Beethoven, Piazzolla, and didgeridoo this hour—you’ll hear two top string quartets, the Pacifica and Del Sol, plus the brilliant woodwind quintet Imani Winds. Pacifica players Sibbi Bernardsson and Brandon Vamos talk with Bill McGlaughlin about one of Beethoven’s Op. 59 “Razumovsky” quartets.
Paired with it, a strikingly evocative and expressive work by Peter Sculthorpe featuring “the sound of Australia,” an aboriginal trumpet called a didgeridoo. Sculthorpe’s music is inspired by the natural beauty of the Australian landscape, and by the instruments and musical tradition of its aboriginal people. This work was inspired by letters from asylum seekers in Australian detention centers, included in the book From Nothing to Zero; its five movement titles suggest emotional states experienced by the detainees. Three of the movements are freely based on an ancient love song from central Afghanistan.
Last, an arrangement of an Astor Piazzolla work for woodwind quintet. “Libertango,” Piazzolla stated, “stands for the freedom which I allow for my musicians.”
Download the Podcast for Program 11 (100 MB)
Performer Bios
Pacifica String Quartet: Formed in 1994, the Pacifica Quartet quickly won chamber music’s top competitions. Recent career honors include appointment as quartet-in-residence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the position held for 43 years by the Guarneri Quartet. In 2009 the Pacifica was named Ensemble of the Year by Musical America and received the 2009 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance.
Simin Ganatra: Simin Ganatra is the recipient of several awards and prizes, including the Naumburg Chamber Music Award, top prizes at the Concert Artists Guild Competition and the Coleman Chamber Music Competition, and several first prizes in various other competitions. Originally from Los Angeles, Ganatra is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory.
Sibbi Bernhardsson: Sibbi Bernhardsson, a native of Iceland, has received several awards and prizes, including the Icelandic Lindar award. A graduate of the Reykjavik College of Music, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Northern Illinois University, he performed across Europe, the United States, Asia, South America, and Canada as a member of the Icelandic String Octet.
Masumi Rostad: Masumi Rostad was winner of the Bronx Arts Ensemble’s Young Artist Competition Grand Prize and the Lillian Fuchs Award at the Julliard School. With the Julliard Symphony he performed the world premiere of Michael White’s Viola Concerto led by James DePreist, and the New York premiere of Paul Schoenfield’s Viola Concerto.
Brandon Vamos: Brandon Vamos has performed solo and chamber music recitals both in the United States and abroad. He has appeared as soloist with several orchestras including the Taipei City Symphony, Suwon Symphony in Seoul, Samara Symphony in Russia, and New Philharmonia Orchestra and Elgin Symphony Orchestra in Chicago.
Del Sol Quartet: Kate Stenberg, violin; Rick Shinozaki, violin; Charlton Lee, viola; Hannah Addario-Berry, cello. Founded in 1992, San Francisco-based Del Sol Quartet began a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, followed by a residency at San Francisco State University in association with the Alexander String Quartet.
Kate Stenberg: Kate Stenberg has performed as soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States and Europe, including festivals such as Festival Acanthes in Avignon, Banff Center, Tanglewood, and Sandpoint. A founding member of Left Coast, a Bay Area contemporary music ensemble, she also plays with the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Ballet, and San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.
Rick Shinozaki: Rick Shinozaki is principal second violin of Symphony Silicon Valley and concertmaster of Nova Vista Symphony. Solo appearances include the world premiere of Zdzislaw Wysocki’s Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra with Kent Nagano and Berkeley Symphony.
Charlton Lee: Charlton Lee, founder of Del Sol Quartet, has toured North America, Mexico, and Europe as a soloist and chamber musician. He and his wife, pianist Eva-Maria, perform works for viola and piano as the Lee/Zimmermann Duo. Other collaborators include Gavin Bryars, Tin Hat Trio, and Ben Levy Dance Company.
Hannah Addario-Berry: Hannah Addario-Berry gave the American premiere of Brian Cherney’s Cello Concerto “Apparitions” with the San Francisco Conservatory’s New Music Ensemble. As a chamber musician she was once a member of the Lloyd Carr-Harris String Quartet, and she has appeared in music festivals, among them, the Casalmaggiore in Italy.
Stephen Kent: One of the foremost exponents of the Australian aboriginal didgeridoo (variously called didj, didge, and didjeridu), Stephen Kent has helped to redefine the sound of one of the world’s most ancient instruments with his ground-breaking work. His career has taken him across five continents, living at various times in the United Kingdom, Spain, South Africa, Australia, and the United States.
Imani Winds: Imani Winds (named after the Swahili word for “faith”), has established itself as more than a wind quintet. Since 1997, the Grammy nominated ensemble has taken a unique path, carving out a distinct presence in the classical music world with its dynamic playing, culturally poignant programming, genre-blurring collaborations, and inspirational outreach programs encompassing European, African, Latin American and American works.
Playlist/Repertoire
Ludwig Van Beethoven: String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1
Pacifica String Quartet
Peter Sculthorpe: Quartet No. 16 for strings and didgeridoo
Del Sol Quartet
Astor Piazzolla: Libertango
Imani Winds
Program Notes
Ludwig Van Beethoven: String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1
Beethoven’s Op. 59 quartets were commissioned in 1806 by Count Andreas Razumovsky, Russian ambassador to Vienna, with the stipulation that each of the three quartets would incorporate a Russian theme. Beethoven transposed two melodies from a collection of Russian folk songs that he owned, published by Ivan Prach in 1790. He used one in the finale of op. 59, no. 1 and the second in the trio section of the third movement of no. 2. For the slow movement of no. 3 he composed an original theme in the style of a Russian dance.
The Count, like his brother-in-law Prince Karl Lichnowsky, was among Beethoven’s early admirers and supporters in Vienna. He was born into a Ukrainian-Russian noble family whose remaining members went into exile in Austria in the early nineteenth century. On New Year's Eve 1814 the Count hosted a sumptuous ball at the Russian Embassy with Tsar Nicholas as guest of honor, to celebrate the successful conclusion of the Congress of Vienna. On this occasion, the Tsar made Count Razumovsky a prince for his role in the summit as Russia’s chief negotiator. (Beethoven was invited, but characteristically did not attend.)
To accommodate his guests, Razumovsky built a temporary extension of the main house. After all the guests had departed a fire started in the flue that heated the extension, and it quickly spread to the main building. In his effort to help put out the fire, Razumovsky’s eyesight was damaged and his spirit was broken. "I found the Prince aged and depressed," wrote Baroness du Montet.
“His extravagant magnificence has ruined him…He is a great gentleman who commands respect and is generally most amiable. His presence and appearance are imperious; he radiates pride in all things; pride in his birth, his rank and his honor… in his bearing, in his speech… Sometimes he is downright haughty…This nobleman was afflicted a few years before his death with the decay of his mental and physical faculties.”1
Beethoven completed the "Razumovsky" Quartets in February 1807 and they were tried out in private readings by the Schuppanzigh Quartet. A review in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of the first public performance of the op. 59 Quartets on February 27, 1807, described them as "three new, very long and difficult violin quartets by Beethoven . . . deep in conception and marvelously worked out, but not universally comprehensible" except possibly the third one.2
The first, in F Major, comprised four very long movements in sonata form and on the scale of the recent "Eroica" Symphony. Thayer in his multi-volume Life of Beethoven, recounts several anecdotes about the reception of the first "Razumovsky" Quartet in F Major.3 Czerny, a pupil of Beethoven, recalled that when Schuppanzigh first played the Quartet, he and his fellow musicians "laughed and were convinced that Beethoven was playing a joke and it was not the quartet that had been promised." In Moscow, "Bernhard Romberg trampled under foot as a contemptible mystification the bass [cello] part which he was to play." A few years later, in St. Petersburg, the group "broke out in laughter when the bass played his solo on one note."During a tour of England in 1810, the Italian violinist Felix Radicati visited the English musician Thomas Appleby in Manchester. Noticing the published parts of op. 59 on the piano, the violinist exclaimed: "Ha! Beethoven, as the world says, and as I believe, is music-mad;--for these [quartets] are not music. He submitted them to me in manuscript and, at his request, I fingered them for him. I said to him, that he surely did not consider these works to be music?--to which he replied, ‘Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age!’"
—Tomás C. Hernández
Music Division, Library of Congress
1. Baronne du Montet, Souvenirs 1785-1866, Paris 1814, quoted in H.C. Robbins Landon, Beethoven. A Documentary Study (abridged edition), 1975 (Return to text)
2. Wayne M. Senner, ed. The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions by His German Contemporaries, vol. 2, (trans. Robin Wallace), 1999 (Return to text)
3. Thayer’s Life of Beethoven I, rev. and ed. By Elliot Forbes, 1967 (Return to text)
Peter Sculthorpe: Quartet No. 16 for strings and didgeridoo
Born in Tasmania, Peter Sculthorpe—an Australian Living Treasure—has written more than three hundred and fifty works, several of which are performed and recorded throughout the world. He has written in virtually all genres, but all his work reflects the topography and culture of Australia. His music is inspired by two factors: first, the Australian terrain—flat, wide-open spaces filled with the bird calls of native species; and second, the musical traditions of the aboriginal tribes along with the gamelan music of Indonesia. Because of his belief that music should make people feel better and happier, his music is devoid of the dense, atonal techniques of many of his contemporaries. In the Queen’s Birthday Honours List of 1970, Sculthorpe was named a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), upgraded in 1977 to Officer status (OBE). In the Australia Day Honours of 1990, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO).
Composed in 2005, Quartet no. 16 was written for the Del Sol Quartet and features the didgeriodoo—“the sound of Australia”—an aboriginal trumpet made of wood or bamboo that originated in northern Australia. In it Western European influences are combined with folk music from the Pacific Rim. The work was inspired by letters from asylum seekers in Australian detention centers included in the book From Nothing to Zero, and its five movement titles suggest emotional states experienced by the detainees. Three of the movements are freely based on an ancient love song from central Afghanistan.
Astor Piazzolla: Libertango
Arguably the most renowned tango musician in the world, Argentine-born Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla has left a vast oeuvre of works ranging from instrumental tangos, tango songs, film music, pieces for guitar or flute, chamber and orchestral music, and opera as well, had he lived to fulfill a commission to write an opera. In 1955 he introduced “Nuevo tango,” a new approach to the genre incorporating jazz improvisation, counterpoint, and dissonance. Met with resistance in Argentina, his music gained popularity in Europe and North America. A virtuoso bandeonista, Piazzolla in the 1980s collaborated with classical musicians including violinst Gidon Kremer, cellists Rostropovich and Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Emanuel Ax, and the Kronos Quartet, which commissioned Five Tango Sensations for bandoneón and string quartet (1989). In 1990 he suffered a heart attack in Paris, and died two years later in Buenos Aires.
One of his most popular works, Libertango (1973), has been arranged for various instruments and combinations. In the composer’s own words, “Libertango stands for the freedom which I allow for my musicians. Their limits are defined solely by the extent of their own capabilities and not through any exterior pressure.” Written for his Octeto Nuevo de Buenos Aires, the piece represents a leaner, more fluid musical style, based on the inherent musical qualities of the tango, “liberated” from the social context of its origins.
Last Updated: 03/29/2010
