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DALÍ QUARTET, MCDERMOTT, MORALES & MONTONE

Dalí Quartet - Ricardo Morales, clarinet - Jennifer Montone, horn - Anne-Marie McDermott, piano
Chamber Music Series
Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 7pm Vilar Performing Arts Center

The Dalí Quartet returns to the Chamber Music Series performing rarely heard string quartets by Arriaga and Ginastera, as well as Dohnányi’s Sextet in C Major joined by McDermott, The Philadelphia Orchestra’s Principal Horn Jennifer Montone, and Principal Clarinet Ricardo Morales.

Did you know?

Arriaga, Ginastera, Dohnányi—under-represented but well worth knowing. The early-19th-century Basque composer Arriaga left a small but choice oeuvre, including three string quartets that are unimaginably fine for a composer who wrote them at age 17 and died at 19.

Featured Artists

Ricardo Morales

clarinet

Jennifer Montone

horn

Anne-Marie McDermott

piano

Dalí Quartet

Program Highlights

  • Dalí Quartet 
    • Ari Isaacman-Beck, violin 
    • Carlos Rubio, violin 
    • Adriana Linares, viola 
    • Jesús Morales, cello 
  • Ricardo Morales, clarinet 
  • Jennifer Montone, horn 
  • Anne-Marie McDermott, piano 

ARRIAGA String Quartet No. 1 

GINASTERA String Quartet No. 1 

DOHNÁNYI Sextet in C major

 

Program Notes

String Quartet No. 1 in D minor (1823)

(23 minutes)

JUAN CRISÓSTOMO DE ARRIAGA Y BALZOLA (1806-26)

String Quartet No. 1 in D minor 
     Allegro
     Adagio con espressione
     Menuetto. Allegro
     Adagio—Allegro—Allegretto

One of the most remarkable of all prodigy composers, Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga y Balzola was born in Bilbao 50 years to the day after the death of another, Wolfgang Amadè Mozart, and Arriaga inevitably got called “the Spanish Mozart,” and later “The Basque Mozart.” At the age of 11 he composed a chamber work titled Nada y mucho (Nothing and Much) for three violins and bass, the next year he completed an overture for chamber orchestra, and in 1819, at the age of 13, he wrote his opera Los esclavos felices (The Happy Slaves), which was produced in Bilbao the following year. Its title would not look great plastered on a marquee today, and there is little chance of that happening since it survives only in fragments; still, orchestras do occasionally program its delightful Overture, which is complete. His is mostly a case of “what might have been,” since he died in Paris, of some pulmonary disease (officially a “condition of languor”), 10 days short of his 20th birthday.

For chamber music aficionados the name of Arriaga is synonymous with his three string quartets, which were published in Paris in 1824, a year after their composition—his only works to appear in print in his lifetime. He was 16 when he wrote them, and was studying at the Paris Conservatoire with the eminent Pierre Baillot (for violin) and François-Joseph Fétis (counterpoint and fugue), who promptly appointed him his teaching assistant. When Fétis published his encyclopedic Biographie universelle des musiciens (1835-44),  he offered this assessment of Arriaga’s string quartets: “It is impossible to imagine anything more original or elegant, or written with greater purity, than these quartets, which are not very well known. Every time they were performed by their young author they inspired the audience’s admiration.”

String Quartet No. 1, Op. 20 (1948)

(21 minutes)

ALBERTO GINASTERA (1916-83)

String Quartet No. 1, Op. 20
     Allegro violento ed agitato
     Vivacissimo
     Calmo e poetico
     Allegramente rustico

Born in Argentina into a family of Catalan and Italian roots, Alberto Ginastera was entirely schooled in his native country, principally at the National Conservatory of Music in Buenos Aires. Already as a teenager he produced numerous pieces with a distinctive flavor, often employing native Argentine rhythms or folk melodies. He did not flourish under the oppressive regime of Juan Perón. In 1945-47, he traveled to study in the United States, and after that his journeys abroad grew more frequent. After Perón was overthrown, in 1955, he assumed several political-academic posts in Argentina; but in 1969, exasperated with the political situation in his country, he left Argentina definitively, and spent most of the rest of his life in Geneva, where he would die.

His chamber music includes a piano quintet (1963) and, most significantly, three string quartets; a fourth quartet, in which a baritone sings a text from Beethoven’s “Heiligenstadt Testament” was begun in 1974, but remained incomplete at his death. His interest in musical folklore is evident in his Quartet No. 1, which includes in its first and last movements references to the malambo, a competitive dance of the Argentine gauchos that turns up often in his early works, including in his much-performed ballet Estancia. The third movement also has an unmistakably Spanish/Latin American touch. It begins with a chord familiar to everyone who has heard a guitar being tuned—that instrument’s six open strings, plucked from bottom to top, with the tones lingering—and above this the first violin traces mysterious phrases. When this quartet reached New York, in 1955, the New York Herald Tribune hailed it as “a work so fresh, brilliant, and esthetically forceful that it will surely follow a route into the working repertoire of chamber music.”

INTERMISSION

(18 minutes)

Sextet in C major for Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, Clarinet, and Horn, Op. 37 (1935)

(31 minutes)

ERNST (ERNŐ) VON DOHNÁNYI (1877-1960)

Sextet in C major for Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, Clarinet, and Horn, Op. 37 (1935)
     Allegro appassionato
     Intermezzo (Adagio)
     Allegro con sentimento—Presto, quasi
        l’istesso tempo—Meno mosso
     Finale (segue): Allegro vivace—giocoso

Ernst von Dohnányi honed his skills as a pianist and composer at the Budapest Conservatory with such acumen that in 1896 (the year he graduated) his F-major Symphony won the Hungarian Millennium Prize, a prestigious national award and a terrific achievement for someone who was not yet 20. By that time, he had already won an important seal of approval from no less an eminence than Johannes Brahms, who in 1895 expressed deep admiration for Dohnányi’s C-minor Piano Quintet (Op. 1) and arranged for its premiere in Vienna. For the next two decades he led the busy life of a touring pianist with a special sympathy for Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. World War II brought tragedy: one of his two sons was killed in combat and the other was executed for participating in a plot to assassinate Hitler in July  1944. Following the war, he emigrated across the Atlantic, first to Argentina, then (in 1949) to Tallahassee, Florida, where he spent many years fostering an extraordinary musical climate at Florida State University.

As a composer, Dohnányi tended to look back to what had been rather than ahead to unknown musical terrain. Chamber music was central to his output from the beginning. His last chamber piece, the Sextet deploys an unusual instrumentation, its assemblage of string and wind instruments—in addition to the piano—lending an almost symphonic richness. One should not overstate the Brahmsian element in his music, since he really did develop a distinct late-Romantic voice. Nonetheless, there is something recognizably Brahmsian in the expansiveness of the first movement, and maybe some harmonic touches redolent of Korngold or Richard Strauss. The good-spirited finale makes for fun listening as bits of a nostalgic waltz and then a few cinematic licks worthy of Nino Rota pass through before a final harmonic witticism.