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presents…

CALIDORE STRING QUARTETJeffrey Myers | Violin Jeremy Berry | ViolaRyan Meehan | Violin Estelle Choi | Cello

Monday, October 21 , 2019 | 7:30pmHerbst Theatre

HAYDN String Quartet in C Major, Opus 20, No. 2 Moderato Capriccio. Adagio — Cantabile Menuetto. Allegretto — Trio Fuga a 4 soggetti. Allegro

CAROLINE SHAW Three Essays First Essay: Nimrod Second Essay: Echo Third Essay: Ruby

INTERMISSION

BEETHOVEN String Quartet in B-flat Major, Opus 130/133 Adagio, ma non troppo; Allegro Presto Andante con moto ma non troppo Alla danza tedesca: Allegro assai Cavatina: Adagio molto espressivo Grosse Fuge

This program is made possible in part by the generous support of Schoenberg Family Law

Calidore String Quartet is represented by Opus 3 Artists470 Park Ave. South, 9th Fl. North, New York, NY 10016 opus3artists.com

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ARTIST PROFILESSan Francisco Performances presents the Calidore String Quartet for the second time in less than a year. In January, they appeared with pianist Inon Barnatan.

The Calidore String Quartet has been praised by the New York Times for its “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct.” The Washington Post has said that “Four more individual musi-cians are unimaginable, yet these speak, breathe, think and feel as one.”

Recipient of a 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and the 2017 Lincoln Center Emerg-ing Artist Award, the Calidore first made international headlines as winner of the $100,000 Grand-Prize of the 2016 M-Prize International Chamber Music Compe-tition. The Quartet was the first North American ensemble to win the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, was a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist and just com-pleted its third year in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program.

In 2019–20, the Calidore celebrates its tenth anniversary and the 250th anni-versary of Beethoven’s birth with cycles of the Beethoven String Quartets in New York, Los Angeles, Buffalo, Toronto, the University of Delaware, Antwerp and Dresden. Additionally, the Calidore will premiere a new work by composer Anna Clyne inspired by Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge and commissioned by Music Accord in performances at several major U.S. ven-ues. The Quartet will make their debuts at Strathmore and the Kansas City Friends of Chamber Music; and will perform in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Poland, Spain and Switzerland. The Quartet will continue to collaborate

with artists including pianist Marc-André Hamelin, violist Lawrence Power, cellist Clive Greensmith, bassist Xavier Foley, guitarist Sharon Isbin, and oboist Cristina Gómez Godoy, among others.

On Resilience, the Calidore’s 2018 Sig-num release, the Quartet “present an im-pressive sense of ensemble” in a “cleverly devised selection of quartets” (Strad) by Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Janáček and Goli-jov. Other commercial recordings include two albums recorded live at the Music@Menlo Festival: Serenade: Music from the Great War, featuring music by Hindemith, Milhaud and Stravinsky, Ernst Toch and Jacques de la Presle (Editions Hortus); and their 2015 debut recording of quartets by Mendelssohn and Haydn (“the epitome of confidence and finesse”—Gramophone). The Calidore were featured as Young Art-ists-in-Residence on American Public Me-dia’s Performance Today. They have been broadcast on NPR, BBC, CBC and SiriusXM, and in Korea and Germany.

The Calidore have given world pre-mieres of works by Caroline Shaw, Hannah Lash, Mark Anthony Turnage and Ben-jamin Dean Taylor. The Quartet has col-laborated with many esteemed artists and ensembles, including Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Joshua Bell, David Shifrin, Inon Barnatan, Paul Coletti, David Finckel, Wu Han, Paul Neubauer, Ronald Leonard, Paul Watkins, and the Emerson and Ebène Quartets.

As a passionate supporter of music edu-cation, the Calidore is committed to men-toring and educating young musicians, stu-dents and audiences. The Calidore serves as Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Delaware and the University of Toronto.

The Calidore String Quartet was found-ed at the Colburn School in Los Angeles in 2010. Within two years the Quartet won grand prizes in virtually all the major U.S.

chamber music competitions, including Fischoff, Coleman, Chesapeake, and Yellow Springs, and captured top prizes at the 2012 ARD Munich International String Quartet Competition and Hamburg International Chamber Music Competition. Using an amalgamation of “California” and “doré” (French for “golden”), the ensemble’s name represents a reverence for the diversity of culture and the strong support it received from its home of origin, the “golden state.”

PROGRAM NOTES

String Quartet in C Major, Opus 20, No. 2FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN(1732–1809)

Haydn was 42 when he published the six quartets of his Opus 20 in 1774. The second, in C Major, has been particularly admired. If one of the clichés about Haydn’s quartet-writing is that he liberated the cello from a merely accompanying role, this quartet is a textbook example of that. The quartet is also remarkable for the unusual key rela-tionships between its movements (all four movements are in some form of C) and for the dazzling fugal writing in the finale.

Instantly assuming its role as a melodic instrument, the cello opens the Moderato with the long main idea. Significantly, the first violin remains silent for the first six measures, and only when the cello fin-ishes is the violin allowed to take up this theme for itself. The first violin part is fairly brilliant, however, full of some un-usually high writing, and the second vio-lin is hardly neglected: its accompanying music at the start of the development is brilliant, even as it does not call particular attention to itself.

Haydn moves to C minor and gives the second movement the unusual title Capric-cio, suggesting a flight of fancy. The move-ment has been compared both to a violin concerto and an accompanied aria—at its center, the first violin has a soaring canta-bile melody. In an unusual touch, Haydn joins the slow movement with the min-uet—there are brief modulating chords, and suddenly the C-Major minuet simply begins. Haydn asks the first violin to ac-company its own syncopated melody with a double-stopped drone, so there are actu-ally five voices in this harmony.

The finale is a fugue in four voices, intro-duced by the first violin. Haydn keeps the

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dynamic level low—his dynamic marking is sempre sotto voce—and the individual voices emerge clearly from the busy tex-ture. At one point, Haydn specifies al ro-vescio: in a brief but impressive display of compositional mastery, he turns the fugue theme upside down and develops it by inversion.

Three Essays

CAROLINE SHAW(B. 1982)

Caroline Shaw has provided a program note for her work.

I fell in love with playing in a string quartet when I was about 10, and it’s been a love and obsession ever since. It’s an amaz-ing way to converse musically with others, and you can really get a sense of someone’s personality through reading a quartet with them for the first time. I had the good fortune of getting to play in a quartet with the Calidore cellist, Estelle Choi, back in grad school, so of course that experience feeds into my writing for the group. I also love the way that they play together, and their approach to timing and phrasing.

I was lucky enough to write a piece for the Calidore Quartet in 2016—First Es-say: Nimrod—which was my eighth string quartet. This was a slight departure for me. Instead of beginning with a visual concept or harmonic idea, I decided to try and start from words and language, think-ing about syntax and style and form in prose writing. I started writing the piece in the calm and optimism of an audio re-cording of Marilynne Robinson reading from her book The Givenness of Things and completed it during the turmoil of the US Presidential election in November 2016, hence the disintegration of elements that occurs through the piece. This consider-ation of the essay-writing process—how we generate and understand and organize language and thought—is very interest-ing to me, and I wanted to approach it from two more angles, which is what I have done in these Second and Third Essays.

The Second Essay: Echo is a stylistic con-trast to the first and third, in the spirit of a typical “slow movement” nested between two quick ones. The title touches on a num-ber of references: the concept of the “echo chamber” that social media fosters in our political discourse; the “echo” function in the Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) pro-

gramming language; and of course, the effect of an echo. The Third Essay: Ruby re-turns to the fragmentation and angularity that was introduced in the First Essay but attempts to tame it into some kind of logi-cal structure. The title refers both to the programming language Ruby (developed in Japan in the mid-1990s) as well the sim-ple beauty of the gem stone for which the language was named. It’s more a point of inspiration than a strict system of generat-ing material.

I really think about conversation and flow whenever I’m composing, but I have never really started from that place. It’s of-ten really a fun game for me, writing mu-sic. Like designing your own game envi-ronment and then solving the puzzles that crop up. I love reading an essay by a favor-ite writer (lately it’s been Kathryn Schulz and Doreen St Félix) and seeing how they dance around a thesis before slipping it in brilliantly in a way you weren’t expecting. I like trying to do that with music. I keep coming back to the string quartet—even though there are now so many possibilities for combinations of sounds and instru-ments—because it has been around for so long and has such clear parameters. And I love the dialogue with the repertoire that

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came before. It’s part of the joy of design-ing and destroying and solving the puzzle of music. You can love the rules and under-mine them at the same time.

String Quartet in B-flat Major, Opus 130/133LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN(1770–1827)

Beethoven composed the Quartet in B-flat Major in 1825, and the music had its premiere in Vienna on March 21, 1826, al-most exactly a year to the day before the composer’s death. This massive quartet, consisting of six movements that span a total of nearly 50 minutes, concluded with an extremely difficult fugue that left the first audience stunned. Beethoven did not attend the premiere, but when told that the fourth and fifth movements had been so enthusiastically applauded that they had to be repeated, he erupted with anger: “Yes, these delicacies! Why not the Fugue? Cattle! Asses!”

But it was not just the audience at the pre-miere that found the concluding fugue dif-ficult. With some trepidation, Beethoven’s publisher asked the crusty old composer to write a substitute finale and to publish the fugue separately. To everyone’s aston-ishment, Beethoven agreed and wrote a new finale—a good-natured rondo—in the fall of 1826. For generations, the Quar-tet in B-flat Major was performed with the substitute rondo as the finale, but recently that practice appears to have evolved, and quartets today are increasingly following Beethoven’s original intention and con-cluding the Quartet in B-flat Major with the Grosse Fuge, which was published separate-ly as Opus 133. The present performance of-fers the quartet in its original form.

The first movement, cast in the highly-modified sonata form Beethoven used in his final years, is built on two contrasting tempos: a reverent Adagio and a quick Al-legro that flies along on a steady rush of sixteenth notes. These tempos alternate, sometimes in sections only one measure long—there is some extraordinarily beau-tiful music here, full of soaring themes and unexpected shifts of key. By contrast, the Presto—flickering and shadowy—flits past in less than two minutes; in ABA form, it offers a long center section and a sudden close on the return of the open-ing material. The solemn opening of the Andante is a false direction, for it quickly gives way to a rather elegant movement in

sonata form, full of poised, flowing, and calm music. Beethoven titled the fourth movement Alla danza tedesca, which means “Dance in the German Style.” In 3/8 meter, it is based on the rocking, haunting little tune that opens the movement.

The Cavatina has become one of the most famous movements in all Beethoven’s quartets. Everyone is struck by the in-tensity of its feeling, though few agree as to what it expresses—some feel it tragic, others view it as serene; Beethoven him-self confessed that even thinking about this movement moved him to tears. Near the end comes an extraordinary passage that Beethoven marks Beklemmt (“Oppres-sive”): the music seems to stumble and then makes its way to the close over halt-ing, uncertain rhythms.

The Grosse Fuge is in fact not one fugue, but three different fugal sections, each in a contrasting tempo—Beethoven de-scribed it as a “Grand Fugue, freely treat-ed in some places, fugally elaborated in others.” The brief Overtura suggests the shape of the fugue subject in three differ-ent permutations (all of which will reap-pear and be treated differently) and then proceeds directly into the first fugue, an extremely abrasive Allegro in B-flat Major

that demands a great deal from both per-formers and audiences. Much of the com-plexity here is rhythmic: not only does the fugue subject leap across a span of several octaves, but its progress is often obscured by its overlapping triple, duple, and dotted rhythms. The lyric, flowing central section, a Meno mosso e moderato in G-flat Major, is fugal in character rath-er than taking the form of a strict fugue. It gives way to the Allegro molto e con brio, which is derived from the second appear-ance of the fugue subject in the Overtura; here it bristles with trills and sudden pauses. Near the close, Beethoven recalls fragments of the different sections, then offers a full-throated restatement of the fugue theme before the rush to the ca-dence.

Individual listeners may draw their own conclusions about the use of the Grosse Fuge as a fitting close to this quar-tet, but there can be no doubt that the Quartet in B-flat Major—by turns beauti-ful, aggressive, charming, and violent—remains as astonishing a piece of music for us today as it was to that first audience in 1826.

—Program notes by Eric Bromberger