For Tickets and More: sfperformances.org | 415.392.2545 | 1

presents…

2017–18 Gift Concert APOLLON MUSAGÈTE QUARTET

Pawel Zalejski | Violin Piotr Szumiel | ViolaBartosz Zachlod | Violin Piotr Skweres | Cello

Sunday, February 25, 2018 | 7pmHerbst Theatre

SIBELIUS Andante Festivo

MOZART String Quartet in C Major, K.465 “Dissonant” Adagio; Allegro Andante cantabile Menuetto: Allegro Allegro molto

INTERMISSION

GRIEG String Quartet in G minor, Opus 27 Un poco andante; Allegro molto ed agitato Romanze: Andantino; Allegro agitato Intermezzo: Allegro molto marcato Finale: Lento; Presto al saltarello

The Gift Concert is made possible through the generous support of George and Camilla Smith.

Apollon Musagète Quartet is represented by Arts Management Group130 West 57th Street, Suite 6A, New York, NY 10019artsmg.com

2 | For Tickets and More: sfperformances.org | 415.392.2545

ARTIST PROFILESSan Francisco Performances presents the San Francisco debut of the Apollon Musagète Quartet.

Winner of first prize and several other awards at the International Music Compe-tition of the ARD in 2008, the Apollon Mus-agète Quartet has rapidly become an es-tablished feature of the European musical scene, captivating public and press alike. The quartet studied with Johannes Meissl at the European Chamber Music Academy and was inspired by the musicians of the Alban Berg Quartet at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

The quartet was nominated ECHO Ris-ing Stars 2010, followed by highly success-ful performances at prestigious European venues. It was also named BBC New Gen-eration Artist in 2012, leading to extensive touring in the UK and a number of record-ings for the BBC. More recently, the Quar-tet was announced as recipient of the Bor-letti-Buitoni Trust Award in 2014.

Recent engagements have taken the quartet to the Concertgebouw Amster-dam, De Singel Antwerp, Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, Auditori Barcelona, Beijing, Konzerthaus and Philharmonie Berlin, Bozar Brussels, Elbphilharmonie Ham-burg, Philharmonie Cologne, Gewandhaus Leipzig, Wigmore Hall London, Philhar-monie Luxembourg, Milan, Munich, Carn-egie Hall New York, Louvre Paris, Shang-hai, Konserthuset Stockholm, Tokyo, Toronto, Vancouver, Warsaw, Washington, Vienna Konzerthaus and Musikverein as

well as to the Tonhalle Zurich.Highlights for the 2017–18 season in-

clude re-invitations to the Schubertiade in Hohenems, Music Toronto, West Cork Chamber Music Festival and to Wigmore Hall as well as appearances in Budapest, Festival de Notre-Dame de Vie in Mougins, Vevey and at La Folle Journée Warsaw. In February 2018 they go on an extensive USA-debut tour performing in locations such as Boston, Carnegie Hall New York, Salt Lake City and San Francisco. The quar-tet takes part of a production of the Berlin performance group Nico and the Naviga-tors at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg and Konzerthaus Berlin.

The Apollon Musagète Quartet collabo-rates with renowned artists in chamber music such as Martin Fröst, Per Arne Glor-vigen, Angelika Kirchschlager, Gabriela Montero and Jörg Widmann. The quartet appeared in chamber music festivals in-cluding the Bach Festival Leipzig, Buda-pest Spring, Chopin Festival in Warsaw, Edinburgh International Festival, Ester-hazy String Quartet Festival in Eisenstadt, Grafenegg Festival, Heidelberger Frühling, Kissinger Sommer, Musikfest Bremen, Musikfestspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpom-mern, Mozartfest Würzburg, Rheingau Music Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival as well as the Settimane Musicali di Ascona and Stresa. It has also appeared in several symphonic series with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC Sym-phony Orchestra, Dresden Philharmonic, Philharmonic Orchestra Heidelberg and the Symphony Orchestra Vorarlberg.

An essential element of the Quartet’s

work is its collaborations with living com-posers such as Konstantia Gourzi and Krzysztof Penderecki; in addition to the traditional repertoire for string quartet, the group has had a number of works dedi-cated, often on the theme of its mythical inspiration Apollo. Moreover, the quartet focuses on concert repertoire of the 20th & 21st century and recently recorded works by Panufnik and Palester.

Concert programs also include the quar-tet’s own compositions: Multitude for String Quartet and A Multitude of Shades; these collective compositions were also pub-lished by Doblinger, a traditional Viennese publishing company.

The ensemble’s debut CD was released in 2010 on Oehms Classics to great critical acclaim and received a number of awards. The quartet has also recorded works by Lutosławski, Penderecki and Górecki for Decca Classics, receiving glowing reviews from the press. Recently the quartet has released Russian Soul presenting works by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostako-vich with the label Oehms Classics in 2014. Their live recording of Beethoven and We-ber as part of the BBC Proms in London was released in 2016 at the BBC Music Maga-zine CD.

Beyond their regular concert activities the quartet has participated in the CD Night of Hunters by the American pop singer Tori Amos on Deutsche Grammophon. The al-bum was rewarded with the ECHO in 2012 and was followed by a joint tour through Europe and America.

Paweł Zalejski plays a violin by the Ama-ti brothers from 1615 and Piotr Skweres plays a cello by Gennaro Gagliano dated 1741. The MERITO String Instruments Trust has kindly provided these instru-ments. Furthermore, the quartet thanks Thomastik Infeld for its generous support and the enterprise Stoffwerk for exclusive and custom-made concert clothes.

PROGRAM NOTES

Andante Festivo

JEAN SIBELIUSBorn December 8, 1865, HämeenlinnaDied September 20, 1957, Järvenpää

This lovely, moving music has a com-plex and very interesting history. While at work on his Sixth Symphony in 1922, Si-belius received an unusual request: the owner of the sawmill in the small town of

For Tickets and More: sfperformances.org | 415.392.2545 | 3

Säynätsalo asked him to compose a dra-matic cantata to help celebrate the mill’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Such an occa-sion would seem to call for a big, festive piece, but instead Sibelius wrote a short movement for string quartet. There is no record of a first performance, but presum-ably it was played as part of the mill’s cel-ebration. Sixteen years later, in 1938, the American critic Olin Downes suggested to Sibelius that he write a piece that would be performed on the occasion of the New York World’s Fair, which would open the following year—Downes suggested to the composer that the music might be con-sidered “Finland’s greeting to the world.” By this point, Sibelius was 73 and deep in the creative silence that marked the final 30 years of his long life. Rather than try-ing to compose something new, Sibelius returned to the string quartet movement he had written many years before and ar-ranged it for string orchestra, adding an optional timpani part in the final four measures. Sibelius himself conducted the premiere of this version on January 1, 1939, and it was broadcast internationally. That performance was recorded, and it re-mains the only known recording of Sibel-ius conducting.

This program opens with a performance of the Andante Festivo in its original ver-sion for string quartet. The structure of this piece is quite simple: it begins with a fully harmonized statement of the cho-rale-like main theme, music of a prayer-like intensity. Sibelius then repeats that theme, coloring it slightly differently on each re-appearance. The music grows to a full-throated final statement, and then fades into rapt silence. Though simple in structure, the Andante Festivo is quite mov-ing music, and it has been performed on a number of solemn occasions. This music was, in fact, performed at Sibelius’ own fu-neral in 1957.

String Quartet in C Major, K.465 “Dissonant”

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZARTBorn January 27, 1756, SalzburgDied December 5, 1791, Vienna

When Mozart arrived in Vienna, the towering figure in music was Franz Joseph Haydn, then nearly 50. Haydn had taken the string quartet, which for the previous generation had been a divertimento-like entertainment, and transformed it. He lib-

erated the viola and cello from what had been purely accompanying roles and made all four voices equal partners; he further made each detail of rhythm and theme and harmony an important part of the musical enterprise. Under Haydn’s inspired hands, the string quartet evolved from entertain-ment music into an important art form. Mozart, who was 25 when he arrived in Vienna, quickly grasped what the older master had achieved with the string quar-tet and embarked on a cycle of six quartets of his own. These are in no sense deriva-tive works—they are thoroughly original quartets, each of them a masterpiece—but Mozart acknowledged his debt (and admi-ration) by dedicating the entire cycle to Haydn when it was published in 1785.

The “Dissonant” Quartet, the last of the six, was completed on January 14, 1785. The nickname comes from its extraor-dinary slow introduction. The quartet is in C Major and the music opens with a steady pulse of C’s from the cello, but as the other three voices make terraced en-trances above, their notes (A-flat, E-flat, and A—all wrong for the key of C Major) grind quietly against each other. The to-nality remains uncertain until the Alle-gro, where the music settles into radiant C Major and normal sonata form. The sur-prise is that after this unusual introduc-tion, the first movement is quite straight-forward, flowing broadly along its bright C-Major energy; an ebullient coda even-tually draws the movement to a quiet close. The Andante cantabile develops by repetition, its lyric main idea growing more conflicted as it evolves. The Menu-etto sends the first violin soaring across a wide range, while the dramatic trio sec-tion moves unexpectedly into urgent C minor. After these stresses, the conclud-ing Allegro, in sonata form, returns to the bright spirits of the opening movement. This finale, which has a brilliant part for the first violin, fairly flies to its resound-ing close.

Mozart may have been struck by Haydn’s quartets, but now it was Haydn’s turn to be amazed. When he heard the “Dissonant” Quartet and two others of this cycle per-formed at a garden party in Vienna in Feb-ruary 1785, Haydn pulled Mozart’s father Leopold aside and offered as sincere a com-pliment as any composer ever gave anoth-er: “Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.”

String Quartet in G minor, Opus 27

EDVARD GRIEGBorn June 15, 1843, BergenDied September 4, 1907, Bergen

We automatically think of Grieg as a Norwegian nationalist composer—as the composer of music for Sigurd Jorsalfar and Peer Gynt, of Norwegian dances for piano, and of a number of ravishing songs in Nor-wegian—and so it comes as a surprise to discover an entirely different side of this composer: he was at some deep level dis-satisfied with writing purely “nationalis-tic” music and was drawn to the discipline of the classical forms. In 1877, when he was 34, Grieg turned to the most demanding of classical forms and wrote to a friend: “I have recently finished a string quartet which I still haven’t heard. It is in G minor and is not intended to bring trivialities to market. It strives towards breadth, soar-ing flight and above all resonance for the instruments for which it was written. I needed to do this as a study…I think in this way I shall find myself again. You can have no idea what trouble I had with the forms, but this was because I was stagnating…”

The intensity of Grieg’s language sug-gests how difficult writing this quartet was for him—and also how important it was. Grieg made the task even more complex by unifying much of the quartet around one simple theme-shape, which is then varied and extended in countless ways across the span of the quartet. He took this theme from his own song Spillemaend (Minstrels), composed two years earlier, in 1875. This shape is stamped out by the four instru-ments in octaves to open the quartet’s slow introduction, and listeners may take plea-sure in following Grieg’s transformations of this theme: it reappears quietly as the second subject of the first movement, is shouted out furiously as part of the Inter-mezzo’s central episode, opens the finale’s slow introduction, and is threaded inge-niously into textures throughout.

One of the other impressive things about this quartet is its sound: Grieg was not kid-ding when he said that this music strives to achieve “above all resonance for the instruments for which it is written.” The massed sound of the opening, with the instruments in octaves, establishes this sonority, and at moments the sound of this quartet can verge on the orchestral, with hammered chords and extensive double-

4 | For Tickets and More: sfperformances.org | 415.392.2545

stopping. Yet Grieg can relax, and the quartet also has some of those wonderful, effortless Grieg melodies.

The structure may be briefly described: the portentous slow introduction leads to the nervous main subject, marked Allegro molto ed agitato (it is worth noting that two of the quartet’s movements are marked agitato, a third marcato). The second sub-ject of this sonata-form movement is an attractive derivation of the fundamental theme-shape, and this movement makes its dramatic way over a very long span. Particularly impressive is the ending of this movement: over ponticello accompani-

ment from the upper voices, the cello winds the movement down with a long melody marked cantabile e molto espressivo, and the music drives to a sudden close on a Prestissi-mo derived from the original theme-shape.

Grieg marks the second movement Ro-manze, suggesting music of an expressive character, and then alternates two quite distinct kinds of music: the melting lyri-cism of the opening gives way to a hard-driving Allegro agitato; the music moves between these quite different poles before a relaxed ending. The Intermezzo, marked Allegro molto marcato, begins with the same massive sound that opened the quartet.

This movement—in ternary form—has a quicksilvery quality, flowing quickly be-tween different kinds of expression: con fuoco gives way almost instantly to tran-quillo. After a slow introduction, the Finale turns into a racing dance movement—it is a saltarello, an old Italian dance that features leaping (the finale of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony is a saltarello). There is a subtle rhythmic sense here (2/4 will flow effort-lessly into 6/8) as the music dances its way to a full-throated climax and a ringing close in G Major.

—Program notes by Eric Bromberger