After nearly four decades of acclaimed performances at Stanford and around the world, the St. Lawrence String Quartet introduces the St. Lawrence Legacy Series. This new initiative, in partnership with Stanford Live, showcases three of today’s most celebrated string quartets—ranging from legendary ensembles to rising stars and fresh competition winners. Each group will spend a week on campus in a wide-ranging residency focused on mentorship, collaboration, and community engagement, culminating in a world-class performance at Bing Concert Hall.

Beethoven Quartet opus 18 #2

Beethoven's "early quartets", the six works published as Opus 18, were written during the closing years of the 18th century. In a sense they are very much creatures of that century. Beethoven in 1799 was a former student of Haydn's, a worshiper of Gluck, and an aspirer to the throne of the then-popular composer Luigi Cherubini. The biographer Maynard Solomon documents how, after hearing the Mozart c minor Piano Concerto, Beethoven turned to a fellow composer and exclaimed, "Cramer! Cramer! We shall never be able to do anything like that!" But he meant to try. Unlike the later Beethoven, the shatterer of creative molds and ways of musical thinking, this young newcomer to Vienna was bent on making his name in an established field, of doing the traditional forms as well anybody had ever done them (or, he hoped, better). To this end, the opus 18 quartets are brilliant pieces, brimming with character and impetuosity, yet residing largely within the expected structures and scope of a string quartet written by a Mozart or a Haydn, any time during the previous 25 years.

The second of these quartets, in G major, is a case in point. The music is genial, filled with sunlight. The first movement enters the room like an elegant stranger: courtly bows, witty conversation, suspenseful pauses. The writing for quartet here is very tightly knit; one of Beethoven's favorite devices, a unison statement followed by a silence, is to be found everywhere in the opus 18 quartets, and he exploits it to full rhetorical advantage in this opening, using it now as a challenge, now as a tease. The second melodic idea in the movement is disarmingly simple, stated in rhythmic unison, impeccable manners wed to clever repartee. Later in the movement, Beethoven puts on a mock show of learned seriousness, introducing a little fugue that builds in tension to a disapproving climax, followed by a shocked pause. After the quartet shuffles around, wondering how to put the pieces back together, the cello part pulls out a (metaphorical) trombone for three blasts, and the good times resume. The movement ends exactly as it began, with the same simple phrase and its teasing silences.

The slow movement is a cantilena, warm and intimate, wherein the first violin sings an aria of devotion, richly ornamented. We seem to be transported, for the time being, from the quartet chamber to the opera stage, where the soprano sings her love with coloratura flourishes. The closing statement of this first lyrical section is again a unison statement followed by pauses -- a whispered farewell. What happens next is an utter surprise: the same motif is turned into a lively game of catch, the lovers' cherished keepsake snatched up by friends nearby and tossed from hand to hand. This game lasts for all of sixty seconds, whereupon the calm aria resumes, now an enriched duet between first violin and cello.

The third movement, a playful Scherzo, harps almost single-mindedly on a single skipping rhythm throughout its main section. It is by turns graceful and elephantine, but remains entertaining throughout as it journeys through its many moods and keys. The stay-at-home trio section, by contrast, hardly leaves its C major house; the miracle here is that after starting out pompous and heavy-handed, the music sprouts triplet wings and flits from room to room.

The Finale opens with a single voice, the cello, inviting everybody to come out and play. This movement is all about games: copycat, hide-and-seek, leapfrog, and chase scenes, played at full speed. A favorite game is "guess my key" -- the music will seem to start out in one key, then think better of it all of a sudden and try again in a different one, evoking a childlike delight. The movement concludes with a bout of "Ring around the Rosie" and collapses in a triumphant heap.

© 2012 by Misha Amory

Bartók Quartet #4

In the late 1920s, Bartók was living in Budapest, and was starting to be known all over the world. Despite this fame, however, he remained an intensely private and introverted person. He was not fond of teaching or performing, although he had to do both to support his family. He spoke and wrote very little about his own compositions, preferring to let the music represent itself. The one topic that made his eyes light up was the collection and study of folk music -- Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian and even Arabian -- that had occupied him from his youth and continued to be central to his life. To Bartók's thinking, folk music was of more than scientific interest: it was the life-giving seed without which there was no way forward in musical creation. His ideal was to internalize the rhythms and contours of the folk melodies he collected, to a point where his own compositions were the natural result.

He composed his Fourth Quartet in 1928. Considered by many to be among his very greatest compositions, it represents in some sense an extreme case. Taut, economical, almost geometrical in its arguments, it is music that wastes not a single note, and thus conveys a kind of athletic exuberance. Everything about the piece betrays Bartók's obsession with mirror-images and symmetry, a hallmark of his mature style. In every movement one hears a melody in one voice, which is answered by the same melody upside-down in another voice . Elsewhere there are abundant examples of a motif answered by its duplicate on a different pitch, echoed back across the quartet. Once in a while a melody is even replied to by its retrograde: the same melody played backwards. These contrapuntal games are hardly unique to Bartók among composers, but he saturated this music with them to an unusual extent. The obsession with symmetry, imitation and mirror-reflection is so omnipresent that it virtually defines his style during these years.

Nor is the pursuit of symmetry confined to local neighborhoods: the entire, five-movement layout of the quartet is symmetrical as well. Bartók cast the piece in an "arch form," much as he did later in the Fifth Quartet and the Concerto for Orchestra. That is, he coupled the first movement with the fifth movement, and the second movement with the fourth movement, with the third movement standing alone as the work's solitary capstone. The paired movements share various characteristics: basic soundscape, motivic material, and emotional heft.

The outer movements are both lively, energetic and bold. The first movement, on the face of it, might seem somewhat more serious, developing its material inan orderly and considered fashion; one might even say that it is forbiddingly heavy in its dense textures and its forests of semitones. At the same time, though, there is an enormous energy in this movement's activity, and it has a positive, not a destructive, aspect; with every imitation, every reflected melody, every exclamatory chord, one hears the verve of new creation, of musical DNA being mapped and remapped. Central to the movement is a galloping six-note idea, consisting of three rising chromatic notes followed by three faster falling ones, which is first heard about ten bars in. This "motto" idea returns in the last movement and binds the piece together.

The fifth and final movement, for its part, is a rugged, stamping folk dance. The main melody of this movement reminds us Bartók's deep connection to folk music: a simple, primal idea that goes up and down four notes of an exotic scale. The accompanimental rhythms that punctuate the texture of the first section recall, superficially, the irregular and exciting rhythms in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring; undoubtedly Bartók sought here to evoke a rustic, vital energy of his own. In the central, more quiet episode of this movement, the galloping "motto" idea from the first movement starts to sneak back in, first in the cello part and eventually moving up through the whole quartet. The main material from the finale returns to do battle with this intruder, and they vie to the end of the movement, but the "motto" theme gets the last word, with an ending that resembles the first movement's conclusion, only in a more extended and emphatic form.

The second and fourth movements are lighter scherzo movements. The second movement is muted, weightless, and fleet, a four-way game of catch on fast- forward. The movement is mainly concerned with rapid-fire counterpoint -- the passing around of ideas; but at times it seems as if the music evaporates into pure texture, just a few cirrus clouds scudding about in the sky, before it descends back to the plane of reality. Other striking effects abound: glissandi that smear the canvas, the glassy sound of ponticello (playing near the bridge), harmonics and pizzicati.

The fourth movement is a close variant of the second; it is possible actually to map one movement onto the other, section by section. Here, however, the feet stay on the ground: this is a charming, somewhat rustic tableau wherein the quartet plays only pizzicato. We seem to have stumbled across a village scene where a band of four balalaika players (or perhaps cimbaloms) are entertaining the locals. The strings are often strummed back and forth, guitar-like, and sometimes snapped harshly against the fingerboard: the celebrated "Bartók pizzicato."

The third movement foreshadows, in its atmosphere and role, the same movement in the Concerto for Orchestra, still fifteen years in the future. This is night music, solitary and mournful. A chord fades in, note by note, at the beginning, and becomes a backdrop for a melody in the cello part, which sings, weeps, and yodels, questing ever upward through three ascending verses. The first violin responds: nervous, improvised, altogether more airborne, a winged creature expressing its own very different frame of mind. Gruffly, the second violin cuts in, having its own say on the G-string, bringing the movement to its point of greatest intensity; and the outer voices effect a kind of return, singing sorrowfully in mirror-image canon. At last the first violin flutters off into oblivion, and the chord that ushered in the movement fades away again, once more note by note.

© Mark Steinberg

Beethoven Quartet opus 18 #1

Beethoven’s opus 18 quartets are his earliest compositions for the medium, written in the closing years of the 18th century, when he was in his late twenties. The 1790s were a period of dense chamber music productivity for the composer: he composed about two dozen important chamber works in these few years, including his early piano trios, five string trios, some early violin sonatas and cello sonatas, and the popular Septet.

Beethoven was not an effortless creator, transcribing masterpieces fully formed from his head to the paper. Sketches for countless compositions, still available to us, betray the struggles he underwent to arrive at a work’s final form. In the case of Beethoven’s F Major Quartet, opus 18 #1, not only were there numerous sketches and attempts to evolve ideas for melodies, but also an entire, completed first incarnation of the piece, which the composer sent as a gift to his friend Karl Amenda. However, within a few weeks, he had a change of heart, and asked Amenda to show the work to no-one, for in the meantime he found that he had truly learned how to write a string quartet. And he generated a new version of the piece, which, taken broadly, seems very close to the earlier version, but in fact has been altered almost in every bar, in a thousand details of orchestration, harmonization, rhythm, texture and dynamic. In point of fact, the second version is a big improvement over the original, not only from a point of view of craftmanship, but also as an expressive vehicle; and it was the new version that he published with its five companion pieces as opus 18.

It would be impossible not to compare the opus 18 quartets to the mature quartets of Joseph Haydn and Mozart, and innumerable critics, musicologists and historians have certainly done so. The young Beethoven was briefly the counterpoint student of Haydn, who wrote his most celebrated quartets just a couple of years before the opus 18s were written; and Beethoven was certainly acquainted with some of Mozart’s greatest quartets. The opus 18 quartets, particularly opus 18 #1, have Haydn’s stamp deeply imprinted on them, in respect to their geniality, innovation and wit. However, there is another layer to these early chamber works of Beethoven, a kind of hard-edged brilliance or impetuosity, which one does not encounter in Haydn’s music. It is probably meaningless to describe a composition as sounding “young”, but listening to Beethoven’s early quartets, we can’t help being aware of his impatience and ambition at this time in his life, his eagerness to prove his worth.

From a player’s point of view, these demands of brilliance and impetuous character make themselves felt at once. In opus 18 #1’s first, third and fourth movements, all of which are essentially genial and sunny, we need to grapple with Beethoven’s quite rapid tempo markings, bravura passage work, rather complex contrapuntal writing and uncompromising unisons; at the same time, the work is a child of the classical period, and requires the same symmetry, grace and transparency as a quartet of Haydn or Mozart. The rather extraordinary second movement is another story. In this movement, according to one of Amenda’s letters, Beethoven sought to depict, in musical terms, the tomb scene of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Beethoven’s choice of key, d minor, hearkens back to Mozart’s stormy and tragic associations with that key. But Beethoven’s treatment of the string quartet goes beyond what Mozart’s own great d minor Quartet attempted. In that earlier work, especially in the first movement, grief is the enveloping entity, surrounding all musical events; but in Beethoven’s quartet we are asked to confront tragedy head-on, almost as an adversary. The opening is hushed, yet there is a feeling of heaviness in the steady rhythm of the accompaniment that oppresses the whispered theme. Although sweeter passages intervene, suggesting remembrance of happier times, there is never any doubt as to the movement’s ultimate message. Particularly in the middle and in the coda, where the quartet is whipped up to a frenzy, denoting a truly Beethovenian raging against fate, it is clear that we have left the classical era behind, in some expressive sense, and we get a foretaste of what this composer will become in his later years.

Thus almost uniquely among his quartets, opus 18 #1 is a window affording a glimpse of Beethoven at a turning point. We hear Beethoven the student, absorbing and imitating Haydn’s wit and capacity for surprise, as well as his prowess in quartet writing; Beethoven the classicist, handling standard structures with well-proportioned elegance and showcasing his melodic gifts, as he had done in several other works already; and Beethoven the self-determining artist, seeking to stamp his own voice ever more strongly on music that otherwise dwells within the formal constructs of his predecessors.

© Note by Misha Amory