With its origins in the opening phrase of Beethoven’s string quartet Op. 95 (known as ‘serioso’), this quartet emerges from the vitality of those few notes.  Having heard ConTempo play Beethoven’s quartet several times, the resonance never left me as I shaped something new for the same instruments.  The opening motif  is explored and dissolves into a more ethereal spaciousness; the contrast between these two elements - driving/rhythmic and floating/atmospheric - shapes the music.

 

The title is from the closing lines of Dermot Healy’s poem ‘the echo of all that’s happened’ in the collection ‘A Fool’s Errand’.  The poem too was deep in my consciousness during the period of composition.

 

The work was premiered in January 2016 by ConTempo Quartet, and given a US premiere in June 2017 at the Mise-en Music Festival in New York.  It was released on a CD of chamber music by Jane O’Leary with Navona Records in 2017.

 

Bartók wrote his Third String Quartet in September 1927, by which time his style had become highly personal. Most distinctive was his fascination with the characteristics of the music of the many ethnic minorities in the Hungarian section of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which included Slovak, Romanian, Ruthenian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Transylvanian communities. He had collected ethnic traditional music with Kodály in the early years of the century and believed that the music of the rural communities was a natural phenomenon, which had the potential to reform both the nation’s musical life and his own musical approach. In his quartets he relied on short motifs and so traditional music particularly appealed to him because of its small-scale completeness.

 

His Third Quartet is renowned for the extreme concentration and violence of its language. The prima parte, after a mysterious 5-bar introduction, takes the form of a triptych whose central episode metamorphoses into strange and rarified nocturnal music punctuated by growls and cries. Moments of aggression are tempered by unexpected glimpses of lyricism, swiftly forgotten. The strongly contrasted seconda parte features Hungarian folk dance elements especially a driving rhythmic energy. His language is harsh, using pitilessly dissonant intervals and a veritable dictionary of sound effects, which drive the expressive tension to a peak, mastering this music is a huge test of a Quartet’s resolve and technical ability.  The Ricapitulazione sets out to concentrate even further the already highly compressed prima parte, giving the listener a brief reminiscence of a half-forgotten dream before a virtuoso summary of the seconda parte drives to an explosive finish.

Francis Humphrys

 

Dvořák has had a rough ride from the critics, more or less in inverse proportion to his popularity with audiences. Writers like Adorno considered that Dvořák's immediacy and trouble-free accessibility deprived music of its redemptive spiritual power. Such critics felt music needed to rouse and inspire the audience as in Wagner's generation or to make them critical and uncomfortable as in Schönberg's generation. Even the contemporary writer, who delighted in finding in Dvořák's music compelling alternatives to academic formalism, romantic excess and the desire to achieve profundity, never argued that his gift for natural melodic beauty was integrated with the formal depth of Beethoven or Brahms. 

 

Dvořák came from humble peasant stock and was completely unspoilt by his enormous public success. On his return from America, he spent four months idling at home, delighting in his garden, his large family and his beloved pigeons. This was no dramatic artistic crisis but a spiritual relaxation after years of tense and restless travelling. He refused all tempting offers to return to New York as director of a National Conservatory and retired to the country. After the four months of idleness, he sat down and wrote in quick succession two quartets, in G major and A flat.

 

The unusual opening theme seems to express his overflowing happiness, while a subsidiary theme is equally upbeat. After a joyful outburst, we hear hints of the second subject, which nonetheless takes us by surprise when it suddenly springs out as yet another irresistible theme. A mysterious interrupted cadence leads to the powerful development where his melodic and harmonic invention is unparalleled. This continuous transformation of his material reminds us of Schubert as does the extraordinary slow movement. Dvořák does not explicitly use the dumky form here but he takes the outward plan of contrasting a pensive, minor‑key lament with a relaxed, dance-like theme in the major and develops and enriches it in a way that demonstrates his total mastery of the medium. He moulds the whole movement into a dynamic and deeply moving whole that should be an answer to his sternest critics. The main scherzo theme has the character of a heavy-footed peasant dance, whose impact is softened by an unexpectedly mellow second subject. The trio is extensive, perhaps because Dvořák got carried away by his wealth of new tunes, but eventually the rollicking dance returns. Commentators disapprovingly describe the finale as very loose in construction, a kind of irregular rondo, which covers more or less anything. However the melodies just keep on coming in all shapes, a slow pensive introduction followed by a whole series of lively but contrasting ideas. Halfway through the movement, the pace slackens and the slow introduction is recalled and then suddenly wisps from the first movement are touchingly summoned up before the movement resumes. This cyclic idea is then repeated three times just before the coda, which concludes in wild euphoria.
Francis Humphrys