Allegro moderato. très doux
Assez vif. très rythmé
Très lent Vif et agité

The first two movements of Ravel’s Quartet were finished in December 1902 and the next month he submitted the first movement for a prize at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was still a student. The jury was unimpressed and the Director Théodore Dubois was typically acidic, claiming that it “lacked simplicity”. The failure to win a prize meant that Ravel’s studies with Fauré were over but Ravel persisted with the Quartet, and by April 1903 he had finished all four movements. He put it aside for yet another doomed attempt at the Prix de Rome, but it’s likely that he made further revisions later in the year. The pianist and composer Alfredo Casella recalled running into Ravel in the street in January 1904: “I found [Ravel] seated on a bench, attentively reading a manuscript. I asked him what it was. He said: It is a quartet I have just finished. I am rather pleased with it.” The first performance was given at the Schola Cantorum by the Heymann Quartet, on 5 March 1904. It is dedicated “à mon cher maître Gabriel Fauré”.

In a parallel with Debussy’s Quartet, Ravel makes use of cyclic themes – material heard in the first movement returns in various guises throughout. The second movement is notable for Ravel’s brilliant use of cross-rhythms as all four string players become a kind of gigantic guitar. The rhapsodic slow movement includes a dream-like recollection of the cyclic theme. In the finale, Ravel’s use of irregular time signatures generates a momentum that is not only impossible to predict but impossible to resist. Recollections of the cyclic theme are woven into the texture with great subtlety and the kaleidoscopic string writing produces a conclusion that glitters and surges.

Nigel Simeone © 2012

Prima parte. Moderato –
Seconda parte. Allegro –
Recapitulazione della prima parte. Moderato –
Coda. Allegro molto

Composed in 1927, Bartók’s Third String Quartet was written for a competition launched in 1925 by the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia for a new piece of chamber music, with three prizes totalling $10,000. When the competition closed at the end of 1927, 643 compositions had been submitted to a panel that included the conductors Willem Mengelberg and Fritz Reiner. The judges awarded the $6,000 first prize jointly to Bartók (for this quartet) and the Italian composer Alfredo Casella. The quartet was premiered at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia on 30 December 1928 and given for the first time in Europe a few weeks later, in Budapest on 19 February 1929.

The work is played without a break, but falls into two large sections, each one slow–fast. The quartet fuses a Beethoven-like sense of interweaving musical lines and extremely economical use of musical ideas with rhythmic elements and melodic contours that derive from Bartók’s study of Hungarian folk music, expressed in a harmonic language that is uncompromisingly of its time. For the first time in this quartet, Bartók uses techniques (including playing with the bow as close as possible to the bridge, and the ‘Bartók’ pizzicato where the string hits the fingerboard) that become familiar devices in his later quartets. Despite the contrasts between different sections, it is a work of fierce intensity that reaches a a pulverizing conclusion.

Allegro moderato
Scherzo: Allegro
Largo
Presto

At least one of the Op. 33 Quartets was first performed in the Viennese home of the Grand Duke Paul of Russia, the his wife, the Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna, on Christmas Day 1781 and it is to the Grand Duke that they were subsequently dedicated when Artaria published them the following year (by which time Haydn – a seasoned operator by this time – had also sold the same quartets to publishers in the Netherlands and Germany. Months before any printed editions appeared, Haydn had offered patrons and potential supporters the chance to buy manuscript copies of his new quartets, describing them as being written ‘in a completely new and special way, for I haven’t composed any for ten years’. The first movement of Op. 33 No. 2 demonstrates this ‘new and special way’ at its most subtle: there is an ease of musical conversation between the four instruments that shows absolute mastery of the form while at the same time Haydn uses just one principal theme and some variants of it to develop a sophisticated musical argument. The Scherzo takes the form of an Austrian peasant dance, a ‘Schuhplattler’ with its characteristic stamping rhythms and a trio section in which Haydn marks slides between the notes, presumably to maintain a sense of rustic merry-making. The slow movement is altogether more serious, opening with the viola and cello playing the main theme before the violins take it over, and in this Largo Haydn aims for a more sparing texture than in other slow movements. It is the fourth movement that is the source of the work’s nickname, ‘the Joke’. A bright and brilliant tarantella, Haydn’s joke lies in trying to trick listeners – more than once – into thinking the piece has finished when it hasn’t. It’s a witty and clever series of musical booby-traps that can easily lure the unwary.

Nigel Simeone