Program Note
Reprintable only with permission from the author. When Haydn published his Op. 33 quartets and claimed he had written them in a “new and special style” it was neither an empty boast nor necessarily particularly newsworthy; every new work the master wrote seems to reveal further, unforeseen facets of his fertile imagination. Haydn, often lauded […]
Program Note
Like The Marriage of Figaro, the quartet is built around the key of D major: in Mozart’s music this is often a radiant place, shot through with life and joy.
Program Note
Listeners disagree on the flavor of the A-flat Quartet, composed on both sides of the Atlantic; some claim to hear persistent American strains in it, some hear an affirmation of the composer’s Slavic roots, some just hear an expat yearning for home.
Program Note
As a young man, Joseph Haydn took a job improvising for a comic actor, a sort of vaudeville performer, and was called upon to illustrate musically the character’s antics and physical comedy, apparently with great success. He was a man of the theater. At the time that the quartets of Op. 33 were published it had been nine years since Haydn’s previous set of quartets, and he, famously, announced that the publication of the six quartets of Op. 33 heralded a “new and special style.”
Program Note
Haydn Quartet opus 20 #2 Haydn’s Quartet in C Major, Op. 20 No. 2 seems much like a palimpsest. In an often florid and elegant work in many respects typical of the classical period, the faded hand of the baroque still shows through. And the composer engages in a kind of game with this faded, […]
Program Note
Reprintable only with permission from the author. Ravel String Quartet Igor Stravinsky famously said, “Good composers borrow…but great ones steal.” He might have been speaking of his one-time friend and associate Maurice Ravel. Ravel’s youthful String Quartet, written in 1902, owes an immense and inarguable debt to Claude Debussy’s Quartet from nine years earlier, both […]