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St Mary’s Church, CratfieldSunday 11 September 2016

CALLINO QUARTETSarah Sexton, Tom Hankey violins

Rebecca Jones violaSarah McMahon cello

withANNA DENNIS soprano

ALASDAIR BEATSON piano

Concerts at CratfieldBlyth Valley Chamber Music

Mr T.E.Allen, Peter Baker & Kate Hutchon, Sir Jeremy &Lady Blackham, Rachel Booth & Clare Webb, Philip Britton &Tom Southern, Mr & Mrs Roger Cooper, Prof.MJ & Dr CHG Daunton, Paul Fincham, Judith Foord, Shirley Fry, Tony Gelsthorpe & Gill Bracey, Carole & Simon Haskel,David Heckels, Andrew Johnston, Julia Josephs, Susan Kodicek &Judith Harrad, David & Deirdre Mintz, Dr & Mrs Ivan Moseley,John & Gloria Nottage, Judith Payne, Donald & Jean Peacock,Anthony & Sarah Platt, Ruth Plowden, Garth & Lucy Pollard, Jill Sawdon, Lesley & Barry Shooter, Derek & Rosemary Simon,John Sims, Paul & Caroline Stanley, Christine & Jack Stephenson,Alan Swerdlow & Jeremy Greenwood, Charles Taylor &Tony Collinge, Michael Taylor & Mike Nott, Mr & Mrs S.Whitney-Long.

Philip Britton (Chairman); Clare Webb (Treasurer); Alan McLean and Peter Baker (Concert Organisers – to the end of 2017); Gill Bracey, David Mintz, Kathrin Peters, Richard Quarrell, Christine Stephenson, Jack Stephenson andMichael Taylor.

Box office: Pauline Grahamtelephone 01728 603 077email boxoffice@concertsatcratfield.org.uk

Presented by Blyth Valley Chamber Music registered charity 1019300www.concertsatcratfield.org.uk

patrons

box office &mailing list

concerts atcratfield

All Patrons and Members are warmly encouraged to attend thisunusually important meeting: we expect to be asking approvalfor a new Constitution, transforming Blyth Valley ChamberMusic, the current charitable trust, into Concerts at Cratfield, aCharitable Incorporated Organisation. The meeting will also beconsidering reports from the Trustees for 2016 and lookingahead to 2017. The traditional buffet lunch follows the formalbusiness. Papers will be posted to you in November.

annualgeneralmeetingCratfield Village Hall,Sunday 11 December at12 noon

trustees 2016

in case of emergencyUse the door marked exit which is nearest to you and moveinto the churchyard, away from the church. If the churchneeds to be evacuated, one of the Trustees will make anannouncement and individual stewards close to where youare sitting will then assist you towards the appropriate exit.

By the end of today, concertgoers who are eager enough andomnivorous enough of chamber music to have bought a seasonticket and attended every Cratfield concert this year will haveheard four different string quartets (playing in total ten worksfor that medium, plus four other ‘strings-plus’ pieces and anunexpected burst of tinkling on four triangles), one pianoquintet, three works for piano trio and a solo piano recital; theywill also have heard a soprano and an oboe. The music hasranged from venerable Bach (1710 or so) to brand new Langer(2016).

Our aim at all times is to offer a combination of the familiar andthe less familiar, in both the works on offer and the performersthemselves. Thus we eagerly welcomed back the Carducci andHeath but were equally keen for you to hear Nicholas Daniel,Quartetto Rossi, the André Trio and the Callino Quartet, allappearing for the first time at St Mary’s. There is a longer runover which variety also has meaning: from past seasons to thepresent and away into the future. So in planning we try topresent works which we think are ‘core’ in the repertoire oftenenough to remind our audience of their enduring importance,but not so often as to crowd out less familiar but equallyinteresting alternatives.

In attempting to achieve this delicate balance, we count entirelyon your support and encouragement, above all by buying tickets,but also by subscribing as Patrons and Members and by – wehope – telling your friends and contacts what is special aboutConcerts at Cratfield and encouraging them to come to ourconcerts. These are testing times for many relatively small musicsocieties and we know we must earn your loyalty year by year,just as we have to find enough volunteers each season to becomeTrustees and to run our concerts.

In that connection, this programme contains summaryinformation about next year’s thirtieth season of concerts – thefirst developed by Peter Baker as one of our joint ConcertOrganisers. Please note the dates in your diary. You will also findan update on the constitutional changes which we shall shortly beasking all our subscribers to support.

Small numbers of printed programmes of past concerts this seasonare still available; they can be bought from Pauline at the BoxOffice table today at 50p each.

If hearing any of the works in today’s concert makes you want tohave your own recording, here are some personalrecommendations:

Webern, Langsamer Satz and Schoenberg, String quartet no2: asingle full-price cd from the Danish Petersen Quartett onPhoenix offers both these works (with Christine Schäfersoprano, who also sings the vocal version of the final movementof Berg’s Lyric Suite). bbc Music Magazine called the quartet’splaying: ‘firmly tuned and focused, while giving full scope to themusic’s extremes of emotionalism and flickering fantasy. Bothaspects are also true of Christine Schäfer’s fine singing’.

Brahms, Piano quintet in F minor op34: with more than eightyavailable recordings, the coupling may be important. On full-price Hyperion from 2010, the Takács are joined by StephenHough piano and add the String quartet in a minor op51 no2:‘fire and passion aplenty’ commented Gramophone magazine. Ifthe op51 no 1 quartet appeals instead, the Brodsky Quartet onChandos at medium price are equally recommendable, withpianist Natacha Kudritskaya in the quintet: five stars from bbcMusic Magazine earlier in 2016.

In our experience, two companies offer a good range of stock,keen prices and efficient service for buying classical cds onlinein the uk : www.mdt.co.uk and

www.prestoclassical.co.uk

The fastest delivery to Suffolk may come from Prelude Recordsin Norwich, www.preluderecords.co.uk, who are equally helpfulon the phone: 01603 620 170.

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the season inretrospect

music on cdtoday’s performers andworks

the 2017seasonoutline provisionalprogramme

All concerts are at3.00pm on Sundays at St Mary’s Cratfield

2 July: James Gilchrist tenor, Philip Dukes viola and AnnaTilbrook piano. Purcell, Rebecca Clarke, Britten, Elgar, VaughanWilliams, Quilter, Finzi, Gurney, Bridge

16 July: Zemlinsky String Quartet. Richter, Janácek, Dvorak

30 July: Chroma (David le Page violin, Clare O’Connell cello,Helen Sharp harp). Saint Saëns, Debussy, Ibert, Renie

13 August: Aronowitz Ensemble (Magnus Johnston violin, TomHankey viola, Guy Johnston cello, Tom Poster piano). Schubert, Fauré, Brahms

27 August: Lendvai String Trio. Röntgen, Schubert, Bach

10 September: Brodsky Quartet. Bach, Borodin, Beethoven

ˆˆ

All three works in this final concert of 2016 are centrally in theAustro-German Romantic tradition, all having a link withVienna. Brahms completed his Piano quintet there on his firststay in the Habsburg capital; it was later the birthplace and firstprofessional base for both Webern and Schoenberg, their worksin today’s programme being composed there too. AlthoughBrahms took a public stand with violinist and composer Joachimagainst the ‘excesses’ of Wagnerian chromaticism, he seems tohave regretted doing so. He might in the end have welcomed andappreciated the advanced approach to tonality which both theWebern and Schoenberg works illustrate.

Compositions like today’s Schoenberg quartet, which add asinger to a string quartet, are rare birds: Respighi’s Il Tramonto(1914) for mezzo-soprano and Barber’s Dover Beach (1931) forbaritone are among the few with a solid place in the repertoire.Both are late Romantic works, post-Wagnerian in language, liketoday’s Schoenberg. However, there are more recent singer-plus-string quartet works, from composers whose lives started inGermany or Austria and who fled before the Second World War,like Egon Wellesz (to the uk), Karl Weigl and Ernst Toch (to theusa) or Georg Tintner (to Australasia, then Canada): all lesswell known but worth exploring.

None of the works in the programme have ever been played atCratfield before.

The Callino Quartet was founded in West Cork in 1999 and in2008 won second prize in the Tromp International String Quartetcompetition in the Netherlands. It has worked closely with manyliving composers, including Kevin Volans, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh,Ian Wilson, Raymond Deane, Ronan Guilfoyle and Ben Dwyer.

For more information, visit the quartet’s website onwww.callino.com

Anna Dennis has sung regularly in Suffolk, notably in theKyriakides opera An Ocean of Rain at the Aldeburgh Festival in2008 and in Music for Motor Neurone in 2012. She has takenpart in recording projects with David Bates’ La Nuova Musica, aswell as in the Cratfield-led cd of music by Elena Langer,Landscape with Three People (2015). For eno she sang inDamon Albarn’s Dr Dee, as well as in in Death in Venice, and hasregularly been invited to the Göttingen Handel Festival, appearingin Imeneo in 2016. She will be in an international tour of the threesurviving Monteverdi operas under John Eliot Gardiner in 2017.36

interval

Refreshments are offered by a team from the parish, in aid ofchurch funds

Following the pattern established by Schumann’s pioneering Pianoquintet in e flat – composed twenty years before Brahms firstarrived in the Schumann household as a young composer of greatpromise – this quintet is for piano plus traditional string quartet,integrating keyboard and strings tightly together. In Brahms’chamber output, it sits between his two String sextets and almost adecade before his first published string quartets as op 51.

The quintet first started out for strings alone (string quartet plusextra cello – Brahms later destroyed the score), then as a sonata fortwo pianos. It also went through changes of ‘home’ key. f minornow dominates its outer movements, with the slow movement intwo contrasting major keys (a flat and e) and the scherzo in cminor, but with c major also strongly present.

The quintet is on a symphonic scale – which some will consider acriticism – with powerful ideas and a sense of drama andstruggle, yet with the individual voices and varieties of texturepossible in chamber music. It opens with piano and first violin inunison, presenting the first subject of this sonata-form firstmovement – much the longest of the four. The second subjectstays in a minor key (c minor), which returns at the start of thecoda at the movement’s end. After the a-b-a structure of theslow movement and the major-minor uncertainty of the scherzoand trio (reminiscent of the Schubert String quintet), the finaleopens with a slow and tentative introduction which leads intothe main allegro. A calm conclusion seems inevitable when a fastcoda intervenes, bringing a headlong finish.

The quintet was dedicated to Princess Anna of Hesse-Kassel(1836-1918), fetchingly captured in oils by Winterhalter (1805-1873), portrait painter to the international elite. She was anotable pianist and presided over a salon of outstanding artistsand musicians, including Brahms, Clara Schumann and AntonRubinstein. Brahms and Clara Schumann performed the two-piano version (op34b) of what became the Piano quintet for herin 1864; Brahms’ dedication followed, on its publication as aquintet in 1865. She in turn presented him with the autographscore of Mozart’s Symphony no 40 in g minor.

Programme text © 2016Philip Britton and BlythValley Chamber Music

today’sperformers

johannesbrahms1833 -1897

Piano quintet in F minorop 34 (1864)

Allegro non troppo

Andante, un poco adagio

Scherzo: allegro – trio

Finale: poco sostenuto –allegro non troppo –presto non troppo

About 40 minutes

today’sconcert

Alasdair Beatson has played solo regularly at the Wigmore Hall,Kings Place and other top concert halls; closer to home, also inensembles playing in the Aldeburgh Festival, including forBritten Dances in the 2013 Festival. He has worked with theScottish Chamber Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra,Britten Sinfonia and the Scottish Ensemble and in chambercollaborations with Adrian Brendel, Philippe Graffin, ErichHöbarth, the Nash Ensemble and the Doric String Quartet. Hehas recorded piano music of Mendelssohn and Ludwig Thuille,as well as violin sonatas with Esther Hoppe. He first came toCratfield in 2013 as a member of a piano quartet with ThomasGould, Manuel Hofer and Adrian Brendel.

For more information, visit his website on:www.alasdairbeatson.com

‘Slow movement’ is all the German title promises about this singlemovement work for string quartet, though its opening marking inthe score adds ‘Langsam, mit bewegter Ausdruck’ (‘Slowly, withturbulent expression’). By a whisker, it is the longest single pieceWebern ever wrote, though he may have intended it as onemovement of a future string quartet, never completed. It is one ofthe most intense and moving late Romantic pieces in the Austro-German tradition. He wrote it, ahead of his op 1, the year after hehad become a composition pupil in Vienna, like Alban Berg, ofArnold Schoenberg. This was before the three formed –unwittingly at the time – what we now call the Second VienneseSchool by moving towards ‘atonal’, ‘serial’ or ‘twelve-tone’methods of composition.

The Langsamer Satz is really programme music, as well as a loveletter. Webern was recollecting in music a walking holiday in thepicturesque Waldwinkel region of Lower Austria with his cousin,Wilhelmine Mörtl, with whom he was in love and was to marrysix years later. Webern described the trip in language reminiscentof the psychologically complex ‘Symbolist’ poetry of RichardDehmel (1863-1920), several of whose poems Webern hadalready set and on whose narrative poem Verklärte NachtSchoenberg based his string sextet of 1899:

‘To walk forever like this among the flowers, with my dearestone beside me, to feel oneself so entirely at one with theUniverse, without care, free as the lark in the sky above – Oh,what splendour ... When night fell (after the rain) the sky shed

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bitter tears but I wandered with her along a road. A coatprotected the two of us. Our love rose to infinite heights andfilled the Universe. Two souls were enraptured.’

Though nominally based in e flat major, it combines an intenselychromatic and shifting post-Wagnerian language with somethingmore: what Paul Morley has called ‘the sound of a new worldopening up’. It is in effect in a-b-a form, the opening sequencecombining broad Brahmsian melodies (and his favourite three-against-two rhythm) with a chromatic theme started by the secondviolin. The central b section, marked ‘Sehr ruhig’ (‘Very calm’) hasa rhapsodic theme in cascading triplets which leads to the fffclimax of the whole work and a section with all instrumentsmuted; the opening ideas then return (including a passage with thetop three strings muted and the cello alternating between bowednotes and pizzicato). The piece ends with tranquil floating chords,marked ‘Sehr breit und mit grösstem Ausdruck’ (‘Very broadlyand with all possible expression’) and ‘zögernd’ (‘lingeringly’).

Inexplicably, it was first published only in 1961 and given itsfirst public performance in May 1962, by the University ofWashington String Quartet in Seattle (usa).

This quartet is the first modern chamber work to combine a sungtext with a string quartet, though only in its third and finalmovements. It follows his first quartet in d minor, written thesame year as Webern’s Langsamer Satz, which wasunconventional in a different way: a single movement lastingabout forty-five minutes on the outer edges of tonality (‘proteanharmonic aerobics’, Philip Clark calls it). The second quartetseems to reflect the composer’s discovery that his wife Mathildehad had an affair with their friend and neighbour, theExpressionist painter Richard Gerstl, who committed suicide atage 25 in 1908 after Mathilde, encouraged by Webern, wentback to Schoenberg. So his eventual dedication of the quartet‘Meiner Frau’ (‘to my wife’) may be ironic.

The first movement is marked ‘moderate’, in f sharp minor,suggesting wistful nostalgia; the second, marked ‘very brisk’ andhinting at serious psychological disturbance, is in d minor, andthe third (‘Litany’) is marked ‘slow’, in e flat minor. The decisiveand revolutionary break with tonality comes in the final sungmovement, ‘Rapture’, which is marked ‘very slow’ and has nokey signature.

arnoldschoenberg1874 -1951

String quartet no2 in F sharp minor op10(1908, revised 1921)

Mäßig

Sehr rasch

‘Litanei’: langsam

‘Entrückung’: sehr langsam

About 28 minutes

For texts of poems, seeseparate sheet

anton webern1883-1945

Langsamer Satz M 78 (1905)

About 10 minutes

Litanei

Tief ist die trauer die mich umdüstert,Ein tret ich wieder, Herr! in dein haus.

Lang war die reise, matt sind die glieder,Leer sind die schreine, voll nur die qual.

Durstende zunge darbt nach dem weine.Hart war gestritten, starr ist mein arm.

Gönne die ruhe schwankenden schritten,Hungrigem gaume bröckle dein brot!

Schwach ist mein atem rufend dem traume,Hohl sind die hände, fiebernd der mund.

Leih deine kühle, lösche der brände.Tilge das hoffen, sende das licht!

Gluten im herzen lodern noch offen,Innerst im grunde wacht noch ein schrei.

Töte das sehnen, schliesse die wunde!Nimm mir die liebe, gib mir dein glück!

Litany

Deep is the sadness that gloomily comes overme,

Again I step, Lord, in your house.

Long was the journey, my limbs are weary,The shrines are empty, only anguish is full.

My thirsty tongue desires wine.The battle was hard, my arm is stiff.

Grudge peace to my staggering steps,for my hungry gums break your bread!

Weak is my breath, calling the dream,my hands are hollow, my mouth fevers.

Lend your coolness, douse the fires,rub out hope, send the light!

Fires in my heart still glow, open,inside my heart a cry wakes.

Kill the longing, close the wound!Take my love away, give me your joy!

please turn over

Entrückung

Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten.Mir blassen durch das dunkel die gesichterDie freundlich eben noch sich zu mir

drehten.

Und bäum und wege die ich liebte fahlenDass ich sie kaum mehr kenne und du lichterGeliebter schatten – rufer meiner qualen –Bist nun erloschen ganz in tiefern glutenUm nach dem taumel streitenden getobesMit einem frommen schauer anzumuten.

Ich löse mich in tönen, kreisend, webend,Ungründigen danks und unbenamten lobesDem grossen atem wunschlos mich

ergebend.

Mich überfährt ein ungestümes wehenIm rausch der weihe wo inbrünstige schreieIn staub geworfner beterinnen flehen:

Dann seh ich wie sich duftige nebel lüpfenIn einer sonnerfüllten klaren freieDie nur umfängt auf fernsten

bergesschlüpfen.

Der boden schüffert weiss und weich wie molke.

Ich steige über schluchten ungeheuer.Ich fühle wie ich über letzter wolke

In einem meer kristallnen glanzes schwimme –Ich bin ein funke nur vom heiligen feuerIch bin ein dröhnen nur der heiligen stimme.

Rapture

I feel air from another planet.I faintly through the darkness see facesFriendly even now, turning toward me.

And trees and paths that I loved fadeSo I can scarcely know them and you brightBeloved shadow – summoner of my

anguish –Are only extinguished completely in a deep

glowingIn the frenzy of the fightWith a pious show of reason.

I lose myself in tones, circling, weaving,With unfathomable thanks and unnamed

praise,Bereft of desire, I surrender myself to the

great breath.

A violent wind passes over meIn the thrill of consecration where ardent

criesIn dust flung by women on the ground:

Then I see a filmy mist risingIn a sun-filled, open expanseThat includes only the farthest mountain

hatches.

The land looks white and smooth like whey,I climb over enormous canyons.I feel as if above the last cloud

Swimming in a sea of crystal radiance –I am only a spark of the holy fireI am only a whisper of the holy voice.

arnoldschoenbergString quartet no2 in F sharp minor op10

The poems whose texts Schoenberg sets in the final twomovements are from Der siebente Ring (‘The SeventhRing’) by influential poet Stefan George (1868-1933),published in 1907. Webern also set five poems from thesame collection for voice and piano as his op 4. The poemsdepart from the continuing tradition that nouns inGerman have initial capital letters.

The English translation is from Wikipedia.