Tuesday January 26, 2010

Friends of Chamber Music
Miró String Quartet; Shai Wosner, piano

Leoš Janáček: In the Mist
Leoš Janáček: String Quartet No. 2 (Intimate Letters) (2/18/09)
Also, Antonin Dvořák: Scherzo (Furiant: Molto vivace) [3rd movement] & Finale (Allegro) from Piano Quintet in A major, Op.81
Shai Wosner, piano; Axel Strauss, Chee-Yun, violins; Nokuthula Ngwenyama, viola; Alisa Weilerstein, cello 11:15
Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival (7/18/06)


Leoš Janáček (1854-1928): String Quartet No. 2 (Intimate Letters)
I. Andante--Con moto--Allegro
II. Adagio—Vivace—Andante—Presto—Allegro—Vivo--Adagio
III. Moderato—Adagio--Allegro
IV. Allegro—Andante--Con moto—Adagio--Tempo I

In 1917, at the age of sixty-two, Janáček fell in love with Kamila Stösslová, who was twenty-seven. The relationship continued for ten years, right up to Janáček’s death in 1928. On January 29 of that year, he began his second string quartet. “I’ve begun to write something nice,” he wrote to her. “Our life will be in it. It will be called ‘Love Letters.’ I think that it will sound delightful. There have already been so many of those dear adventures of ours, haven’t there? They’ll be little fires in my soul and they’ll set it ablaze with the most beautiful melodies.”
He completed the piece on February 19. “Today I managed to write a piece in which the earth moves,” he reported. “This work will be dedicated to you. You are the cause of it and composing it has been my greatest joy.”
Not wishing “to deliver up my feelings to the tender mercies of fools,” Janáček changed the title to “Intimate Letters.”
The Moravian Quartet came to Janáček’s house in Brno to rehearse the new work on May 18. “It’s going to be beautiful,” he said, “outside all conventional composition….It’s my first composition to spring from directly-experienced emotion.” After the final rehearsal on June 27, he wrote to Kamila: “They played with fire as if they themselves were writing Intimate Letters….I think that I shall write nothing deeper or more truthful….Everything is somehow coming to an end by itself! It’s as if I were never to take up my pen again.” Janáček was prophetic: the first performance was given by the Moravian Quartet in Brno on September 11, 1928, one month after Janáček’s death from pneumonia.
The music is profoundly autobiographical. The first movement, he told Kamila, represents “the impression when I saw you for the first time…Mine alone the speaking; yours—just surprised silence.” In the second movement, “you are giving birth. Just like you, falling from tears into laughter, that’s how it sounds.” The third movement “is bright and carefree, but dissolves into an apparition which resembles you.” “Let it be jolly,” he said of the last movement, “and then dissolve into a vision resembling your image, translucent as mist….It is the sound of my fear for you, not exactly fear, but yearning, yearning which is fulfilled by you.”