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28 Jan 25 | Events
Stories behind the music: Castalian String Quartet – 30 January
Excitement mounts for the upcoming programme for Castalian String Quartet’s concert on Thursday 30 January at the Holywell Music Room. Featuring four 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:
Joseph Haydn (1732 – 1809)String Quartet in G minor, Op. 20 No. 3
In 1772, over a decade into his thirty-year tenure at the Esterházy Court, Haydn composed the six works of his opus 20. They represent a departure from the playful divertimenti style of his previous compositions in the genre. Despite the set’s rather cheery nickname – the ‘Sun’, due to the image which decorated an early edition of the work – here Haydn deals in a more serious strain, characteristic of the then flourishing Sturm und Drang movement.
The concept of ‘storm and stress’ may have resonated with the composer, whose extensive musical responsibilities under Prince Nikolaus Esterházy left him, in his own words, ‘completely secluded from the world’. But this isolation was not without its merits, as the composer recognised when he added, ‘in this way I became original’. Critics agree. As Donald Tovey wrote, ‘every page of the six quartets of Op. 20 is of historic and aesthetic importance’.
The Quartet in G minor encapsulates Haydn’s individual spirit. The first of two minor-key quartets in the set, it introduces his choice to emphasise the minor mode, uncommon in string quartets of the time. In the spirited Allegro, the minor primary theme unfolds over a set of seven-bar phrases, another unusual compositional choice which produces a disconcerting unevenness. The secondary theme then emerges in the relative major, contrasting with the minor opening. This movement’s tension between minor and major modes, combined with its odd phrase lengths, contributes to the enigmatic reputation of the quartet.
In the second movement, a melancholic allegretto Minuetto, irregular five-bar phrases in the minor continue to create a sense of undanceable unease. The E-flat major trio initially offers some comforting emotional uplift, but its ending, marked perdendosi (‘dying away’), returns to uncertainty.
The slow third movement, Poco adagio, expounds the key of G major through stately exchanges between first violin and cello, a dialogue which comes to define the movement. The first violin’s melodic motifs dominate the Allegro di molto finale, where abrupt contrasts between sound and silence effect a frenetic energy before the movement quietly fades out in an echo of the Minuet’s trio, setting like the sun.
György Kurtág (1926 –)Six Moments Musicaux, Op. 44
‘Playing is just playing. It requires a great deal of freedom and initiative from the performer … We should make use of free declamation, folk-music, parlando-rubato, of Gregorian chant, and of all that improvisational musical practice has ever brought forth.’
György Kurtág provides this insight into his compelling, fragmentary aesthetic. The Hungarian composer’s delightfully capricious piece consists of six short sections, each with its own programmatic impulse. Recalling Schubert’s composition of the same name, Kurtág’s Six Moments Musicaux incorporates an eclectic yet complementary array of inspirations. A passionate opening gives way to eerie, echoic footfalls suggested by a poem of the fin-de-siècle Hungarian writer Endre Ady. What Kurtág describes as the ‘cunning pitfalls’ of the third moment turn contemplative in the fourth, in homage to the pianist György Sebők. Birdsong mingles with the Dies irae before a pastiche of Janáček sounds a speechlike farewell.
Composed between 1999 and 2005, when Kurtág was in his mid-seventies, Six Moments Musicaux reflects the diverse symbolic language of his musical life – from his youth spent under turbulent transitions between the Nazi occupation, Communist regime, and the Hungarian Uprising, to his encounters with the musical avant-garde in Paris. This work is dedicated to his son and fellow composer, György Kurtág Jr.
Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 1179)Three Antiphons for string quartet (arr. Marianne Pfau)
Hildegard von Bingen was a twelfth-century polymath: an abbess, visionary, writer, and composer famed for numerous antiphons – short pieces of religious text set to music – reflecting her mystic musical philosophy: ‘the body is the vestment of the spirit, which has a living voice, and so it is proper for the body, in harmony with the soul, to use its voice to sing praises to God’.
In these arrangements, the opening antiphon, O virtus sapientie, sees the first violin sings out Hildegard’s plainchant melody over drone-like meditations from the other strings. Hildegard envisions the titular ‘Divine Wisdom’ as a three-winged being, symbolic of the Trinity. The second violin, reserved from the first antiphon’s trio of voices, leads into the responsory for the holy innocent, Rex Noster. A flowing melody lingers on the figure of ‘Our King’ in heaven, who receives the blood of the infants massacred by Herod. The angels are moved to praise, but the clouds weep. The held tones of the quartet recall the resonant acoustics of a vaulted cathedral: a voice echoing out under the mournful heavens. The final antiphon O dulcissime amator, Hildegard’s symphony of virgins, communicates youth and spiritual purity through ornate musical virtuosity. The viola here leads the quartet into a moment of unison – conveying a collective lamentation of sin.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827)String Quartet No. 9 in C major, Op. 59 No. 3
In 1805, Russian ambassador in Vienna and prolific patron of the arts Count Andreas Razumovsky, commissioned a set of three string quartets from Beethoven. Written the following year, in the composer’s ‘heroic’ middle period, the work was published in 1808 as the eponymous Razumovsky quartets That same year, Razumovsky sponsored the formation of a chamber ensemble led by virtuoso first violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh. Where other quartets of the day tended to operate on few rehearsals, Razumovsky’s support allowed the Schuppanzigh Quartet sufficient time to practice more difficult repertoire like this. Still, Schuppanzigh complained about the complexity of the work. The notoriously curmudgeonly Beethoven is said to have demanded, ‘does he really believe that I think about his silly fiddle when the muse strikes me to compose?’.
The whims of the muse may have vexed Razumovsky, too. Although the ambassador had asked that Beethoven include a ‘Thème Russe’ in each of the three quartets, an explicit Russian theme is absent in the final C major quartet. The work begins with a slow Andante con moto section before introducing a distinctly spirited Allegro vivace main theme. The sense of disjuncture endures in the second movement, a yearning A minor Andante con moto quasi allegretto which makes use of a reversed recapitulation: Beethoven switches the expected order of the expositional themes, a manoeuvre associated with tragedy and frustration. His use of the Hungarian (double harmonic minor) scale furthers the bleak atmosphere before the third movement Menuetto delivers us out of desolation into the tonic key. We remain in C major for the closing Allegro molto, where fugal episodes interweave with an inversion of the minuet’s main motif. Having worked through the uncertainties of the earlier movements, Beethoven concludes the Razumovsky set with a triumphant Mannheim crescendo, with the entire ensemble rushing to a triple forte.
Although the work’s reception was mixed in its own time, this quartet stood out from the rest. In the words of a contemporary reviewer, ‘they are deep in conception and marvellously worked out, but not universally comprehensible, except the third, which by virtue of its individuality, melody, and harmonic power must win over every educated friend of music’.
Credit: Chloe Green
Book your tickets for the Castalian String Quartet’s upcoming concert and pre-concert talk on Thursday 30 January
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.
28 Jan 25