewish theme), the Cello Concerto No. 1 and - like in the fourth
part – the cello solo that is also found in opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk
District. The fragments of the melody Dies irae and the Russian revolutionary songs
occasionally appear. The composer’s initials repeatedly and symbolically interweave
in all instruments during the final, already dying polyphonic cluster.
The output of the famous Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
is a significant component in restoring the Russian music in the time of romanticism.
Although his convictions were different from those of the famous “mighty handful”,
i.e. Balakirev, Cui, Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin, Tchaikovsky
completes them in a certain way. Namely while they find inspiration in the stylised
elements of the folk melos, Tchaikovsky supports the universal artistic ideas; however
his music idiom is at the same time imbued with the elements of folk sonority in a
certain deeper sense, in the same way as the far-seeing musical message of The Five
includes many essentialities of purely tonal substance. Thus, like contradiction, the
extremities blend, ensuring the persistence of the artistic image of an epoch. As an
artist who time-wise belongs to the 19th Century, Tchaikovsky is nevertheless already
obsessed with the theme of human alienation and a horrid disability of people to
communicate among themselves; this permanent theme of his artistic diary is a
significant anticipation of ideological preoccupations of our time. The fate of such
cognition gives a particular strength to the master’s expression, Pyotr Ilyich
Tchaikovsky is therefore one of the first European, and certainly the first Slavic
composer, whose symphonic idiom can be compared with Beethoven’s.
Tchaikovsky composed his String Quartet No. 2 in F major, Opus 22, aged 34, in one
of his most prolific composing phases, in 1874, in the time when he also worked on
his Symphony No. 4 and opera Eugene Onegin. The author himself considered the
piece, filled with almost orchestral torrent of ideas but also very carefully planned, his
most successful chamber work. Reflecting Tchaikovsky’s difficult character, the piece
has the moments of exaltations interchanging with the darkest desperate pessimism.
Like in the String Quartet No.1, the piece resounds with numerous elements of the
Russian folklore; yet while the String Quartet No.1 (and his anthological Andante
cantabile) contains the precise quotations, here we see no quotations at all;
Tchaikovsky only deals with similar intervals and rhythms. Like in Beethoven’s the
Rasoumovsky String Quartets, Tchaikovsky here achieved an inspired synthesis of the
two apparently incompatible elements, the folk element and the sophisticated
European counterpoint inheritance. The first movement is opened by a careful
introductory Adagio that pretends not to be in any thematic relation to the further
development of the movement. The parts are camouflaged in the semi-tonal
movement, but cannot completely hide the affinity for larger interval leaps, the fourth,
the fifth and the octave. The main part of the first movement Moderato introduces a
series of motifs that are sometimes joined into a complete but restless melody, and
sometimes divided into fragmentary lines; when this happens, they tend to repeat in
the excited sequences. The colour of the second theme is brighter and announced by a
variant (expressed in a Russian way) of the eternal musical dilemma: tonic or
dominant? In the development all four instruments are in the full swing, which
culminates in a rhythmically transformed appearance of the second theme composed
in the form of a canon in the seventh between the violin and the cello. In the coda the
chromatics is replaced by the cheerful diatonic that enables a bright and quiet ending.
After a stormy and tense first movement, Tchaikovsky needed something more
luminous and delicate so he replaced the slow movement by a refined Scherzo
supported by a brisk, typically Russian metric combination 6/8 + 9/8 measure. The
central part of the movement is a charming Mazurka in which the main theme is
entrusted to the first violin and then to the second violin on the G-string, which is
followed by an interesting discussion on the theme’s theme. A short introduction
precedes the main part of the slow third movement (Andante ma non tanto), and its
central episode is somewhat quicker in order to enliven the quiet tonal cluster. The
piece’s finale (which is typical of Tchaikovsky) is composed in the full swing of a
perfect joy. It is placed in a rondo form with two main themes. The rhythm of the first
theme is hectic and the second one is more singable, yet supported by the rhythm of
the first one. The third adventurous section also appears, and, after repetition of the
two main themes, the development unexpectedly takes the form of an expanded
fugue. The Quartet’s finale (Allegro con moto) brings a magnificent apotheosis of the
main melody, which concludes the piece with a vivacious ending.
D. Detoni