← News & Features
19 Nov 24 | Events
Stories Behind the Music: Castalian String Quartet – 26 November
As anticipation builds, we invite you to explore the upcoming programme for Castalian String Quartet’s concert on Tuesday 26 November at the Holywell Music Room. Featuring three captivating pieces, each with its own unique character and story, the evening will be a journey through pieces both familiar and new. For those wanting to go deeper, we’ve prepared a sneak peek into the programme notes, offering insights into the stories and history behind the music you’ll experience:
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875 – 1912) 5 Fantasiestücke for String Quartet, Op. 5
Edward Elgar always had an ear for talent. When the 1898 Three Choirs Festival committee asked him for an orchestral work, he declined, but made a recommendation: ‘I wish, wish, wish you would ask Coleridge- Taylor to do it. He still wants recognition and he is far and away the cleverest fellow going among the young men’. Elgar had a point. Coleridge-Taylor had been born in Holborn, the son of a farrier’s daughter and a medical student from Sierra Leone, who’d returned to Africa, unaware, before his son was born. If the mixed-race, illegitimate Samuel experienced prejudice on the streets of Victorian London, his early talent as a musician won him welcome and acclaim at the RCM. ‘Indisputable!’ scribbled his teacher, Charles Villiers Stanford under the column headed ‘Progress’ on his 1895 end-of- year report. As well he might. On the 13th March that year a mixed-sex student quartet had premiered Coleridge-Taylor’s Fantasiestücke in a concert at the college and it had been reviewed in the national press – then as now, a striking accolade for a nineteen-year old composer. The anonymous critic, writing for The Era, was disappointed by the German title (it seems to have been borrowed from Schumann) but he was delighted with the music, in which the great chamber music patron W.W. Cobbett heard the influence of Dvořák. That’s certainly the case with the bittersweet opening Prelude, though the flowing Serenade has a warmth that is all Coleridge-Taylor’s own. The Humoresque is a brilliant scherzo, while the Minuet was a particular hit at the first performance – The Era noted that there was ‘quite enthusiastic applause at the close’. And by way of finale, there’s a restless headlong Dance over a growling rustic drone. ‘The audience at the end recognised the talent of Mr Coleridge Taylor by summoning him twice to the platform’, recorded The Era – before adding that ‘it is one of the best efforts we have heard from a student for years’. Coleridge-Taylor dedicated the score to Stanford when it was published, the following year.
Credit: Richard Bratby
Francesco Antonioni (b.1971) Surfarara, String Quartet No. 2
Folk influences have long permeated classical music, inspiring the likes of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák, Liszt, Sibelius, and most notably Béla Bartók. However, whereas Transylvanian villages were Bartók’s gold mine, a sulphur mine in Sicily served as the central inspiration for my second string quartet. In 1881, near Caltanissetta, a grisou explosion claimed the lives of 65 people, including 19 ‘carusi’, boys aged 6 to 14. Two years later, in a gallery nearby, 36 workers died of suffocation. It was in this fraught context that, in 1953, ethnomusicologists Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella recorded an intense and heartbreaking song, Surfarara, from a singer in a small Sicilian village, where another 23 miners were soon to die. ‘I forget; I forgot; I’ve forgotten; I’ve forgotten my very own life,’ says the singer in a raw, piercing voice, without any hint of whining. It is a song of despair and solitude. The miner has lost everything dear: family, friends, even the saints, and the recollection of his lover, the sole memory left, adds to his grief. And yet he stands still and sings out loud, along with a Jew’s harp. The ‘Surfarara’ string quartet was commissioned by the Wigmore Hall as one of their ‘lockdown commissions’ and was premiered by the Castalian String Quartet last June. That song of unfading sorrow and relentless courage resounded deeply throughout the pandemic and served as a backdrop for a dialogue with the vibrant, raucous voice of the singer–the bearer of the message. The song weaves itself into the fabric of the quartet, emerging fleetingly in the first movement and more extensively in the last one, and appears in sudden epiphanies, amidst a tapestry of heterogeneous materials. But it is the reverberation of that ancient song of sorrow and the voice that articulated it that give meaning and purpose to the abiding disquiet weaving throughout the piece. From the first notes, which reflect the way out of the cavern with open strings and transparent harmonics, to the backward descent down the shaft through micro-intervals, combination tones, white noise, and sul ponticello sounds, every aspect of the composition reflects the organic, vital pulse of the popular music that inspired it. Through a kaleidoscope of musical gestures—from slow glissandos to repeated aggressive gestures—the quartet tries to bring back to life the unwavering song of sorrow with its timeless echoes of human resilience.
Credit: Francesco Antonioni (abridged)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827) String Quartet No. 12 in E flat, Op. 127
‘Dear Beethoven! You go to realise a long- desired wish…By diligent study, receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.’ That was the plan, anyway. Late in 1792, Ferdinand, Count von Waldstein sent this message to his 22-year old protégé Beethoven as he set out from provincial Bonn for Vienna – where Waldstein had arranged for him to study with Haydn. It didn’t quite work out. Haydn’s mind was elsewhere and Beethoven was a recalcitrant pupil. And so the legend was born of Beethoven the rebel and outsider: a vital component of the myth of the Beethoven string quartets as works that stand outside of tradition and convention. As ever, the reality is both more interesting, and more extraordinary. Beethoven was just 54 years old when he completed this “late” quartet, composed between March 1824 and January 1825 to a commission from the Russian Prince Nikolai Galitzin. And every bar illustrates just how comprehensively Haydn’s transformation of the quartet into an instrument of absolute expression – in which tone-colour and instrumental texture play as vital an expressive role as melody, harmony or counterpoint – had become part of Beethoven’s musical language. The very opening makes that point – the way the first violin, with a bird-like trill, breaks clear of the dense, double-stopped Maestoso introduction, as the whole texture opens out into the free-flowing Allegro. The formal process is less important than the sense of emotional release. ‘All things flow clear and pure from the Maestoso’ remarks the musicologist Birgit Lodes. You don’t have to read too much into the Maestoso’s frequent returns to feel that something of the utmost emotional significance is being communicated in this quartet, conceived while Beethoven worked on the Missa Solemnis. Or, for that matter, to feel that the pianissimo low note with which the cello begins the second movement is more than just a bass note – or that the third variation’s sudden, transfiguring move into E major is more than a mere key change. A miniature pizzicato introduction offsets the rigours of the Scherzo that follows, and the last-minute transformation of the bustling, rough-cut Finale into a lilting half-whispered coda shows just how profoundly Beethoven had assimilated the lessons of Haydn – the supreme master of musical fun and games. The first performance was led by the violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh on 6th March 1825, and it left its audience confused. ‘Few were moved, it was a weak succès d’estime’ reported the violinist Joseph Böhm, who, at Beethoven’s request went on to play the quartet twice in a single concert on two separate occasions: 23rd March and 7th April 1825. And as ears began to acclimatise to these new sounds, it’s significant that the metaphor reached for by the critic of the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung Wien was one of colour – of light. “The misty veil disappeared, and the splendid work of art radiated its dazzling glory”.
Credit: Richard Bratby
You can now book your tickets for the Castalian String Quartet’s upcoming concerts and pre-concert talks on Tuesday 26 November and Thursday 30 January with a special offer if you book both concerts at the same time. There will also be a two celebration concerts on Friday 9 May with a special offer if you book both concerts taking place on this date.
Presented by the Cultural Programme in association with the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, where the Castalian String Quartet are The Hans Keller String Quartet in Residence. Made possible thanks to The Cosman Keller Art & Music Trust.
19 Nov 24