Tuesday September 29, 2009

Friends of Chamber Music
Guarneri String Quartet
Franz Josef Haydn: String Quartet in G minor, Op.74 No. 3 (Rider) 19:32
Zoltán Kodály: String Quartet No. 2, Op.10 18:37 (12/3/08)
Also, Charley talks with cellist Jurgen de Lemos and soprano Tana Cochran, who are featured on the Ars Nova Singers's opening concert.
John Tavener: "Death" from Akhmatova Songs
Jurgen de Lemos, cello; Tana Cochran, soprano
KVOD Performance Studio 9/18/09 MS
Also, Charley talks with Ars Nova Singers artistic director Thomas Edward Morgan.
Moreover, Charley anticipates Hsing-ay Hsu's appearance on the "Music with a View" series at the Arvada Center Friday.
Frédéric Chopin: Mazurka in B-flat major, Op.7 No. 1 1:22
Hsing-ay Hsu, piano
KVOD Performance Studio 110608 MS


Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967): String Quartet No. 2, Op.10
Allegro
Andante—Quasi récitativo—Allegro giocoso

Composed between 1916 and 1918, the second string quartet was first performed on May 7, 1918 by the Waldbauer-Kerpely String Quartet in Budapest. Critical reception was mixed, one writer calling it the “eccentric, almost perverted, manifestation of a great and muscular, though misguided talent.” After the score was published in 1921, Philip Heseltine (who used the penname “Peter Warlock” for his own compositions) wrote: “This music is of a deceptive simplicity which will yield more to prolonged study than much that is of far greater apparent complexity.”
In his book on Kodály, János Breuer regards the work as a “dream in sound,” whose “large form, consisting of two movements, or more exactly, the outlines of a middle movement can be felt in the slow introductory music to the finale, were it not constructed in such a completely improvisatory manner.” With its gently swaying barcarolle rhythm, the opening movement, he writes, “can justifiably be considered as a monothematic structure outlining a sonata form, a single large-scale development with a series of variations.”
After the slow introduction to the finale comes a section marked “Quasi recitativo” (like a recitative), which Breuer says “serves as a free, improvisatory filling of an interval of a fifth--as if one heard a violin and then a cello version of distant piping. This sound of a shepherd’s pipe becomes almost ethereal and fleeting….The continuation both on the violin and the cello resembles speech melody, it almost asks for expressive words….In the profound silence the notes of a distant dance melody anticipate the actual, dance-like finale.” Breuer calls this “a pseudo-folk dance czárdás…lent an almost unreal effect by its pizzicato accompaniment.” Motives from the first movement are recalled, alternating with either the recitative or dance themes, sometimes including bagpipe effects, until the final “single heavy dance step.” This last section sounds to Breuer “like a revolving stage, a virtual consummation of esprit de corps.”