CECILIA STRING QUARTET WITH LAWRENCE WILIFORD

HENRY PURCELL (1659 – 1695)Music for a While from Oedipus, Z.583, no. 2 (arr. Mozetich) Chacony in G minor (arr. Britten)Henry Purcell, of Dido and Aeneas fame, was a boy chorister in the Chapel Royal. At 20 he was appointed organist at Westminster Abbey and there was buried at 36. He composed Chacony, variations on a bass line, for viols, and the ground bass song, “Music for a while”, for John Dryden’s Oedipus.

EDMUND RUBBRA (1901-1986)Amoretti Op. 43 for Tenor and String QuartetBritten’s obscure compatriot, Edmund Rubbra, was raised by poor, working-class, music-loving parents. Amoretti (1935), settings of five love sonnets by Spenser, emphasize the poetry’s plaintive elements, often hauntingly so. Rubbra spins out meandering melodies that probe the text’s subtleties to which the strings add delicate polyphonic commentary.

MARJAN MOZETICH (1948 - )Songs to Whitman for Tenor and String QuartetJuno Award-winning composer Marjan Mozetich

describes Energies of Darkness and Light, his settings of two contrasting Whitman poems, as “of night and day, of the dark and light, of repose and action, of the life taking and the life giving”.

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 – 1828)String Quartet in D minor “Death and the Maiden”, D. 810A fiery, fanfarish declaration; a quiet, probing afterthought. Schubert’s penultimate quartet, “Death and the Maiden”, begins with a startling juxtaposition that, in just a few breaths, establishes the mood of the whole work. Then it’s off to the races as propulsive triplets jump from part to part in a stunning web of counterpoint. The slow movement consists of instrumental variations on one of his own songs, about a fearful girl who resists Death. The scherzo snickers sarcastically. Some hear in the turbulent finale a tarantella, the storied folk dance from southern Italy that was supposedly danced to a frenzy as a cure to the tarantula bite.

© 2017 Robert Rival (robertrival.com)