Photo by Tero Ahonen


PROGRAM INFORMATION

Meta4 Quartet

Saturday, November 12, 2022
7:00 PM | The Studio


Artists


Antti Tikkanen, violin
Minna Pensola, violin
Atte Kilpeläinen, viola
Tomas Djupsjöbacka, cello


Program


KAIJA SAARIAHO (b. 1952):
Fleurs de neige (1998/2013)

 

AMY MARCY BEACH (1867–1944)
String Quartet, Op. 89 (1921/29)

 

KRISHNA NAGARAJA (b. 1975)
Stringar for string quartet (2020)

      Udelt takt
      Telespringar
      Valdresspringar

 

JEAN SIBELIUS (1865–1957)
Quartet in D minor, Op. 56 (Voces intimae) (1909)

      Andante – Allegro molto moderato
      Vivace
      Adagio di molto
      Allegretto (ma pesante)
      Allegro

 

 

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PROGRAM SUBJECT TO CHANGE. Please be considerate of others and turn off all phones and watch alarms. Photography and recording of any kind are not permitted. Thank you.                                                              


Program Notes


KAIJA SAARIAHO
Born in Helsinki, Finland, October 14, 1952
Fleurs de neige (1998/2013)

One of a generation of Finnish musicians with prominent international careers, Kaija Saariaho studied the visual arts before focusing on music. Her music often reflects visual thinking, with musical textures evolving from color and timber rather than from traditional tonal musical gestures or rhythm. Her language is highly refined, constantly evolving and colored by the electronics she began to incorporate into her music after resettling in Paris in 1982. The brief, poetic Fleurs de neige (Snowflakes) immediately draws us into Saariaho’s micro musical landscape. Fragments of themes are shared between the four instruments, each adding color and texture to the sound by bowing at varying distances from the instrument’s bridge, on either side of the bridge, with varying bow pressure, varying degrees of vibrato and finger pressure on the string, frequent use of harmonics, micro-intervals, trills, glissandi and other coloristic techniques. Fleurs de neige is, in effect, a miniature tone poem. The piece started life as the concluding movement of a 1998 suite for eight cellos. While pondering the musical textures opened up by this combination of instruments, Saariaho recalls that she “saw snowflakes falling from the dark sky of the Finnish autumn. Focusing on the snow, the idea of writing variations on it and its various forms became clearer in my mind.” 


AMY MARCY BEACH 
Born in Henniker, NH, September 5, 1867; died in New York City, December 27, 1944
String Quartet, Op. 89 (1921/29)

The idea of musical nationalism came later to North American composers than to the Europeans. However, there were stirrings of an interest in folksong by American classical composers before 1893, when Antonin Dvořák came up with his much-discussed endorsement of African American song as the basis for an American national music, later adding Indigenous American music. At the time, Edward MacDowell was already at work on his Second Orchestral Suite ("Indian"), Op. 48 (1891-5) on themes drawn from an 1882 publication by Theodore Baker titled On the Music of the North American Indians. Calling MacDowell’s pioneering composition “the one great epic of our Indian life,” the by then well-established Amy Beach was inspired to turn to the folk music of her own Anglo-Irish heritage between 1894 and 1896, while composing her grandly conceived Gaelic Symphony. In all, Beach was to incorporate folk song (Irish, English, Scottish, Balkan, African American) and Indigenous music found throughout the United States in some 30 compositions.

Five of these works by Beach are influenced by North American Indian and Inuit songs and music-making. The String Quartet was one of them. Sketched in 1921 as a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the artist’s retreat in New Hampshire (to whom she was to bequeath her royalties) and completed in Rome eight years later, the work is in a single movement. The quartet has an arch-like structure and is based upon three songs of the Alaskan Inuit drawn from Franz Boas’s 1888 monograph The Central Eskimo. A suspenseful introduction over a descending bass line leads into the poignant first theme from solo viola. This is the first Inuit melody (titled "Summer Song" by Boas) which is built around a five-note (pentatonic) scale. Almost as soon as the other instruments join in, a second Inuit theme ("Playing at ball") is heard from the first violin and immediately becomes material for extended, often chromatic development by the quartet. The A section of the A – B – C – B – A structure concludes with a revisiting of the "Summer Song" music. 

Dramatic chords herald the B section which draws from a third theme, "Ititaujang’s Song." This provides rich material for Beach’s contrapuntal style, together with further development of the second part of "Playing at ball." By keeping the focus on the relatively simple Inuit themes, Beach found herself paring back her formerly dense harmonic style, while maintaining a leaner, lighter contrapuntal development in and around her borrowed material. The quartet is often referred to as a turning point in her music. The C section is the centerpiece of the quartet as the third Inuit song unfolds into an intricate fugue, with all its material deriving from this productive source. Carefully structured, the material of the B section returns, before giving way to a revisiting of the quiet, reflective opening. The tension in the music now gradually unwinds as its taut chromatic harmonies are peacefully resolved.  

Amy Beach never heard a fully professional performance of her only String Quartet. She was too ill to travel to Washington, D.C. to a 1942 gala performance marking her 75th birthday.


KRISHNA NAGARAJA
Born in Foligno, Italy, July 9, 1975
Stringar for string quartet (2020)

Helsinki-based Italian-Indian violinist, violist, and composer Krishna Nagaraja performs baroque violin and viola and has developed a deep interest in traditional music from many cultures. After moving to Helsinki in 2012, he began to experiment with mixing folk music with the baroque and contemporary in original arrangements and compositions. Stringar is a recent three-movement string quartet, premièred by the Meta4 in May 2021, which is inspired by the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle springar folk tradition.      

The Hardanger fiddle is a traditional Norwegian fiddle, strung like a concert violin, with four or five additional resonating strings lying underneath the four bowed strings. Hardanger fiddles are also frequently beautifully crafted works of art in themselves, with ornate fingerboards and a carved figurehead at the top of the pegbox. The springar is a traditional three-beat Norwegian folk dance found in several regions (including Valdres and Telemark) in Southern Norway. Nagaraja says that his Stringar combines elements of Norwegian traditional music with Western art music, Indian rhythms, and even progressive metal and semi-improvisatory techniques. 

Composer Krishna Nagaraja takes up the story: “The first movement, Udelt takt (Undivided beat), explores the bouncy and lively springars from Southwestern Norway with an undivided beat and connects them with techniques as foreign as Southern Indian rhythms and progressive metal polymeters and odd time signatures. The second movement, Telespringar, takes the peculiar asymmetrical meters of springars from Telemark into a sound world where rhythm and time are conceived as elastic, malleable material, to be molded with micro-variations, pattern morphing, and guided improvisation on behalf of the performers. The third movement, Valdresspringar, is the musical depiction of a traditional farmhouse dancing night on the mountainous slopes of the Valdres region. Hypnotic tunes, unusual Hardanger fiddle scordaturas, a certain wild character of Valdres folk tunes and dance, everything evokes an enchanted atmosphere that slowly seizes and electrifies all the tired guests at the end of the long night of dancing. The energy grows more and more irresistible, it peaks as the fiddler lets out a joyful cry and powerfully stomps the foot on the floor, right before the first rays of the rising sun penetrate the dimly lit hall, and the music dies out sending everybody home. The dance is over.”


JEAN SIBELIUS (1865-1957)
Quartet in D minor, Op. 56 (Voces intimae) (1909)
            Andante – Allegro molto moderato
            Vivace
            Adagio di molto
            Allegretto (ma pesante)
            Allegro

By the end of his earliest music studies in Helsinki, the 23-year-old Sibelius was a modestly accomplished string player, a violinist whose love for chamber music was first nurtured in the family piano trio he formed with his brother Christian and sister Linda. Playing second violin in a string quartet in his hometown of Hämeenlinna, led to the earliest of three student quartets. His best-known chamber work, however, tonight’s D minor Quartet, comes from much later, falling between his Third and Fourth Symphonies when he was in his mid-forties. It’s his only mature quartet, although sketches for a subsequent quartet were worked into the Fourth Symphony. Plans for two further quartets came to nothing. 

The subtitle, Voces intimae, best translates as Inner Voices, rather than the more usual Intimate Voices. It derives from a note Sibelius penciled in the score of measure 20 of the central slow movement. At this point, three, intense, mysterious pianissimo E minor chords encapsulate the mix of pensive lyricism and sense of the ethereal that runs through the entire movement. This slow movement is the emotional center of gravity and structural heart of the quartet and one of Sibelius’s finest creations. The mood is at once probing yet comforting, nostalgic yet disciplined, combining the conversational-like quality of chamber music writing with the more rigorous inner thoughts that were beginning to reveal themselves in his symphonic writing. “Believe me,” Sibelius wrote in 1909, the year he composed the work, “with this quartet, I have left the training ship and gained my master’s certificate.” 

The central slow movement is framed by two scherzos. Beyond them lie the two outer movements. The symmetry of construction is typical of the composer. Similarly, the organic growth of the quartet’s thematic fragments (first introduced in a dialogue between the first violin and cello) represents Sibelius at his finest. The first two movements are linked (“a movement-and-a-half,” Sibelius called them in his diary) with the brief Vivace recalling the hushed, tremolando melodic writing of the symphonies. The counterpart of the first Scherzo is the robust, dance-like fourth movement, which begins with an earthy melody that is a distant relative of the main theme of the opening movement. The finale grows increasingly exuberant as it propels the work towards a decisive conclusion. Sibelius was happy with his D minor Quartet: “It turned out quite wonderful. It is the sort of thing that will make one smile, even on one’s deathbed,” he wrote to his wife. 

—Program notes (Saariaho, Beach, Sibelius) © 2022 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca


About the Artists


Meta4
Meta4, formed in 2001, is one of the most internationally successful Finnish string quartets. In 2004 it won the first prize in the International Shostakovich Quartet Competition in Moscow, and was also awarded a special prize for best Shostakovich interpretation. The quartet enjoyed continued success in 2007, when it won the first prize in the International Joseph Haydn Chamber Music Competition in Vienna. Later that year the Finnish Minister of Culture awarded Meta4 with the annual Finland Prize in recognition of an international breakthrough. Meta4 was selected as a BBC New Generation Artist for 2008–2010 and in 2013 the Fund of Jenny and Antti Wihuri awarded the quartet with a special prize in recognition of its work.

Meta4 performs regularly in key music capitals and concert halls around the world including Wiener Konzerthaus, Wigmore Hall and King’s Place in London, Auditorio Nacional in Madrid, Cité de la Musique in Paris and Stockholms Konserthus, and has recently also toured in Australia. Meta4 served as the quartet-in-residence at the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival from 2008-2016.

The quartet studied at the European Chamber Music Academy (ECMA) under Hatto Beyerle and Johannes Meissl. They have released three recordings on Hänssler Classics: Haydn’s String Quartets op. 55 1–3 (2009), which was awarded the esteemed Echo Klassik Award in 2010; Shostakovich’s String Quartets 3, 4 & 7 (2012), which received the 2012 Record of the Year award from the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE as well as the Emma prize (the Finnish Grammy) in the category of Classical Album of the Year; and Bartók’s String Quartets 1 & 5, released in 2014. The quartet has also released an album of Kaija Saariaho’s chamber music works (Ondine, 2013) and an LP of Sibelius’s String Quartet Voces Intimae (Berliner Meister Schallplatten, 2013).

The members of Meta4 play distinguished instruments, which include a Stradivarius, kindly on loan from the Finnish Cultural Foundation, a Carlo Bergonzi violin, kindly on loan from Signe and Ane Gyllenberg’s Foundation, and a cello made by Lorenzo Storioni in Cremona in 1780.

 

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