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St Mary’s Church, CratfieldSunday 3 July 2016

CARDUCCI STRING QUARTETMatthew Denton, Michelle Fleming violins

Eoin Schmidt-Martin violaEmma Denton cello

with

NICHOLAS DANIEL oboe and cor anglais

This concert is supported by a gift from a Patron

Concerts at CratfieldBlyth Valley Chamber Music

Mr T.E.Allen, Peter Baker & Kate Hutchon, Sir Jeremy &Lady Blackham, Rachel Booth & Clare Webb, Philip Britton &Tom Southern, Mr & Mrs Roger Cooper, Prof.MJ & Dr CHG Daunton, Paul Fincham, Judith Foord, Shirley Fry, Tony Gelsthorpe & Gill Bracey, Carole & Simon Haskel,David Heckels, Andrew Johnston, Julia Josephs, Susan Kodicek &Judith Harrad, David & Deirdre Mintz, Dr & Mrs Ivan Moseley,John & Gloria Nottage, Judith Payne, Donald & Jean Peacock,Anthony & Sarah Platt, Ruth Plowden, Garth & Lucy Pollard, Jill Sawdon, Lesley & Barry Shooter, Derek & Rosemary Simon,John Sims, Paul & Caroline Stanley, Christine & Jack Stephenson,Alan Swerdlow & Jeremy Greenwood, Charles Taylor &Tony Collinge, Michael Taylor & Mike Nott, Mr & Mrs S.Whitney-Long.

Philip Britton (Chairman); Clare Webb (Treasurer); Alan McLean and Peter Baker (Concert Organisers – to the end of 2017); Gill Bracey, David Mintz, Kathrin Peters, Richard Quarrell, Christine Stephenson, Jack Stephenson andMichael Taylor.

Box office: Pauline Grahamtelephone 01728 603 077email boxoffice@concertsatcratfield.org.uk

Presented by Blyth Valley Chamber Music registered charity 1019300www.concertsatcratfield.org.uk

patronsWe regret to record, sincethe end of the precedingseason, the death of WilfredDukes, Julian Gardner andGeoffrey Kirkham: allcommitted concertgoers andlong-term supporters ofConcerts at Cratfield.

box office &mailing list

concerts atcratfield

on Sundays at 3.00pm

17 July: Heath QuartetMozart, Bartók, Beethoven

31 July: Quartetto RossiHaydn, Beethoven

14 August: André Trio piano trioMendelssohn, Fauré, Beethoven

28 August: Charles Owen pianoBach, Chopin, Liszt, Ravel

11 September: Callino Quartet, Anna Dennis soprano &Alasdair Beatson piano

Webern, Schoenberg, Brahms

futureconcertsTickets for other concerts inthe 2016 season can bebought or reserved fromPauline at the Box Officetable, during the interval orat the end of the concerttoday.

trustees 2016

Many concertgoers will know that in December 2015 thievesstole about four tonnes of lead from the roof of St Mary’s, mostlyfrom above the North Aisle. None has been recovered, but gooddetective work may lead to a prosecution against at least some ofthe gang. The bill for repair, however, was far beyond the level ofinsurance and the limited resources of the church itself. Manygenerous supporters stepped in, including Concerts at Cratfield,with individual donations and a superb fundraising concert atThe Cut in Halesworth in April 2016. At that concert, we heardDon Peacock announce on behalf of St Mary’s pcc that therestoration work would all be completed – and in lead, the bestmaterial – by the start of our 2016 season. Both the parish andConcerts at Cratfield have also benefitted greatly from the sellingexhibition Jack Stephenson organised, in Saxmundham, of woodengravings by our much missed Founder Patron Linda Holmes.Today therefore marks a happy conclusion to all these efforts anda church fully restored.

To mark the occasion – and profiting from having NicholasDaniel with us for the first time – we had the idea of starting ourseason with a newly composed fanfare for solo oboe, which cando celebratory just as well as it can do plangent or seductive.Given our happy and long-standing relationship with composerElena Langer, she was the obvious choice. In less than two days,we had the score.

About the work, the composer adds:

The piece is lively and virtuosic. It starts in the oboe’s lowestregister and gradually climbs up to the very top (the roof!). Iworked a very short quotation from Beethoven's overture TheConsecration of the House (1822) into one of the fast passages!This is therefore the fanfare’s very first public performance.

We open our new season with a concert featuring the fourthvisit to Cratfield of the Carducci. They are joined by NicholasDaniel, whom we are delighted to welcome to Cratfield for thefirst time.

Three further concerts this season feature a string quartet: theHeath, the Quartetto Rossi on gut strings (replacing the LondonHaydn Quartet) and the Callino in the final concert, joined byAnna Dennis soprano and Alasdair Beatson piano. The remainingtwo offer a young piano trio from France (but with Suffolkconnections) and an ingeniously constructed solo piano recitalfrom a Cratfield regular, Charles Owen.

Shostakovich, String quartet no 11: the obvious choice is ourown Carducci on Signum Classics, who recorded nos 4, 8 and11 in 2014 in readiness for their ‘Shostakovich year’. Aninteresting alternative is the Pacifica Quartet from the usa , whoon a two-disc set couple Shostakovich nos 9-12 with the Quartetno 6 by his Soviet contemporary Mieczslaw Weinberg – atmedium price from Cedille.

Mozart, Oboe quartet: at budget price from Hyperion Helios,the always reliable Gaudier Ensemble also offer Mozart’s Hornquintet k407, the wonderful Quintet for piano and winds k452(with Susan Tomes piano) and a seldom performed Quintetmovement in f k 580b; but this may soon be available only fordownload.

David Matthews, The Flaying of Marsyas: an all-Matthews cdfrom Metronome by the Brindisi Quartet (with Nicholas Daniel)also includes two of his string quartets.

Beethoven, String quartet op 95 (‘Serioso’): there are manyrecommendable sets of recordings of Beethoven quartets, of whichrecent frontrunners include the Takács at full price on Decca andthe Belcea (recorded in live performances at Snape) at mediumprice on Zig-Zag Territoires. The Takács treat op 95 as the earliestof the ‘late quartets’ on three discs; the Belcea mix quartets fromall periods in each four-disc volume, with op 95 in vol 1.

In our experience, two companies offer a good range of stock,keen prices and efficient service for buying classical cds onlinein the uk : www.mdt.co.uk

www.prestoclassical.co.uk

The fastest delivery to Suffolk may come from Prelude Recordsin Norwich: www.preluderecords.co.uk,who are equally helpfulon the phone: 01603 620 170.

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elena langerb 1974

Fanfare for a new roof(2016)

About 2 minutes

our newseason

since lastseason

From the Box Office table you can buy the new cd of musicby Elena Langer, Landscape with Three People. Its titlework is the song cycle commissioned by Concerts atCratfield and first performed at St Mary’s in 2013. RichardMorrison in The Times gave the disc four stars, speciallymentioningAnna Dennis soprano, William Towerscountertenor and Nicholas Daniel oboe.

We also hope to have other cds on sale, featuring NicholasDaniel and the Carducci.

cds on sale

The Carducci String Quartet, long established as one of thefinest quartets based in the uk, are Cratfield regulars, lastplaying for us in 2013. In September 2015 they offered a rarechance to hear all the Shostakovich quartets at the Jubilee Hallin Aldeburgh, as part of their international celebration of thefortieth anniversary of the composer’s death. They evenperformed all fifteen quartets in one day at the Sam WanamakerTheatre in London: a rare feat of concentration and endurance.

Nicholas Daniel launched his musical career by becoming BBC

Young Musician of the Year at 18; he is now the doyen of Britishoboists, playing as soloist with orchestras and chamber groupsinternationally and also increasingly active as a conductor (heplays and directs the Britten Sinfonia in his recent cd of theVaughan Williams and MacMillan concertos, Editor’s Choice inGramophone and winner of a bbc Music Magazine PremièreAward). He is also Artistic Director of the LeicesterInternational Music Festival and is featured on the newHarmonia Mundi cd of music by Elena Langer, Landscape withThree People, on sale at the concert today; its title work is aCratfield-commissioned song cycle from 2013.

The background and date of this standalone slow movement forfour instruments are both murky, but there is no doubt that it isauthentic Mozart, inhabiting the same hushed and intensesound-world as his later motet Ave Verum Corpus k 618. Thetop line may have been intended for the cor anglais, the tenormember of the oboe family, as played today. Some suggest thatthis designation was the work of an editor who completed thepiece. What instruments were intended for the lower partsremains unclear: some suggest three basset horns (a lowerregister early version of the clarinet) or two French horns and abassoon. Today they are played by a string trio. This is certainlythe first time this work has been heard at Cratfield (if not in thewhole of East Anglia).

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Marsyas’ blood becoming a river, ‘on the banks of which grewreeds, from which men made oboes; so his music continues’.

Edited extracts from a note for the Leicester InternationalMusic Festival © Mike Wheeler 2013.

Although some commentators treat this quartet as one ofBeethoven’s ‘late quartets’, it actually sits on its own – morethan a decade before op 127 and one year after another‘singleton’ among quartets, op 74 in e flat (‘The Harp’). Thebilingually titled Quartett serioso therefore fits between hismajor works of 1809 – the Piano concerto no5 (‘The Emperor’)and three piano sonatas opp 78, 79 and 81a (‘Les Adieux’) –and the ‘Archduke’ piano trio of 1811, followed in turn the nextyear by the Seventh and Eighth symphonies. Perhaps because ofthe bleakness of the piece – Misha Donat calls it ‘terse andaustere’ – the composer withheld publication for six years andsaid that it was never to be performed in public.

The quartet does at moments sound like ‘Beethoven’s privateworkshop’ (Joseph Kerman), opening with an initial unisonoutburst, a rest, and then a completely contrasting idea;conventional linking passages are absent, and the exposition isnot repeated. The second movement opens with a famousunaccompanied cello scale downwards which introduces dmajor – in traditional terms an extreme contrast to the f minorof the first movement, but the movement moves chromaticallyin more directions than any conventional slow movement everwould, including a central fugue. In this hard-to-fathompersonal world, the only movement actually marked serioso isthe equivalent of a scherzo, which Kerman calls ‘a serious,three-legged, tough little quick-march’ with a contrasting andawkward trio. The final movement opens with eight bars ofslow introduction leading into the main body of the movement,which combines sonata and rondo elements; the coda at thevery end changes the mood entirely, suggesting the finale of anopera buffa and bringing a sunny major-key conclusion.

If hearing any of the works in today’s concert makes you want tohave your own recording, here are some personalrecommendations:

Mozart, Adagio K 580a: no commercial recording available (butNicholas Daniel plays the work with Camerata Pacifica onYouTube).

today’sperformers

wolfgangamadeusmozart1756 -1791

Adagio in C K580a(?1788)

About 8 minutes

ludwig vanbeethoven1770 -1827

String quartet in F minorop 95 (‘Serioso’) (1810)

Allegro con brio

Allegretto non troppo –

Allegro assai vivace ma serioso

Larghetto espressivo – allegretto agitato – allegro

About 20 minutes

in case of emergencyUse the door marked exit which is nearest to you and moveinto the churchyard, away from the church. If the churchneeds to be evacuated, one of the Trustees will make anannouncement and individual stewards close to where youare sitting will then assist you towards the appropriate exit.

Programme text © 2016Philip Britton and BlythValley Chamber Music

music on cdtoday’s performers andworks

Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets – inventive and varied asthey are in purely musical terms – seem also to be a record of hisown emotional and internal journey. Even so, relating specificquartets to specific events in his life is dangerous. Of no 11 wedo know something solid. He wrote it between his thirteenthand fourteenth symphonies in memory of Vassily Shirinsky,second violin of the Beethoven Quartet, which gave the firstpublic performances of all Shostakovich’s quartets from no 2onwards. Shirinsky was a great supporter of the composer andhis music; he died suddenly of a stroke while chopping wood athis dacha in 1965.

Wendy Lesser in her study of the quartets, Music for SilencedVoices, calls no 11 ‘the quietest, most broken, most passivelydepressive quartet he ever wrote’. Its seven movements – somebarely more than a minute in length – are played without a break,so the work’s structure looks to the suite as well as to sonataform. And many movements seem to resist melody and to conveya mood absolutely opposed to their titles, except the Elegy, thelongest movement and the work’s heart. The quartet ends on abarely perceptible top-of-its range note from the first violin,marked ‘morendo’ (dying) – literally as well as musically, it seems.

In early November 1780 Mozart was invited to Munich by theElector Karl Theodor, in order to fulfil the Elector’s commissionfor the opera Idomeneo. Mozart struggled with the lengthy andrather static libretto and had to work feverishly (beset by apersistent heavy cold) to complete the music, but he conductedthe opera’s first performance there in January 1781. In parallelhe renewed a friendship with the oboist Friedrich Ramm (1744-?1811), who had been in the world-famous court orchestra atMannheim. Like many other orchestra members, Ramm hadleft Mannheim for Munich when the Elector made the samemove.

It was for Ramm that Mozart somehow found time in early 1781to compose his only Oboe quartet, for oboe, violin, viola andcello. In ambition and scale, despite having only threemovements, it prefigures the Clarinet quintet K581; at moments,it resembles a small-scale concerto for the oboe (with even amini-cadenza in the d minor slow movement). The rondo-finalecontains an unusual passage where the three strings are in 6/8,while the oboist has figurations above in 4/4, returning to jointhe strings’ time-signature in the end.

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intervalAs thanks for the support from concertgoers towards the costsof the roof repair, the parish is very kindly offering everyonefree tea, coffee or water and a cake in the interval today.

According to Greek mythology, Marsyas was a satyr (half-goat,half-human) who rashly challenged the god Apollo to a contestof musical skill, Apollo playing his lyre and Marsyas the aulos(a kind of oboe). Predictably, he lost and was punished for hispresumption by being hung upside-down and flayed alive.

This is the grim subject depicted by the Venetian artist Titian(Tiziano Vecelli, c 1488 or1490-1576) as his last completedwork. When composer David Matthews saw it, he considered it‘a horrifying painting, but … also full of compassion’. He notedthat the figure of Apollo in the top left-hand corner, playing thelira da bracchio (an early violin) has a miraculously calmingeffect on the torture being enacted in his presence. ‘Looking atthe painting, I imagined I could hear the music Apollo wasplaying, and realised it offered me a fortuitous starting point forthe piece’.

The work opens with an extended passage for the second violin,viola and cello, ‘deliberately primitive music suggesting the stateof the world before Apollo brought enlightenment.’ It becomesgradually more energised, until the sudden calm when the firstviolin, representing Apollo, enters. The rising scale which is thefirst thing he plays becomes his identifying motif.

The oboe makes its appearance as Marsyas in a cadenza-likepassage, beginning tentatively – ‘at first, each note is adiscovery’. Gaining confidence, he leads the strings in arhythmically incisive dance (the first violin momentarily stepsout of character to become part of the ensemble). At the heightof the excitement Apollo plays his rising scale and after amoment Marsyas copies it, challenging the god on his ownground. The contest that follows sees each in the spotlight inturn, as they constantly exchange ideas. Apollo finallychallenges Marsyas in a virtuoso cadenza, with Marsyas makinglittle two-note comments marked ‘scornful’. The climax comesas Marsyas tries to play two notes simultaneously, failing whereApollo succeeds. Marsyas’ cries of pain in the following sectiondo not need spelling out. The music that opened the piecereturns, but then Matthews bring the oboe and violin together‘in a postlude which offers reconciliation’. The short finalsection suggests one version of the myth, which ends with

davidmatthewsb 1943

Concertino for oboe andstring quartet TheFlaying of Marsyasop 42 (1987)

About 18 minutes

mozartOboe quartet in F K370(1781)

Allegro

Adagio

Rondeau: allegro

About 16 minutes

dmitrishostakovich1906-1975

String quartet no 11 in F minor op122 (1966)

Introduction: andantino –

Scherzo: allegretto –

Recitativo: adagio –

Etude: allegro –Humoresque: allegro –

Elegie: adagio –

Finale: moderato

About 15 minutes