Dover Quartet with Marc-André Hamelin
Program
Anton Webern Langsamer Satz
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Quartet in D major, K. 575
I. Allegretto
II. Andante
III. Menuetto. Allegretto - Trio
IV. Allegretto
Marc-André Hamelin Piano Quintet
I. Moto perpetuo (interrotto)
II. Passacaglia
III. Intermezzo
IV. Rondo
Dover Quartet
Marc-André Hamelin
DOVER QUARTET
Joel Link, violin
Bryan Lee, violin
Julianne Lee, viola
Camden Shaw, cello
Named one of the greatest string quartets of the last 100 years by BBC Music Magazine and “the next Guarneri Quartet” by the Chicago Tribune, the two-time GRAMMY-nominated Dover Quartet is one of the world’s most in-demand chamber ensembles. The group’s awards include a stunning sweep of all prizes at the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition, grand and first prizes at the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition, and prizes at the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition. Its honors include the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award, and Lincoln Center’s Hunt Family Award. The Dover Quartet is the Penelope P. Watkins Ensemble in Residence at the Curtis Institute of Music and Quartet in Residence at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.
The Dover Quartet’s 2024-25 season includes premiere performances throughout North America of newly commissioned works by Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and a leading composer of American Indian classical music; collaborative performances with preeminent artists that include pianists Michelle Cann, Marc-André Hamelin, and Haochen Zhang; and tours to Europe and Asia. Recent collaborators of the sought-after ensemble include Leif Ove Andsnes, Emanuel Ax, Inon Barnatan, Ray Chen, Anthony McGill, Edgar Meyer, the Pavel Haas Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, and Davóne Tines. The quartet has also recently premiered works by Mason Bates, Steven Mackey, Marc Neikrug, and Chris Rogerson.
The Dover Quartet’s highly acclaimed three-volume recording, Beethoven Complete String Quartets (Cedille Records), was hailed as “meticulously balanced, technically clean-as-a-whistle and intonationally immaculate” (The Strad). The quartet’s discography also includes Encores (Brooklyn Classical), a recording of 10 popular movements from the string quartet repertoire; The Schumann Quartets (Azica Records), which was nominated for a GRAMMY for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance; Voices of Defiance: 1943, 1944, 1945 (Cedille Records); and an all-Mozart debut recording (Cedille Records), featuring Michael Tree, the late, long-time violist of the Guarneri Quartet. The quartet’s recording of Steven Mackey’s theatrical-musical work Memoir, recorded with the percussion group arx duo and narrator Natalie Christa Rakes, was released on Bridge Records in August 2024. A recording of the Tate commissions and Dvořák’s String Quartet in F major, Op. 96 (“American”) will be released in 2025 on Curtis Studio, the record label of the Curtis Institute of Music.
The Dover Quartet draws from the lineage of the distinguished Guarneri, Cleveland, and Vermeer quartets. Its members studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, the New England Conservatory, and the Conservatoire Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. They were mentored extensively by Shmuel Ashkenasi, James Dunham, Norman Fischer, Kenneth Goldsmith, Joseph Silverstein, Arnold Steinhardt, Michael Tree, and Peter Wiley. The Dover Quartet was formed at Curtis in 2008; its name pays tribute to Dover Beach by fellow Curtis alumnus Samuel Barber.
The Dover Quartet plays on the following instruments and proudly endorses Thomastik-Infeld strings:
Joel Link: a very fine Peter Guarneri of Mantua, 1710–15, on generous loan from Irene R. Miller through the Beare’s International Violin Society
Bryan Lee: Nicolas Lupot, Paris, 1810; Samuel Zygmuntowicz, Brooklyn, 2020
Julianne Lee: Robert Brode, 2005
Camden Shaw: Joseph Hill, London, 1770
DoverQuartet.com
On Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube @DoverQuartet
Curtis.edu/DoverQuartet
Pianist Marc-André Hamelin, a “performer of near-superhuman technical prowess” (The New York Times), is known worldwide for his unrivaled blend of consummate musicianship. He continues to amass praise for his brilliant technique in the great works of the repertoire, and for his intrepid exploration of the rarities of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. He regularly performs around the globe with the leading orchestras and conductors of our time, and gives recitals at major concert venues and festivals worldwide.
Mr. Hamelin’s 2024-2025 season began with recitals in Asia at the Beijing Concert Hall, Xi’an Concert Hall, Seoul Arts Center, and in duo recitals with Charles Richard-Hamelin in Tokyo, Yokohama and Fukuoka with later solo recitals in Gulangyu, Chengdu and the Shanghai Symphony Hall. European highlights include recitals in Warsaw, Ascona, Copenhagen, Toulouse, Cremona, Florence, Budapest, Detmold, Nijmegen, Herrenhausen, Ruhr, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie and London’s Wigmore Hall. Orchestral appearances include the RTVE Madrid, Bruckner Orchester Linz, and Prague Radio Symphony. He returned to São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra in the fall for Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23 and will return later in the season for a recital and Bernstein Symphony No. 2 and Rhapsody in Blue before touring with the orchestra to the Bogotá International Classical Music Festival.
In North America he returns to Carnegie Hall for Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with Bernard Labadie. Further orchestral appearances include the Cleveland Orchestra, Montreal Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, National Arts Center Orchestra in Ottawa and the orchestra of Quebec, Toledo, Amarillo and a complete Beethoven Concerti Cycle with the Edmonton Symphony. Recital highlights include San Francisco Performances, Music Toronto, Boston’s Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum, the Music Room at Caramoor and the University of Georgia Presents.
Summer 2024 included recitals at the Schubertiade, Deutschlandsberg, Banff Center, Vivace Festival, a duo recital with Charles Richard-Hamelin at Ottawa Chamberfest, and Liszt Piano Concertos 1 and 2 with Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Orchestre Metropolitain at Festival de Lanaudiere and Domaine Forget.
An exclusive recording artist for Hyperion Records, Hamelin has released 91 albums to date, with notable recordings of a broad range of solo, orchestral, and chamber repertoire. In October 2024, Hamelin released his recording of Beethoven’s imposing Piano Sonata in B flat major, ‘Hammerklavier,’ Op. 106, coupled with the earlier Piano Sonata in C major, Op. 2, No. 3 which received incredible critical acclaim.
Featuring nine original pieces, Hamelin’s 2024 album New Piano Works is a survey of some of his own recent works, exhibiting his formidable skill as a composer-pianist whose music imaginatively and virtuosically taps into his musical forebears. “His previous offerings of his own music were rich, but his latest self-portrait album is on another level,” wrote The New York Times, one of many outlets that wrote glowing reviews. It was Hamelin’s first album of all original compositions since Études (2010). In 2023, Hyperion released Hamelin’s recording of Fauré’s Nocturnes & Barcarolles, with the four-hand Dolly suite, played with his wife, Cathy Fuller. A double album of C.P.E. Bach’s Sonatas & Rondos was released in 2022, and another of William Bolcom’s Complete rags. Both received wide critical acclaim and chart success.
Hamelin has composed music throughout his career, most of which is published by Edition Peters, including his Études and Toccata on L’homme armé, the latter commissioned by the Van Cliburn Foundation. Hamelin performed the Toccata along with music by C.P.E. Bach and Bolcom in an NPR Tiny Desk concert in 2023. His latest compositions include a piano quintet, which he premiered in 2022 with the Dover Quartet, and the solo piano works Hexensabbat and Mazurka, the latter commissioned by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where the composer presented the first performance in spring 2024.
Hamelin makes his home in the Boston area with his wife, Cathy Fuller, a producer and host at Classical WCRB. Born in Montreal, he is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the German Record Critics’ Association, and over 20 of its quarterly awards. He has also received seven Juno Awards, 12 Grammy nominations, and the 2018 Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music. In December 2020, he was awarded the Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award for Keyboard Artistry from the Ontario Arts Foundation. Hamelin is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Québec, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada.
PROGRAM NOTES
ANTON WEBERN
Born in Vienna, Austria, December 3, 1883; died in Mittersill, Austria, September 15, 1945
Langsamer Satz (1905)
In 1905, Austrian composer Anton Webern was head-over-heels in love with his cousin, Wilhelmine Mörtl (soon to be his wife). That summer, they took a walking vacation in Lower Austria, just west of Vienna, an experience he described in effusive diary entries. Likely as an expression of his love, Webern composed the lushly romantic Langsamer Satz (Slow Movement) in Vienna later that summer. At the time, he was nearing the end of his first of four years of intensive private composition studies with Schoenberg.
Langsamer Satz was one of more than 100 finished and sketched student compositions and exercises Webern completed during his time with Schoenberg, most of which remained unpublished. Of the 24 documented unpublished string quartet movements, only Langsamer Satz, a String Quartet from 1905, and a Rondo from 1906 were posthumously published.
Published in 1965, the single-movement Langsamer Satz follows a three-part A-B-A structure with a coda. It inhabits the intense, nocturnal, and emotionally charged landscape of his teacher’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), composed six years earlier. Webern’s interweaving polyphonic lines reveal a close study of Brahms, while the work’s intoxicating, late Romantic harmonies mark a path he would soon abandon. Of his chosen medium for this love song, Webern later wrote to his brother-in-law: “Quartet playing is the most glorious music-making there is.”
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Born in Salzburg, Austria, January 27, 1756; died in Vienna, December 5, 1791
String Quartet in D, K. 575 (‘Prussian’) (1789)
As a patron of music, Frederick the Great – a music-mad monarch who even played the flute on the battlefield – was a hard act to follow. But his nephew, Friedrich Wilhelm II (1744–97), rose to the challenge. A keen cellist, he favored string quartets and quintets and amassed a library of nearly 2,500 instrumental parts. One year after ascending the Prussian throne, he appointed Boccherini as his court composer. Skilled performers joined his court orchestra, and Haydn dedicated his Op. 50 quartets to him. Ignaz Pleyel followed with no fewer than 12 quartets. Naturally, composers seeking royal favor highlighted the cello in their works.
In the spring of 1789, Mozart set his sights on a position at the Prussian court – or at least a commission from the King. Legend (and many history books) claim that after a three-month journey through Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin, and Prague, Mozart returned to Vienna disappointed, carrying only a small sum and a commission for what he later described in a letter to the Viennese textile merchant Michael Puchberg as “six easy clavier sonatas for Princess Frederike and six quartets for the King.”
Recent research, however, questions whether Mozart was ever received at Friedrich Wilhelm’s court in Potsdam. The commission for six quartets appears to have been a speculative venture by a composer in financial distress. By dedicating them to the King, Mozart hoped to secure payment upon publication. Not surprisingly, given the monarch’s interests, the four movements of today’s quartet give a prominent role to the cello – more so than in the other two quartets Mozart completed. He entered it in his catalog as “a quartet . . . for His Majesty, the King of Prussia.”
Throughout, Mozart continually rethinks instrumental balance, allowing voices to shift between solo and ensemble roles. K. 575 reveals a deepening of his musical language, far beyond the melody-and-accompaniment style typical of many contemporaries. Its serene, limpid quality and subtlety of expression place it among his finest quartets. Its creation, however, was not effortless. A year after visiting Potsdam, Mozart described to Puchberg the ‘troublesome task’ of writing what we now call the three ‘Prussian’ quartets. Surviving false starts to all three finales attest to his struggle. Yet the finale of the D major Quartet, with its intricate reworking of the first movement’s main idea, reflects Mozart’s relentless pursuit of innovation – an effort that belies the music’s fluent, effortless sound more than two centuries later.
— Mozart and Webern program notes copyright © 2025 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca
MARC-ANDRÉ HAMELIN
Born in Montreal, Quebec on September 5, 1961
Piano Quintet (2017)
Piano Quintet started from a commission in 2002 for the Scotia Festival of Music in Halifax for a 10 minute piano quintet, which gave birth to the passacaglia (slow second movement).
Later, 1st and 3rd movement resulted from another commission; the 3-movement version was premiered at Segerstrom Center, in California. A couple years later, he added a finale (rondo). In it's 3 movement version, it has been performed by the Pacifica and Doric Quartets, with Marc. It has only been performed by Marc and the Dovers in its final, four-movement form. It is a tonal piece, harmonically accessible, a throwback to Romanticism, (first movement is post-Romantic); the passacaglia is a series of variations, it's the darkest movement of the piece (somber); the third is an intermezzo, mostly for the quartet, the piano is very incidental, its lighthearted and carefree; and the final movement rondo is up-tempo and headlong.
