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presents…

TAKÁCS QUARTETEdward Dusinberre | Violin Geraldine Walther | ViolaKároly Schranz | Violin András Fejér | Cello

Wednesday, April 18, 2018 | 7:30pmHerbst Theatre

MOZART String Quartet in G Major, K.387 Allegro vivace assai Menuetto: Allegro Andante cantabile Molto allegro

DOHNÁNYI String Quartet No. 2 in D-flat Major, Opus 15 Andante; Allegro; Adagio Presto acciacato Molto adagio; Animato

INTERMISSION

MENDELSSOHN String Quartet in F minor, Opus 80 Allegro vivace assai Allegro assai Adagio Finale: Allegro molto

The Shenson Chamber Series is made possible by Fred M. Levin and Nancy Livingston, The Shenson Foundation.

San Francisco Performances acknowledges the generosity of Concert Partners David and Judy Preves Anderson; in memory of Peter F. Ostwald, M.D; Dr. Daniel J. Fourrier Jr.; Dr. and Mrs. Marvin Gordon, in memory of Hanni (Hannah) Forester; Carolyn and Mark Koenig; Jerry and Toby Levine; Bruce and Carolyn Lowenthal

Takács Quartet is represented by Seldy Cramer Artists601 Van Ness Avenue, No. 15, San Francisco, CA 94102seldycramerartists.com

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ARTIST PROFILE

San Francisco Performances presents Takács Quartet for the fifth time. The quartet made its SF Performances debut in 2010.

The  Takács Quartet,  now in its 43rd season, is renowned for the vitality of its interpretations.  The New York Times  re-cently lauded the ensemble for “revealing the familiar as unfamiliar, making the most traditional of works feel radical once more.” Based in Boulder at the University of Colorado, the Takács Quartet performs 80 concerts a year worldwide.

In Europe during the 2017–18 season, in addition to their four annual appearances as Associate Artists at London’s Wigmore Hall, the ensemble returns to Copenhagen, Vien-na, Luxembourg, Rotterdam, the Rheingau Festival and the Edinburgh Festival.  They perform twice at Carnegie Hall, presenting a new Carl Vine work commissioned for them by Musica Viva Australia, Carnegie Hall and the Seattle Commissioning Club. In 2017, the ensemble joined the summer faculty at the

Music Academy of the West in Santa Barba-ra. They return to New Zealand and Austra-lia, perform at Tanglewood with pianist Gar-rick Ohlsson, at the Aspen Festival, and in over 40 other concerts in prestigious North American venues. The latest Takács record-ing, released by Hyperion in September 2017, features Dvořák’s viola quintet, Opus 97 (with Lawrence Power) and String Quartet, Opus 105.

Last season, the Takács presented com-plete six-concert Beethoven quartet cycles in Wigmore Hall, at Princeton, the Univer-sity of Michigan, and at UC Berkeley. Com-plementing these cycles, Edward Dusin-berre’s book, Beethoven for a Later Age: The Journey of a String Quartet,  was published in the UK by Faber and Faber and in North America by the University of Chicago Press.

They became the first string quartet to win the Wigmore Hall Medal in 2014. The Medal, inaugurated in 2007, recognizes ma-jor international artists who have a strong association with the Hall. Recipients so far include Andràs Schiff, Thomas Quasthoff, Menachem Pressler and Dame Felicity Lott. In 2012, Gramophone announced that the

Takács was the only string quartet to be in-ducted into its first Hall of Fame, along with such legendary artists as Jascha Heifetz, Leonard Bernstein and Dame Janet Baker. The ensemble also won the 2011 Award for Chamber Music and Song presented by the Royal Philharmonic Society in London. 

The Takács Quartet performed Philip Roth’s  Everyman  program with Meryl Streep at Princeton in 2014, and again with her at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto in 2015. The Quartet is known for such innovative programming. They first performed  Everyman  at Carnegie Hall in 2007 with Philip Seymour Hoffman. They have toured 14 cities with the poet Rob-ert Pinsky, collaborate regularly with the Hungarian folk group Muzsikás, and in 2010 they collaborated with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and David Lawrence Morse on a drama project that explored the composition of Beethoven’s last quartets.

The Takács records for Hyperion Re-cords, and their releases for that label in-clude string quartets by Haydn, Schubert, Janáček, Smetana, Debussy and Britten, as well as piano quintets by César Franck and

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Shostakovich (with Marc-André Hamelin), and viola quintets by Brahms (with Law-rence Power). Future releases for Hyper-ion include the Dvořák disc with Lawrence Power, the Dohnanyi Piano Quintets with Marc-André Hamelin, and piano quin-tets by Elgar and Amy Beach with Gar-rick Ohlsson. For their CDs on the Decca/London label, the Quartet has won three Gramophone Awards, a Grammy Award, three Japanese Record Academy Awards, Disc of the Year at the inaugural BBC Music Magazine Awards, and Ensemble Album of the Year at the Classical Brits.

The members of the Takács Quartet are Christoffersen Faculty Fellows at the Uni-versity of Colorado Boulder and play on instruments generously loaned to them by a family Foundation. The Takács is also a Visiting Quartet at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London.

The Takács Quartet was formed in 1975 at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest by Gabor Takács-Nagy, Károly Schranz, Gabor Ormai and András Fejér, while all four were students. It first received international at-tention in 1977, winning First Prize and the Critics’ Prize at the International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France. The Quartet also won the Gold Medal at the 1978 Portsmouth and Bordeaux Competitions and First Prizes at the Budapest Internation-al String Quartet Competition in 1978 and the Bratislava Competition in 1981. Violin-ist Edward Dusinberre joined the Quartet in 1993 and violist Roger Tapping in 1995. Vio-list Geraldine Walther replaced Mr. Tapping in 2005. In 2001 the Takács Quartet was awarded the Order of Merit of the Knight’s Cross of the Republic of Hungary, and in 2011 each member of the Quartet was awarded the Order of Merit Commander’s Cross by the President of the Republic of Hungary.

PROGRAM NOTES

String Quartet in G Major, K.387WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZARTBorn January 27, 1756, SalzburgDied December 5, 1791, Vienna

Soon after his arrival in Vienna in 1781, Mozart fell under the spell of Haydn’s quartets, and when Haydn published the six quartets of his Opus 33 the following year, the younger composer saw new ex-pressive possibilities in the form, He set about writing a cycle of six quartets of his

own, and these new works—his first quar-tets in nine years—would be far different from his divertimento-like early essays in that form. We normally think of Mozart as a fast worker, but he worked for three years on these quartets, revising and refining until he had them just the way he wanted, In his rather flowery dedication of them to Haydn, Mozart conceded that they were in-deed “the fruit of long and laborious toil.”

Yet this music hardly sounds labored; it flows with consummate ease, and these six quartets are among Mozart’s finest works, He completed the first of the set, in G Ma-jor, on December 31, 1782. There is nothing remarkable formally about the first three movements—a sonata-form opening move-ment, a minuet-and-trio, and a slow move-ment—but what distinguishes this music is the glorious writing for string quartet and the organic growth of simple thematic motifs. The Allegro is built around a lyric opening idea (note how Mozart dovetails fragments of that theme into the line even as the theme is still being announced) and a bouncy second subject presented by the second violin and which is itself derived from the opening theme. The graceful de-velopment of these ideas is often canonic in structure with the melodic line flowing easily between the four voices.

The minuet is massive, both in duration (surprisingly, this minuet is the longest movement in the quartet) and in scope. It features off-the-beat accents and themes built on long chromatic lines; its powerful trio, in G minor, leaps across unexpected intervals. The elegant Andante cantabile does indeed sing. Mozart was usually spar-ing in his use of the marking cantabile—he believed that all music should sing—but this movement seems to demand that marking. Its main idea, already ornate on its opening statement, grows more intense as the movement proceeds.

Most remarkable by far is the finale, which—while not strictly a fugue—is built on fugal material. It opens with the four-note tag that would later form the fugal opening of the finale of the “Jupi-ter” Symphony. Almost before this contra-puntal complexity is underway, Mozart introduces a second fugue subject, and then—just as a dazzling display of compo-sitional virtuosity—he combines the two fugue themes. The movement is actually in sonata-form, using fugal ideas as the contrasted material, and Mozart works out the movement with breathtaking ease. The very end may well be the most striking mo-ment of all: the music races to what sounds

like a cadence, but it is a false ending, and now Mozart produces the true conclusion, a simple restatement of the opening fugue subject, presented very quietly and—at the end—harmonized.

Mozart may have been impressed by Haydn’s string quartets, but now it was the older composer’s turn to repay the compli-ment, and he did that with the utmost sin-cerity. After hearing three of the quartets that Mozart dedicated to him performed at a garden party in Vienna in 1785, Haydn turned to Mozart’s father and exclaimed: “Before God and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.”

String Quartet No. 2 in D-flat Major, Opus 15

ERNST VON DOHNÁNYIBorn July 27, 1877, Pozsony, HungaryDied February 9, 1960, New York City

Ernst von Dohnányi made his reputation as pianist, and his tours through Europe and the United States established him, in Harold Schonberg’s words, as “one of the great pianists of the day.” Yet his reputa-tion as a composer rests today largely on his chamber works—two piano quintets, three string quartets, a wonderful ser-enade for string trio, a sextet, and several sonatas—a fact that is all the more remark-able when one learns that Dohnányi did not play a stringed instrument. But Dohnányi was drawn to chamber music, and he did something that the great piano virtuosos of his day rarely did: he performed a great deal of it, championing in particular ne-glected works of the 19th-century German repertory. This drew the attention of the great German violinist Joseph Joachim, who invited Dohnányi to join the faculty of the Hochschule in Berlin in 1905; it was during the following year, when Dohnányi was 29, that he composed his String Quartet No. 2 in D-flat Major.

Unlike his younger friends and compa-triots Bartók and Kodaly, Dohnányi was not drawn to a specifically Hungarian idiom, and his own music is rooted in the Germanic tradition. The aging Brahms had admired the Piano Quintet Dohnányi composed as a teenager and arranged its first performance in Vienna, and it is not surprising that Brahms’ influence can be heard in many of Dohnányi’s early works.

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But by the time he came to write the String Quartet in D-flat Major, Dohnányi was will-ing to experiment with the German tra-dition: the clear four-movement formal outline that had shaped the classical quar-tet from Haydn through Brahms blurs in Dohnányi’s Second Quartet, which is new in many ways: it is in three movements, there are unusual relations within and between these three movements, and the quartet moves to a curiously understated close, far from the firm sense of closure that is the usual destination of classical sonata form. Dohnányi does not, however, entirely abandon that tradition, and his Second Quartet is an intriguing blend of old and new, as the forms that had sustained German classical music for over a century began to evolve in the first decade of the 20th century.

In the first movement, Dohnányi pre-serves the notion of conflict central to so-nata form, but here the conflict is between several different tempos: the movement opens with the quartet’s main theme played Andante; this is promptly inter-rupted by a brief Allegro outburst; this in turn is followed by a brief and lyric theme-shape marked Adagio; and we then arrive at the main body of the movement, where the theme from the slow beginning is now transformed into the quick-paced central theme. From these contrasting themes at contrasting speeds, Dohnányi builds his opening movement, leaping between the different kinds of material as he goes; the movement concludes on a quiet restate-ment of the main theme, now recast in a very slow tempo.

The middle movement is a scherzo marked Presto acciacato. Every observer

is struck by the similarity between the opening of this movement and the open-ing of Wagner’s Die Walküre. The opera begins with a great tempest raging (Wag-ner marks the opening “Stormily”), and Dohnányi seems consciously to echo that music: in both the opera and this quartet movement, the music drives furiously forward, circling all the while around one note. Sir Donald Francis Tovey, a great ad-mirer of this quartet, hears “driving rain beating incessantly on the same spot” in this movement. Relief comes with the calmer central section, and the movement concludes with a return of the stormy opening material.

The last movement begins in the dark (and unexpected) key of C-sharp minor and at a very slow tempo, Molto adagio. Gradu-ally this accelerates to the central section, a spirited Animato that Dohnányi marks appassionato and which sends the first vio-lin soaring dramatically across its range. This movement is very difficult for the per-formers and very dramatic for the listen-ers: at one point Dohnányi marks the parts con tutta forza and drives the movement to its climax on great torrents of sound. This fury subsides, and now the opening theme of the first movement returns, first at its slow tempo, then fast, and the quartet comes to an unexpectedly peaceful close on a quiet D-flat Major chord.

String Quartet in F minor, Opus 80

FELIX MENDELSSOHNBorn February 3, 1809, HamburgDied November 4, 1847, Leipzig

Mendelssohn’s life was short, and its ending was particularly painful. Always a driven man, he was showing signs of exhaustion during the 1846–47 season, which included trips to London and con-ducting engagements on the continent. In May 1847 came the catastrophe: his sister Fanny, only 41, suffered a stroke and died within hours. She and her younger brother had always been exceptionally close—Mendelssohn collapsed upon learning of her death, and he never recovered. Wor-ried family members took him on vacation to Switzerland, where they hoped he could regain his strength and composure.

At Interlaken, Mendelssohn painted, composed the String Quartet in F minor, and tried to escape his sorrow, but with little success. An English visitor described his

last view of the composer that summer: “I thought even then, as I followed his fig-ure, looking none the younger for the loose dark coat and the wide brimmed straw hat bound with black crape, which he wore, that he was too much depressed and worn, and walked too heavily.” Back in Leipzig, Mendelssohn cancelled his engagements, suffered severe headaches, and was con-fined to bed. After several days in which he slipped in and out of consciousness, the composer died on the evening of Novem-ber 4. He was 38 years old.

Given the circumstances of its creation, one might expect Mendelssohn’s Quartet in F minor to be somber music, and in fact it is. It is the last of Mendelssohn’s quar-tets (and his last major completed work), but it has never achieved the popular-ity of his earlier quartets—the pianist Ignaz Moscheles found it the product of “an agitated state of mind.” Yet this quar-tet’s driven quality is also the source of its distinction and strength. One feels this from the first instant of the Allegro vivace assai (it is worth noting that three of the four movements are extremely fast): the double-stroked writing, even at a very quiet dynamic, pushes the music forward nervously, and out of this ominous rustle leaps the dotted figure that will be a part of so much of this movement. A more flowing second subject nevertheless maintains the same dark cast, and after a long develop-ment this movement drives to its close on a Presto coda.

The second movement, marked Allegro assai, is in ABA form: the driving outer sec-tions keep the dotted rhythm of the open-ing movement, while the trio rocks along more gently. The Adagio, the only move-ment not in a minor key, is built on the first violin’s lyric opening idea, The music rises to a somewhat frantic climax full of dotted rhythms before subsiding to close peace-fully. The finale, marked Allegro molto, pushes ahead on the vigor of its syncopat-ed rhythms, which are set off by quick ex-changes between groups of instruments. As in the first movement, there is more relaxed secondary material, but the prin-cipal impression here is of nervous energy, and at the close the music hurtles along triplet rhythms to an almost superheated close in which the F-minor tonality is af-firmed with vengeance. It is not a conclu-sion that brings much relief, and it speaks directly from the agonized consciousness of its creator.

—Program notes by Eric Bromberger

2018–19 SeasonSeason Announcement Wednesday, April 11

Season details available online Wednesday, April 18

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