Get to know the composers: Dessner & Beethoven
Well folks - it’s concert week! Last night we performed this show at Winter Warmer Festival down in St. Andrews and had a great time. This is a demanding program (we’ve been joking about how we should hire a massage therapist to work some magic on our shoulders during intermission) but it’s such excellent repertoire that the physical demands are worth it. Tickets are still available - Emily says that this is one of her favourite programs this season, so don’t sleep on this show, it’s worth venturing out on a winter night (safety permitting, of course!).
Bryce Dessner - Impermanence
Bryce Dessner is a vital and rare force in new music. He has won Grammy Awards as a classical composer and with the band The National, of which he is founding member, guitarist, arranger, and co-principal songwriter. He is regularly commissioned to write for the world’s leading ensembles, from Orchestre de Paris to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is a high-profile presence in film score composition, with credits including The Revenant, for which he was Grammy and Golden Globe nominated; Fernando Mereilles’s The Two Popes; Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon; Bardo, by Alejandro González Iñárritu; and Rebecca Miller’s She Came to Me. Dessner collaborates with some of today’s most creative and respected artists, including Philip Glass, Sufjan Stevens, Thom Yorke, Nico Muhly, and Steve Reich. His orchestrations can be heard on the latest albums of Paul Simon, Bon Iver, and Taylor Swift.
Impermanence reflects on the ephemeral nature of life, the perfect subject matter for a live performance; fleeting and vulnerable. The project was inspired by fire; Notre Dame had just burnt down, and the Australian bush forests were burning at catastrophic magnitude. Bryce Dessner and Sydney Dance Company choreographer Rafael Bonachela wanted to create a work that represented the fragility of seemingly eternal things, and the juxtaposition of beauty and destruction. The result was a full ballet that finally premiered in 2021 after delays due to COVID-19. Now that the sheet music is available for public performance, we are thrilled to be sharing selections from this incredible piece. While won’t be including any choreography (this time), the music stands alone as a moving and evocative reflection on life, change, death, and continuation.
The Australian String Quartet recorded excerpts from the ballet, which was released back in 2021. You can hear the recording on Bandcamp here:
If you’re a fan of Philip Glass or Caroline Shaw (who we’ve performed earlier this season) we think you’ll love the Dessner. Here’s a clip from the ballet’s choreographer explaining the inspiration behind the piece.
Beethoven -
String Quartet No. 7 in F major, Op. 59 No. 1
Beethoven’s Quartet No. 7 is part of a collection of three quartets that were commissioned by Russian diplomat Count Andreas Razumovsky. The “Razumovsky” quartets were written during Beethoven’s heroic period, when he was moving away from the Classical style of Haydn and Mozart and toward a more personal, dramatic, and expansive approach to composition. When Beethoven began the Op. 59 string quartets in 1806, he had already composed many of his middle-period masterpieces, including monumental works like the "Eroica" Symphony No. 3, the "Waldstein" and "Appassionata" piano sonatas, and was working on the famous Fifth Symphony. His music from this period all exhibit a new level of intensity, virtuosity and profundity.
One of the composer's most enthusiastic supporters was Russia's ambassador to Vienna, Count Andreas Razumovsky, who commissioned the three Opus 59 Quartets. He was supportive in an important way: He employed a quartet of virtuosic string players whose talents allowed Beethoven to hear his music played with precision. The access to these superb players encouraged Beethoven to make ever-greater demands in his quartet writing. They are longer, more technically challenging, dramatically and psychologically far more intense and they mark the elevation of quartet performance culture to its first plateau of daunting professionalism.
The Razumovksy quartets were met with mixed reviews. Some found the new expansive forms and virtuosic writing to be too much, but others saw the work as groundbreaking. Despite being three of his most enduringly popular pieces today, these quartets incited some of the most antagonistic and negative responses that his music would ever receive! His student Carl Czerny reported, “When Schuppanzigh’s quartet first played the F Major Quartet, they laughed and were convinced Beethoven was playing a trick on them and that it was not the quartet he had promised.”
The piece is in four movements, with a lively first movement, a playful second, an emotional third movement, and a vigorous last movement, featuring a Russian theme as a nod to the patron’s heritage. The first quartet of the three, Op. 59, No. 1 in F Major, curiously shares the same key as Beethoven's first quartet, Op. 18, No. 1, and his very last quartet, Op. 135. Whatever the deeper reasons or implications of Beethoven's choice of key, all these works share a kindred warmth, a beneficent sense of well-being and grandeur that links them even across vast expanses of Beethoven's evolution. Revolutionary, visionary, unprecedented in their grand and sweeping scope, the three quartets of the Opus 59 trilogy made greater instrumental and emotional demands than any string quartet yet written at that time.
Program
Impermanence - Bryce Dessner
I. Alarms
II. Disintegration
III. Impermanence
IV. Pulsing
- Intermission -
String Quartet No. 7 in F major, Op. 59 No. 1 - Ludwig van Beethoven
I. Allegro
II. Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando
III. Adagio molto e mesto
IV. “Thème Russe”: Allegro