ASTOR PIAZZOLLA
Born in Mar del Plata (near Buenos Aires), March 11, 1921
Died in Buenos Aires, July 5, 1992

More than any other figure, Astor Piazzolla has dominated the tango scene in recent years. Most of his compositions are tangos (well over three hundred), and many of them have become classics in their field. Piazzolla’s most significant contribution to the tango has been the synthesis he achieved between the traditional dance form and mainstream classical music.

Although born in a suburb of sprawling Buenos Aires, he spent his childhood in New York City. He then went to Paris, where he half-heartedly embarked on a course of study in classical music with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. It was she who discovered his true talent – writing tangos – and encouraged him to pursue this activity. Piazzolla returned to his native Argentina in 1956, developing first a national reputation, then, in the 1980s, international renown with his Quinteto Tango Nuevo, an ensemble consisting of bandoneón (a close relative of the accordion, with 71 buttons divided between both sides of the bellows, but no keyboard), electric guitar, violin, bass and piano. The tangos he wrote with this instrumentation in mind have been transcribed for countless other ensembles, but Piazzolla’s instrument, the bandoneón, remains the focal sonority.

Introducción al Ángel (Introduction to the Angel) is one of the four “ángel” tangos Piazzolla composed as incidental music for Alberto Rodriguez Muñoz’ 1962 play Tango del ángel, the story of an angel who comes to cleanse the souls of residents living in an apartment block in Buenos Aires.

Program notes by Robert Markow

ARVO PÄRT
Born in Paide, Estonia, September 11, 1935
Now living in Berlin

Arvo Pärt is one of the most visible representatives of a new musical style that stresses simple materials, pure diatonic harmony, an austere mood, a sense of timelessness and haunting intensity. Pärt began his compositional career writing neoclassical piano pieces, went on to become Estonia’s first twelve-tone composer, and later toyed with collage forms. In the mid-1970s he turned to a new style, the one for which he is renowned today and which has earned the moniker “Holy Minimalism.” This style, or technique, incorporates two lines of music simultaneously to the same rhythm, one revolving around the notes of a scale, the other around a triad. Pärt calls this technique tintinnabuli (the plural of tintinnabulum, Latin for “bells”). To Pärt, “the three notes of a triad are like bells, and that is why I call it tintinnabulation.” Kimmo Korhonen writes that “in its introvert solemnity, an island of meditation, Pärt’s music is like a monastery of sound in the midst of a restless and conflicting world of music.”

“Music as a form of prayer,” a “constant stillness,” and “oriental spirituality” are additional terms often used to describe Pärt’s music. These qualities are all much in evidence in Fratres (brothers, or brethren), a family of compositions based on the same original score of 1977 for early-music ensemble, each arranged for a different combination of instruments. These include string quartet, cello octet, string orchestra with percussion, and violin and piano. The latter is the version we hear this afternoon, written in 1980 for Gidon and Elena Kremer, who gave the first performance at the Salzburg Festival that year. For this version, Pärt added a prelude for violin alone consisting of a series of rapid arpeggios culminating in the sudden intrusion of a loud chord in the piano. The theme is then heard eight times in the piano, over which the violin unfolds a series of variations of sublime simplicity, austerity and delicacy, with each variation revealing new surprises of texture, colour and ambiance.

Program notes by Robert Markow

GABRIEL FAURÉ
Born in Pamiers, May 12, 1845
Died in Paris, November 4, 1924

Fauré’s String Quartet is special, even unique in several ways. Many composers write one or more such works in their early years; Fauré’s only string quartet was his last composition of any kind, completed just weeks before he died at the age of 79. He left ten large‑scale chamber works, mostly in pairs: two piano quartets, two piano quintets, two violin sonatas, two cellos sonatas; but only one piano trio and one string quartet. Of these ten, the String Quartet is the only one without piano. Fauré ranks among the world’s best-known composers, yet his string quartet remains one of his least-known compositions. Today’s performance marks a rare appearance of this work on a concert program. The composer never heard a performance; it was first played on June 12, 1925, seven months after his death, at the Paris Conservatoire by an ensemble led by violinist Jacques Thibaud. Rare indeed is the musical composition that is dedicated to a music critic; such is Fauré’s quartet – it went to Camille Ballaigue, who was also an author and musicologist. Critic Rob Cowan calls it “an extraordinary work by any standards, ethereal and other-worldly with themes that seem constantly to be drawn skywards.”

The first movement is in sonata form with a second development section (exposition – development – recapitulation – development – coda). The writing is densely contrapuntal, with all voices almost constantly in play, tossing melodic fragments about in a tightly-argued four‑way dialogue.

The second movement follows no particular form. Rather, the listener is encouraged to follow the nearly continuous rise and fall of tension and dynamic levels (crescendos and decrescendos). The opening theme returns about midway through the movement, but otherwise there is little in the way of formal anchors. Fauré scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux writes that “from start to finish it bathes in a supernatural light. There is nothing that is not beautiful in this movement with its subtle variations of light-play, a sort of white upon white… The sublime music sinks out of sight, where it carries on, rather than seeming to come to an end.”

The third movement, also in sonata form, serves the dual function of scherzo and finale. Fauré called it “light and cheerful.” It begins in E minor, the key of the first movement, but, like many multi-movement works that begin in a minor key, closes triumphantly in the parallel major.

Program notes by Robert Markow

VYTAUTAS BARKAUSKAS
Born in Kaunas, Lithuania, March 25, 1931
Now living in Vilnius

Eighty-seven-year-old Vytautas Barkauskas is one of Lithuania’s most prominent composers. He was one of the first in Lithuania to experiment with serial and aleatoric composition, collage, and other avant-garde techniques. His first degree, and profession, was in mathematics. In 1964, at the age of 33, Barkauskas finally declared himself to be a composer with the work he called his Op. 1, a cycle of piano pieces called Poetry. Barkauskas is Professor of Composition at the Lithuanian Academy of Music, where he has been teaching since 1961. He has won innumerable prizes and awards, including the Lithuanian State Prize and the Sinfonia Baltica International Composers’ Competition. He has written nearly 150 opus numbers, including seven symphonies.

The Partita for Violin Solo (1967) ranks among the best-known works of Lithuanian avant-garde music. It is also one of the most frequently played works for solo violin from the past century, with well over a dozen recordings in circulation. Gidon Kremer championed it almost from the start, resulting in worldwide recognition of its composer. Barkauskas describes the Partita as “a suite based on the idiom of the world’s most popular dances of the twentieth century: rhumba, blues, beguine.” The five tiny movements are played without pause, and total just six minutes in performance. The expressive Praeludium and Postludium are derived from the same material, these frame three inner movements that in themselves form a symmetrical arrangement of two virtuosic movements surrounding a beguiling lament.

Program notes by Robert Markow

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
Born in St. Petersburg, September 25, 1906
Died in Moscow, August 9, 1975

The name Levon Tadevosovich Atovmian (or Atovmyan, 1901–1973)  probably doesn’t mean much to most concertgoers, but this minor Soviet composer and administrator, whose name is usually abbreviated to just Lev, played an important role in popularizing Shostakovich’s music. He was the man who assembled and arranged many of the great composer’s film scores and stage music into suites. These include the four Ballet Suites, the suite from the film The Gadfly, and the suite from the incidental music for Hamlet, among many others, including the music we hear this afternoon. Each of the five little pieces for two violins and piano is a charmer. The first comes from The Gadfly (1955). The second comes from the incidental music for The Human Comedy (1934) , the third is also from The Human Comedy (incorrectly identified in the score as coming from the ballet The Limpid Stream). Although entitled Elegy, it sounds more wistful than elegiac. Next comes a sassy waltz of uncertain provenance, and finally a polka that really does come from The Limpid Stream but sounds almost like it might have come from the pen of one of the Strausses. The Gavotte, Elegy, and Polka (Nos. 2, 3, and 5) were also incorporated respectively into the Ballet Suites Nos. 3, 4 and 1.

Program notes by Robert Markow

PHILIP GLASS
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, January 31, 1937
Now living in New York City

Philip Glass has proved to be one of the most durable institutions of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century music. Along with such composers as John Adams, Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Glass has been lumped together with the minimalists, a term he is said to abhor. Most of his music does exhibit at least some of the qualities and elements most representative of minimalism – long stretches of tiny melodic fragments endlessly repeated while subjected to slow transformational processes, resulting in a hypnotic, mesmerizing effect.

The Third String Quartet subscribes to all of these descriptive tags. Its subtitle refers to the famous Japanese author Yukio Mishima (born Kimitake Hiraoka), who famously committed ritual suicide in 1970 at the age of 45. In 1985, the film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, co-written and directed by Paul Schrader, was released in theatres. The film interweaves episodes from Mishima’s life with dramatizations of passages from his novels. Music for large orchestra accompanies the novel dramatizations, music for strings is used for the last day of Mishima’s life, and music for string quartet for his personal life. Glass conceived the string quartet music both for the film and as music that could later be extracted for a concert hall setting. Critic Jeremy Grimshaw sees in this music “a deliberate sense of detachment and austerity, as [the quartet episodes] carve out a space for the drama to command attention, which lends them a cohesiveness and unity even when they are extracted for presentation as chamber music. Thus, even though each of the six movements of the concert version of the quartet corresponds with a particular event or person from Mishima’s life, they do not constitute program music so much as assume their own dramatic contour.”

Program notes by Robert Markow