LEOŠ JANÁČEK 
String Quartet No. 1, "Kreutzer Sonata", JW VII/8 (1923)

Adagio - Con moto           
Con moto
Con moto ­- Vivo - Andante
Con moto (Adagio) - Piú mosso

Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata provided Czech composer Leoš Janáček with the starting point for the first of his two string quartets.  He wrote the work in a little more than a week in 1923, reworking music from a much earlier piano trio based on the same literary source.  Three years earlier, Janáček had explored a closely related theme in his opera Káťa Kabanová – the unhappily married woman who seeks happiness, finds an unworthy lover, and dies tragically.  With the First Quartet, Janáček gave this subject its most concentrated chamber-music form.

Tolstoy’s tale of passion, jealousy, and violence is narrated by Pozdnyshev, a possessive husband who becomes convinced that his wife’s musical partnership with a violinist masks an affair.  Driven by suspicion, he murders her with a dagger.  Janáček, however, identifies not with Tolstoy’s polemical stance but with the unnamed wife.  “I had in mind a poor woman, tormented, beaten, battered to death,” he wrote to Kamila Stösslová, his confidante and would-be mistress.  Composer Josef Suk, then second violinist of the Czech Quartet, recalled that Janáček conceived the work as “a kind of moral protest against men’s despotic attitude to women.”  Where Tolstoy claimed music exerted “the most immoral effect,” Janáček used music “to the exactly opposite effect – as the voice of the conscience of humanity.”

Janáček does not follow the novella’s plot step by step, nor does he portray its characters literally.  Instead, he draws on its raw emotional charge, juxtaposing fragments and gestures in a fiercely compressed musical language.  The quartet opens with a poignant, pleading theme associated with the wife – possibly colored by a Moravian folk inflection – which returns like a motto throughout.  A more aggressive idea dominates the first movement, embodying the overbearing husband.  The scherzo-like second movement introduces polka rhythms and the elegant violinist Trukhachevski.  The third movement alludes to Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, played by the lovers in Tolstoy’s story.  In the finale, Pozdnyshev’s jealousy erupts, but the work closes as allusions to earlier music are dominated by the poignant, pleading theme of the opening – a powerful musical image of the dying wife. 

SHULAMIT RAN
Betwixt and Between – String Quartet No. 4 (2023-4)

Upheaval
Sway
Supplication

Co-Commissioned by the Philharmonie de Paris and composed for the Jerusalem String Quartet in 2025 on the occasion of their 30th anniversary.

Israeli-American composer, Shulamit Ran is now the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago Department of Music where she taught since 1973.  She writes:

“Betwixt and Between is comprised of three contrasting movements of quite diverse character.  Upheaval is rather volatile, traversing a wide range of moods and expressive ‘types.’  The second movement, Sway, has the feel and the motion of a dance.  In the score, I marked it as ‘quasi-Latin dance.’  It was also about the compositional challenge of continuously varying extremely limited melodic and harmonic cells (first Eb-D, then C#-D-Eb, etc.) that gradually expand in scope and grow in excitement yet ultimately disintegrate.  Concluding the quartet is Supplication, the work’s slow movement, part dark musings, part chorale, culminating in an intense plea.

“There are some important recurring musical ideas that return at key points and function in ways that tie the composition as a whole.  The first of these occurs at the very beginning: the interval of a perfect fourth (B-F#) that undulates back and forth.  It is the interval itself but also very much the undulating motion that become recognizable when returning.  The second is a brisk unison phrase for the four instruments notable for its decisive dotted rhythm.   It appears at a key point in the first movement, opens the second, and returns toward the end of the quartet.  It has an abrupt quality, and it is only in its last iteration that its function becomes clear.  Finally, there is a series of column-like chords (marked in the score as ‘Stately’) occurring late in the first movement and evolving into a central element in the latter part of the last movement as it draws to its fervently pleading conclusion.

“Betwixt and Between is not a programmatic work and was not intended to convey an extra-musical message.  However, it was commissioned by the Jerusalem Quartet (for the occasion of its 30th anniversary) and composed in its entirety after the horrific events of October 7, 2023.  Inevitably, the pain and untold human suffering of so many on both sides accompanied the process of creating this composition from its first to last note.” — Shulamit Ran

MAURICE RAVEL

String Quartet in F (1902-3)

Allegro moderato - très doux                            
Assez vif (très rythmé) - Lent - Tempo 1
Très lent
Vif et agité

Debussy’s String Quartet had already redrawn the map of French chamber music when the 28-year-old Maurice Ravel turned to the genre a decade later. Studying with Gabriel Fauré but working on his own terms, Ravel completed his String Quartet in 1903.  Debussy’s influence is unmistakable – Eastern exoticism, modal inflections, richly scored textures, not to forget a pizzicato second movement.  Yet the voice is different: leaner, more pointed, and already unmistakably Ravel.

Both Ravel and Debussy followed Franck’s lead in using a single theme, transformed both melodically and harmonically throughout all four movements.  Although generally freer in his use of the cyclical principle, with each appearance of the theme, Ravel makes subtle changes, creating a constantly shifting sound world.  Critics were quick to comment on the similarity of his quartet with that of Debussy following the première March 5, 1904.  They divided themselves and the followers of the composers, into two polarized camps.  From this point on, the relationship of these two revolutionary French composers was to grow uneasy.  Nevertheless, when Fauré criticized Ravel’s finale as a failure, Debussy was magnanimous in the way he reassured Ravel shortly before the première: “In the name of the gods of music and in my name too, do not alter a thing in your quartet."  He was backed up the following month by Jean Marnold, critic for Le Mercure de France, who wrote: “A healthy and sensitive temperament of a pure musician is developing here . . . We should remember the name of Maurice Ravel.  He is one of the masters of tomorrow.” 

— Program notes copyright © 2026 Keith Horner. 
Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca

Acknowledgements:

This performance sponsored by: