CONTRASTS
Claire Booth & Ensemble 360
Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Saturday 7 December 2024, 7.00pm
Tickets
£22
£14 UC, DLA & PIP
£5 Under 35s & Students

***Sadly, due to illness and the adverse weather further south, the musicians are unable to go ahead with tonight’s concert. The Crucible box office will be in touch with all ticket holders over the course of today. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact marketing@musicintheround.co.uk ***
SCHOENBERG String Quartet No.2 (31’)
BERG Seven Early Songs (17’)
DEBUSSY String Quartet (25’)
Separated by a few short years and the turn of a century, this concert features two utterly different string quartets from two modernist giants who typify the staggering range of fin de siècle classical music.
Schoenberg’s visionary second quartet sees Ensemble 360 joined by superstar soprano Claire Booth for a surprisingly accessible and personal work that stretches from the intimate to the interstellar. Debussy’s sensual and impressionistic quartet shimmers with life and light between opening storms and a grand conclusion.
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SCHOENBERG Arnold, String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10
The earliest sketch for this quartet is dated 9 March 1907 and the work was completed in the summer of 1908. It was written at a turbulent time in Schoenberg’s private life – his wife Mathilde was having an affair with the painter Richard Gerstl – but the finished work was dedicated to her. The first performance was given at the Bösendorfer-Saal in Vienna on 21 December 1908. The occasion was recalled by the composer almost thirty years later, when he wrote that it caused ‘riots which surpassed every previous and subsequent happenings of this kind.’ He went on to admit that the riots were ‘a natural reaction of a conservatively educated audience to a new kind of music.’ This was a work Schoenberg identified as an important turning point in his creative development: a move away from reliance on traditional keys. As Schoenberg himself put it in a 1949 lecture – choosing his words carefully – the quartet marked ‘the transition to the second period, this period which renounces a tonal centre and is falsely called atonality.’ The composer’s irritation with the use of the ‘atonal’ label is understandable: as he pointed out in the same lecture, in every movement of the quartet ‘the key is presented distinctly at all crossroads of the formal organization.’ Even so, it was a work which shocked early audiences – and at the premiere the second, third and fourth movements were all interrupted by audience jeers and laughter until the coda of the fourth movement, which was heard without disturbance. As Schoenberg commented, ‘perhaps even my enemies and adversaries might have felt something here?’
As well as its harmonic innovations, perhaps the most startling aspect of this work is the addition of a soprano voice in the third and fourth movements, which are settings of two poems by Stefan George. The first movement is loosely in sonata form with five thematic ideas, all of them related to each other. Beginning clearly in the home key of F sharp minor before moving away into remoter harmonic territory, the movement eventually finds repose on quiet F sharp minor chords. The second movement is a kind of Scherzo marked Sehr rasch (very quickly) in D minor, but with frequent changes of tempo – and a Trio section which quotes the Viennese folk song ‘O du lieber Augustin’. The third movement, ‘Litanei’ (Litany) – the first of the two song settings – is loosely in E flat minor though highly chromatic. Schoenberg’s own account of the last movement, ‘Entrückung’ noted that it ‘begins with an introduction, depicting the departure from earth to another planet.’ From this literally other-worldly opening, the voice and instruments in this movement develop the music with a brilliantly imagined and highly expressive array of unusual sonorities before finally arriving on a sublime and radiant chord of F sharp major.
Nigel Simeone © 2024
BERG Alban, Seven Early Songs
Nacht [Night] (Carl Hauptmann)
Schilflied [Song among the reeds] (Nikolaus Lenau)
Die Nachtigall [The nightingale] (Theodor Storm)
Traumgekrönt [Crowned in a dream] (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Im Zimmer [Indoors] (Johannes Schalf)
Liebesode [Ode to love] (Otto Erich Hartleben)
Sommertage [Summer days] (Paul Hohenberg)
Berg composed these songs during his time as a student of Schoenberg (between 1905 and 1908) – so they are almost exactly contemporary with Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet. Altogether during this period, Berg wrote more than eighty songs. The present selection was assembled by the composer in 1928 when he also made versions with orchestral accompaniment. Three of the songs were performed at a concert of music by Schoenberg’s pupils in 1907 – the first public hearing of any music by Berg. Stylistically they owe much to the legacy of Wolf and Mahler as well as Schoenberg’s earlier songs, and the influence of Wagner, Strauss and Debussy. But even though they are student works, they reveal a composer with a superb natural affinity with the human voice: Berg went on to write several mature sets of songs, as well as the operas Wozzeck and Lulu, and that understanding of the expressive potential of the voice can already be heard in the Seven Early Songs. They range from relatively simple writing to almost expressionistic music which borders on atonality. Often intoxicating, sometimes shimmering, the ravishing opulence of these songs have love as their central obsession, so it is no surprise that Berg later dedicated the set to his wife Helena – recalling the blissful time when they first got to know each other. The soprano Diana Damrau has commented that the songs are ‘about a great love, and also physical love … the happiness of fulfilled togetherness. You don’t need anything else, and the circle closes with the last song, ‘Sommertage’. There he goes back to nature and what particularly characterises the romantic soul: the quest for freedom’.
Nigel Simeone © 2024
DEBUSSY Claude, String Quartet in G minor Op. 10
Debussy’s String Quartet was first performed at the Société Nationale de Musique on 29 December 1893 – almost exactly a year before he shocked Paris with the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, the most laconic manifestation of his revolutionary creative spirit. The Quartet, composed just after the Prélude, is one of his earliest mature works – a piece that still has some roots in the musical language of César Franck but in which a fresh and brilliant imagination can be heard, not just in the free handling of forms, but also in the spectacularly inventive writing for string instruments – something absorbed by Ravel in the Quartet he wrote a decade later. The first movement is robust and confident, while the second, with its extensive use of pizzicato, hints at the Javanese music that Debussy heard at the 1889 Exposition. The slow movement begins with fragments of the theme split between the lower instruments before being introduced in full by the first violin, over rich chromatic harmonies. The finale has clear thematic links with the first. It starts hesitantly, gradually building up both tension and speed, on a melodic idea that is presented in different guises before reaching the dazzling conclusion in G major.
Nigel Simeone © 2011