DUNKELD FESTIVAL OF MUSIC
Sunday 14 – Tuesday 16 April 2013
Friday 19 – Sunday 21 April 2013
Program notes for major Festival repertoire
Australian String Quartet with guest artists
Elizabeth Layton / violin
Marshall McQuire / harp
Ashley William Smith / clarinet
Timothy Young / piano
DAY 1
8.00pm
Opening concert
Myers Gallery
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Première rhapsodie for clarinet and piano
By 1909 Debussy was a leading figure in French musical life. His orchestral pieces were
widely performed beyond France; his opera Pelléas et Melisande had appeared in 1902 and
was recognised for its quietly revolutionary qualities. He was made a Chevalier de la Légion
d’Honneur in 1903, and the Société Musicale Indépendante was set up in 1910 by a group of
composers partly to provide a platform for Debussy’s music. In 1909 was elected to the
Superior Council, an artistic advisory body of the Paris Conservatoire then under Fauré’s
direction.
Debussy’s major projects at this time include the Images for orchestra, the first book of
Preludes for piano, and work on his unfinished opera The Fall of the House of Usher and
other works for the stage, such as the ballets Jeux and Khamma, and the incidental music to
D’annunzio’s Le martyre de Saint-Sébastien. In late 1909-1910, as part of his duties on the
Superior Council, Debussy composed his Première rhapsodie for clarinet and piano as an
examination piece for students at the Conservatoire. (The Petite pièce for clarinet and piano,
also written at this time, was a sight-reading exercise.) One of the examiners, Debussy had
to sit through eleven performances of this piece in one day. Predicably, he later noted, most
were ‘straightforward and nondescript’, but the piece was one for which Debussy
maintained considerable affection. The published work is dedicated to professional
clarinettist Prosper Mimart, with ‘a sign of sympathy’, but after Mimart’s public premiere of
the work Debussy said, without irony, that it was one of his works that pleased him most.
An examination piece will, inevitably, seek to display the performer’s mastery of elegant
phrasing and lyrical expression, and contrast this with brilliance and virtuosity. Debussy
fulfils the brief admirably, but rather than simply creating a work of two contrasting sections
on the ‘adagio and presto’ model, he devises a sophisticated rondo-like form, meaning that
contrasting sections can be seen, as it were, from different vantage points. There are four
principal thematic ideas, whose markings indicate the incrementally faster tempo of each:
rêveusement lent, poco mosso, modérément animé and scherzando. The piece thus has a
mercurial, quasi-improvised feel, and allows the soloist to show a huge range of timbre and
technical facility. As Pierre Boulez has said of Debussy’s music in general, it ‘is sensitive
music, but it is very often on the verge of erupting’.
Gordon Kerry © 2012
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Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
String Quartet in C minor, op 110 no 8
Largo
Allegro molto –
Allegretto –
Largo –
Largo
In 1960 Shostakovich travelled to Dresden. He was so shocked by the destruction wrought
by Allied bombing in 1945 that he wrote his Eighth Quartet, dedicated ‘to the victims of
fascism and war’ over three days in a fever of grief. But against this ‘official’ description of
the Eighth Quartet, Shostakovich wrote in a letter to his friend Isaak Glikman:
It is a pseudo-tragic quartet, so much so that while I was composing it I shed the same
amount of tears as I would have to pee after half a dozen beers... This was of course a
response not so much to the pseudo-tragedy as to my own wonder at the superlative unity
of form.
In 1960, Shostakovich had also finally bowed to official pressure to join the Communist
Party. After Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956 there was a certain liberalisation, but the
Party needed the ‘voluntary’ support of the intelligentsia. The chronically-ill Shostakovich
was seemingly ripe for the picking.
Were the work a simple elegy for the victims of fascism, would it be so dominated by
Shostakovich’s musical monogram, the notes D, E flat, C and B (DSCH)? The motif’s tautness
ensures a degree of chromatic tension, both in the inexorable counterpoint of the opening
movement and the violent dance of death that is the second – but also suggests that the
composer is writing about himself. And there are quotations from at least four of
Shostakovich’s symphonies, the Second Piano Trio and the Cello Concerto: in the fourth
movement Shostakovich quotes a revolutionary song ‘Exhausted by the hardships of prison’
and, in the cello’s highest register, an aria of erotic yearning from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
In the finale, moreover, there are reminiscences of Tchaikovsky and Wagner. Why, as David
Fanning asks, does ‘every one of its quoted themes *have+ either a sadder or a more violent
character than it had in its source-work’?
The officials heard the piece as an indictment of fascism; cold warriors were equally
convinced that it damned the Soviet state. The doom-laden moods of the largo movements,
the violence of the second and acidic irony of the third make a number of interpretations
possible, but Shostakovich was plainly enduring some self-disgust at his co-option by the
State, as a result becoming, as it were, both victim and perpetrator. In 1960 he seriously
considered suicide; this quartet was to have been his final, ambiguous testament.
Gordon Kerry © 2006/09
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DAY 2
11.30am
Morning concert
Penshurst Catholic Church
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
String Quartet in E flat major, op.33 no.2 (Hob.III: 38), The Joke
Allegro moderato
Allegro (scherzo)
Largo sostenuto
Presto (finale)
In December 1781 Viennese society feted the visiting Count and Countess von Norden with
musical entertainments, among them a cycle of Gluck operas, a piano contest between
Mozart and Clementi, and a public performance of at least some of Haydn’s string quartets
opus 33. After the performances, the quartet players each received a snuff-box, and Haydn,
as composer, a ‘magnificent enamelled box set with brilliants.’ The ‘von Nordens’ were, in
fact, the Grand Duke Paul of Russia (and later Czar), and his wife, the Princess of
Württemberg, travelling under assumed names, but it is for this reason only that the set is
sometimes nicknamed the ‘Russian Quartets’. Haydn had composed the set some months
earlier and offered manuscript copies to several patrons.
From the 1760s, each Haydn quartet consists of four movements, where the outer ones
frame two central movements that form a contrasting pair (a song-like slow movement and
a dance-like fast one). But, twenty years on, in his covering letter to his patrons, Haydn
claims that the works of op.33 were composed ‘in a new and special way’. This, as
musicologist Charles Rosen has noted, was not just a ‘commercial slogan’ (though it was
that, too): here ‘not only is each instrumental part filled with life…but with the same life’
making them sound, in the poet Goethe’s phrase, ‘like four intelligent people having a
conversation’. We hear this early in the first movement of op.33 no.2, where the cello takes
up a motif from the first violin.
Conversation, for an eighteenth century person of culture, involved wit. In these works
Haydn brings together a populist lightness of touch with his rigorously intricate formal
designs. In four of the six quartets of op.33 the internal ‘dance’ movement is headed
scherzo, or ‘joke’, to distinguish it from the more stately minuet that it replaces and here as
in many cases, the movement’s central trio section is the locus of the unsophisticated
peasant humour which Haydn regarded proudly as his heritage. The slow movement,
unusually for him, is Largo (that is slower than his more usual moderate andante) and begins
with a rich duet from viola and cello. The reason this particular work has been nicknamed
‘The Joke’ comes in the finale, a boisterous rondo in 6/8, which just before the end becomes
suddenly slow and mock-solemn, and then the main theme, broken by dramatic silences,
skips off into the distance.
Gordon Kerry © 2013
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André Caplet (1878-1925)
Conte fantastique after Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death
(for harp and string quartet)
André Caplet is best known now as Debussy’s indispensable colleague. He orchestrated
piano works such as the Children’s Corner Suite and the scoring of The Martyrdom of Saint
Sebastian was largely his work. He also made a number of reductions of orchestral works,
such as the two-piano version of La Mer, and was a renowned conductor in France and the
US, especially famed for his interpretation of Pelléas et Mélisande.
Like Debussy, who planned an opera on The Fall of the House of Usher, Caplet was a fan of
Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction. In 1908 he composed Légende for harp and orchestra, inspired by
Poe’s Gothic fable, The Masque of the Red Death. The orchestral score was lost for many
years, but in 1922 Caplet had made this version for harp and string quartet.
The story, reflected in the music, tells of a country in which a hideous plague that causes
pain, bleeding from the pores and dissolution with half an hour, is raging. The ruling Prince
Prospero responds by gathering up 1000 of his courtiers and retreating to a heavily fortified
and well-provisioned castle. There, in rooms decorated in rainbow colours, were ‘all the
appliances of pleasure’, where after six months the Prince holds a masked ball. In keeping
with the ball’s theme of grotesquerie, one of the rooms is furnished in black, lit by tripods
holding torches, and in it stands a gigantic ebony clock whose chime causes listeners to grow
pale and confused. One guest appears, ‘tall and gaunt, shrouded…in the habiliments of the
grave’ and covered in blood. The Prince, appalled at this show of bad taste, rushes after the
guest who retreats to the black room and turns to reveal himself as the Red Death incarnate.
The Prince and, after him, all the courtiers fall dead, and the clock ceases to chime.
Caplet’s is very much a work of the decade whose ‘harp wars’ produced Debussy’s Deux
Danses and Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro, but while his harmony suggests both
composers at various times, he makes his own striking innovations. The harp, unusually,
exploits dark and disquieting sounds, at first, as well as depicting the glittering ball scene and
later the ghostly chime of the clock. The string writing includes extended techniques that
became standard in subsequent decades, and the coup-de-théâtre is the use of the harp’s
resonating chamber to evoke a scary knock on the door.
Gordon Kerry © 2013
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DAY 2
2.30pm
Afternoon concert
Mt Sturgeon Woolshed
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Clarinet Quintet in B minor, op 115
Allegro
Adagio
Andantino – Presto non assai, ma con sentimento
Con moto – un poco meno mosso
In 1891, the 58 year-old Brahms began to feel that he had completed his life’s work; he
would write no more orchestral music, and had brought his chamber music to a pinnacle in
the String Quintet, Op.111. He began to put his personal affairs in order, but, fortunately,
circumstances inspired him to compose more.
In 1885, he had travelled to the German city of Meiningen, where the reigning Duke
supported a theatre with an orchestra directed by the likes of Hans von Bülow, Richard
Strauss and, later, Max Reger. Brahms was honoured with performances of his own music,
notably the wildly successful premiere of the Fourth Symphony. In 1891 Brahms returned to
Meiningen, and was struck by the excellent sound and technique of Richard Mühlfeld, the
orchestra’s principal clarinettist. Brahms simply stated that the instrument could not be
played more beautifully.
Brahms returned to Austria to spend the summer at the village of Ischl, and from there
wrote to his assistant, Eusebius Mandyczewski, enclosing the score of the Clarinet Trio,
Op.114. Brahms went on to say that the trio was ‘the twin to a far greater folly’, which he
was currently ‘feeding up’, a reference, of course, to the Clarinet Quintet.
The Quintet is certainly a work of greater amplitude and scale than the Trio, and is suffused
with what Edward Said, discussing late style in general, described as a ‘mature subjectivity,
stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest
assurance it has gained as a result of age’. The opening movement is an Allegro but one
purged of any sense of strenuous activity; in a lilting 6/8 time, its assertive episodes are
relatively few and set off against long melodies, frequently given out by the clarinet, that
quietly stress dissonance on strong beats, and patches of bright stillness. The Adagio, which
often features the introverted sounds of muted strings, derives from its simple opening
motif – a repeated, falling, three-note figure – that forms a dramatic contrast with more
passionate episodes in which the clarinet leads with florid writing that may reflect Brahms’
early love of Hungarian music.
After the often turbulent and dark-hued Adagio, the Andantino offers a gentle lyricism, with
an only slightly faster, dance-like trio section. The finale is a theme and variations whose
potentially limitless expansion is brought back to earth by a very slow statement of the
opening movement’s first theme.
© Gordon Kerry 2013
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DAY 2
6.30pm
Gala Concert
Myers Gallery
Ross Edwards
Arafura Dances (1994-95)
Arranged for harp and string quartet (2006)
Arafura Dances is in three movements: a lyrical and expressive adagio framed by two
pulsating maninyas (Australian dance chants) in which references to a variety of Australasian
and Pacific musical cultures are woven into a fabric of insect rhythms and drones. Edwards,
clearly under the spell of Darwin and Australia’s Northern Territory as he composed, refers
to “the turquoise Arafura Sea” as a constant backdrop. Other influences include flora and
fauna of the region and the colourful Macassan sailing boats in Darwin’s Maritime Museum.
Edwards also mentions a photograph “of a gloriously flowering Red Bud Mallee against a
deep blue sky”, an image he likes to think is “somehow inlaid in the music”.
Originally composed as a Guitar Concerto for John Williams, who gave the first performance
with the Darwin Symphony in 1995, Ross Edwards arranged the work for string quartet
especially for performance at the 2006 Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville,
where it was performed for the first time by Marshall McGuire (who also transcribed the
guitar part for harp) and the Goldner String Quartet. He has also toured the work nationally
with the ASQ.
Note: The Adagio from Arafura Dances will be played at Dunkeld
Robert Schumann (1810-1853)
Piano Quintet in E flat, op 44
Allegro brilliante
In modo d’una marcia – un poco largamente
Scherzo: molto vivace
Allegro ma non troppo
In early 1842, Clara Schumann was on a concert tour, but Robert, feeling like a mere
handbag, returned to Leipzig and buried himself in beer, champagne and composition. He
believed that ‘a master of the German school must know his way around all the forms and
genres’, so had concentrated exclusively on single genres around 1833. Again, from the time
of his marriage in 1840, he spent roughly a year each on songs, orchestral, chamber, choral
and dramatic music. He also understood the need to transform himself in the public mind
from a pianist and critic into a serious composer. Shortly before the ill-fated tour, he had
begun thinking about chamber music; in Clara’s absence made a thorough study of the string
quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and began the composition of his own works in
the medium. The three String Quartets, opus 41, were written in under two months,
followed soon after by the composition of the Piano Quartet and Piano Quintet. It is a
measure of Schumann’s ongoing jealousy of Clara’s success that he insisted that she, as a
woman, could not possibly have understood the music (even though she described as a
‘magnificent’ work ‘full of energy and freshness’). Moreover, one man whose good opinion
Schumann especially sought was Franz Liszt, who arrived in Leipzig one day and insisted on
hearing the piece. The story goes that Clara successfully scoured the city for four string
players who could come at short notice, only to have Liszt dismiss the piece as
‘kapellmeisterisch’. And it was the Kapellmeister whom Liszt was burlesquing, Felix
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Mendelssohn, who is said to have stepped in at the last minute and sight-read the piece
when Clara fell ill on the night of its first performance.
It is generally reckoned Schumann’s best chamber work, as the balance between string
quartet and piano is even, and allows for a contrast of full, almost ‘orchestral’, sound with
much more delicate textures. The first movement is not marked brilliante for nothing,
maintaining its initial burst of joyous energy for its entire length. The second movement, ‘in
the manner of a march’, has led to some comparisons with Mahlerian funeral marches while
the scherzo regains the brilliance of the first movement in its rippling scale passages. The
finale, likewise, is substantial and virtuosic, and Schumann concludes with a restatement of
some of the first movement’s opening theme.
Gordon Kerry © 2009
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DAY 3
10.00am
Morning concert
Mt Sturgeon Woolshed
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Clarinet Quintet in A major, K581
Allegro
Larghetto
Menuetto - Trio I – Menuetto – Trio II - Menuetto
Allegretto con variationi [1-4] - Adagio [5] - Allegro [6]
The modern clarinet appeared in the early 18th century but only by the 1780s was it
commonly found in orchestras. And not all orchestras, as a remark in a letter that Mozart
wrote in 1778 from Mannheim, home of one of the greatest orchestras in Europe, to his
father in Salzburg makes clear: ‘Alas. if only we, too, had clarinets...’
Mozart would, of course, go on to produce some of the greatest solo and chamber
masterpieces for members of the clarinet family, and his use of their distinctive timbres in
operas, symphonies and the Requiem marks a new era in orchestration. Three works, the
‘Kegelstatt’ trio, the late Clarinet Concerto and the Quintet, K581, all grew out of Mozart’s
professional and personal relationship with Anton Stadler, one of two brothers who were
the leading clarinettists in Vienna at the time. Stadler’s prestige meant extensive travel, for
instance to Prague in Mozart’s final year to play the prominent clarinet parts in the opera La
clemenza di Tito. He was also a brother Freemason, and contrary to the image of Mozart as
perpetually in debt, was someone to whom the composer loaned considerable sums. But he
also made technical innovations to the instrument, such as changing the shape of fingerholes and adding more keys to allow for more reliable chromatic playing, and almost
certainly helped develop what he called a ‘bass clarinet’. This, now known as a basset
clarinet to distinguish it from the modern bass, had a slightly extended ‘chalumeau’, or
lower register, in which the tuning was more reliable and the tone-colour more beautiful
than in contemporary instruments, and it was for this clarinet that Mozart composed
‘Stadler’s Quintet’ in 1789.
Music of quiet authority, the first movement’s simple first theme is given out by the strings
and answered by more elaborate figures from the clarinet; at the movement’s recapitulation
the relationship is reversed, providing variety and balance. The clarinet frequently takes the
music from major to pensive minor modes in the movement’s development section. The
Larghetto is a serene Mozartian aria, though not without darker implications. The Menuetto
redresses the balance, featuring the strings, especially in the first of two trio sections, which
omits the clarinet; in the second, the clarinet leads a deceptively simple bucolic dance. The
finale is a set of variations on a chirpy, ‘vernacular’ theme that passes through a full gamut
of emotions and textures.
Gordon Kerry © 2013
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