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NYP STRING QUARTET & Anne-Marie McDermott

Chamber Music Series
Monday, July 22, 2024 at 7pm Vilar Performing Arts Center

The New York Philharmonic String Quartet, comprised of four musicians from the orchestra, performs alongside pianist Anne-Marie McDermott in a program including Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No. 2 and more.

Featured Artists

Anne-Marie McDermott

piano

Frank Huang

violin

Alina Kobialka

violin

Cynthia Phelps

viola

Carter Brey

cello

Program Highlights

  • New York Philharmonic String Quartet 

    • Frank Huang, violin

    • Alina Kobialka, violin 

    • Cynthia Phelps, viola 

    • Carter Brey, cello 

  • Anne-Marie McDermott, piano 

 

DVOŘÁK String Quartet No. 11 in C major, Op. 61 

DVOŘÁK Piano Quintet No. 2 

Program Notes

String Quartet No. 11 in C major, Op. 61 (1881)

(35 minutes)

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904)

String Quartet No. 11 in C major, Op. 61
     Allegro
     Poco adagio e molto cantabile
     Scherzo
     Finale: Vivace

INTERMISSION

(18 minutes)

Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 81 (1887)

(36 minutes)

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904)

Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 81 
     Allegro ma non troppo
     Dumka: Andante con moto
     Scherzo (Furiant): Molto vivace—Trio: Poco
        tranquillo
     Finale: Allegro

Antonín Dvořák composed the 11th of his 14 string quartets on request from the Hellmesberger Quartet, led by the renowned Viennese concertmaster Josef Hellmesberger, Sr. On October 1, 1881, he wrote to Hellmesberger promising to carry out the commission “with all enthusiasm and mustering all my ability and insight to the endeavor in order to provide you with something good and solid.” Hellmesberger scheduled the premiere but apparently failed to communicate that fact to Dvořák, who was busy working on his opera Dimitrij. Dvořák wrote to a friend on November 5: “I have read in the newspapers that on December 15, Hellmesberger is playing my new quartet, which I have not yet in any way completed. There is no choice but to set aside the opera in order to write the quartet.” He proceeded with haste; this quartet, which usually runs 35-40 minutes in performance materialized in perhaps three weeks. As it happened, the Vienna Ringtheater, where the event was to take place, suffered a catastrophic fire, and the concert was postponed. When Hellmesberger hadn’t gotten around to programming it by the end of January, Dvořák wrote a perturbed letter to his publisher, Fritz Simrock: “Isn’t the Quartet dedicated to Hellmesberger? He sure is a lowdown patron!” “The new Quartet is in fact very difficult,” Simrock responded. Dvořák sent a copy to the Joachim Quartet in Berlin, which played it there on November 2, 1882—the work’s first documented performance. 

Here Dvořák’s voice is less overtly nationalistic than in such coeval works as his Sixth Symphony or Legends for piano four-hands. Perhaps the sudden deadline explains why Dvořák derived  several of the quartet’s themes from pre-existing sketches and compositions: the beginning of the second movement grew from a sketch for his F-major Violin Sonata of the preceding year, and the principal themes of the third and fourth movements employ motifs from his A-major Polonaise for Cello and Piano. The first movement, however, is entirely new, its triadic themes embodying a swaggering, heroic quality (though they are sometimes rendered tenderly).

The second movement may recall Schubert in its relaxation. Its lyrical cantilena melody (with a dollop of major-minor ambivalence) is often heard against murmuring figures in the accompaniment, sometimes enlivened by intriguing cross-rhythms. In the Scherzo, Beethovenian vigor and intensity rub shoulders with contrasting expanses of broad lyricism, and the Finale turns somewhat nationalistic through a dance rhythm that suggests the skočná, a Czech “leaping-dance.”

Chamber music figured prominently among the best of Dvořák’s early work. One of the first pieces he wrote after deciding to commit full-time to composition was a piano quintet, a three-movement work in A major that came into being in 1872. Dvořák destroyed his manuscript, but 15 years later, in 1887, he borrowed a score from a friend who had kept a copy and set about revising it. In the end, he seems to have found it unsalvageable. It was eventually published posthumously—in 1959—as his Op. 5 and is occasionally played today as a long-winded curiosity.

But in the course of the revision, he became hooked again on the medium, and he soon embarked on his new Piano Quintet, Op. 81, again in A major, one of the finest piano quintets ever written. It is a relatively long piece by chamber-music standards, clocking in at about forty minutes, but it passes quickly thanks to its elegantly constructed dramatic logic. Dvořák’s most endearing characteristics are encapsulated here: rhythmic vitality, elegant scoring, arresting melodies with distinct but well-balanced personalities, and a broad emotional palette. In this work Dvořák also gives free reign to his nationalistic tendencies. Folk-flavored touches abound throughout: quick alternation of major and minor modes, smile-provoking rhythmic displacements (as in the principal theme of the polka-like Finale), phrases that depart from the foursquare.

The cello proposes the lyrical subject of the first movement, and a nostalgic second subject is announced  by the viola. Throughout the movement, major and minor modes alternate with such natural ease that one begins to sense a tonic key that encapsulates both—a characteristic of many modal folk musics, and certainly of the Bohemian songs and dances Dvořák loved. His nationalistic leanings are most insistent in the two ensuing movements. The second movement is a dumka, an ancient and melancholy Slavonic (originally Ukrainian) folk ballad. In this case, the rather gloomy melody alternates with sunnier sections to form a musical palindrome: A-B-AC-A-B-A. The rich-toned viola and cello reign over the principal melody (along with the piano), and the brighter violins grow more prominent in the contrasting sections.

Dvořák subtitles the ensuing Scherzo a Furiant, though with some poetic license, since it is more a quick waltz than a proper furiant, which is an energetic Bohemian folk dance marked by the alternation of duple and triple meters. In folk usage, furiants often followed dumkas; at the very least, Dvořák recaptures the spirit of the furiant’s function in such a coupling, which is to eradicate the melancholy of the slow movement. Though the Finale is not cast in any specific “folk form,” it embodies a vigorous spirit of earthy good humor. Rather than toss it off as a mere exercise in peasant jollity, however, Dvořák works a learned fugue into the movement’s development section and builds up into a joyful secular chorale near the end.