Mendelssohn String Quartet with Robert Mann, violist Sunday, March 13, 2005, 3 p.m. NAS Auditorium Entrance at 2100 C Street, NW FREE! No tickets or reservations are required. **Artist’s Reception for “Arthur Tress: Photographs from ‘The Tao of Physics’ Series” precedes the concert. Click here for details.
	Miriam Fried, violin Nicholas Mann, violin Daniel Panner, viola Marcy Rosen, cello with Robert Mann, violist

   

Program I Quartet in D minor, K. 421 Mozart Allegro moderato Andante Menuetto Allegretto, ma non troppo    Quartet No. 2, Op. 17, Sz. 67 Bartok Moderato Allegro molto capriccioso Lento    Intermission II    Quintet in B-flat Major, Op. 87 Mendelssohn Allegro vivace Andante scherzando Adagio e lento Allegro molto vivace

The Mendelssohn String Quartet has established a reputation as one of the most imaginative, vital and exciting quartets of its generation. The Quartet tours annually throughout North America with regular trips to foreign destinations.    The Mendelssohn Quartet was for nine years the Blodgett Artists in Residence at Harvard University, and has performed at such distinguished venues as Carnegie Hall in New York City, Washington DC's Kennedy Center and Library of Congress, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Wigmore Hall in London, and the Tonhalle in Zurich. The resident quartet of the Eastern Shore Chamber Music Festival and formerly resident quartet of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Mendelssohn Quartet has performed at the Caramoor Festival, the Festival Pablo Casals in Prades, France, and makes frequent appearances at New York's Mostly Mozart Festival as well as the Ravinia, Aspen, and Saratoga Music Festivals. They were the first American ensemble invited to appear at the International Dialogues Festival in Kiev, Ukraine. The Quartet is often heard across the United States on Minnesota Public Radio's Saint Paul Sunday.    In the 2004-05 season the Mendelssohn String Quartet will perform at Dartmouth College with actress Rosemary Harris in a concert of Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Huxley. The ensemble will offer two Beethoven quartets and Miss Harris will read from Romeo and Juliet and Point Counter Point by Huxley.    The Quartet's schedule will find them in many U.S. cities including Washington, DC, Boston, Buffalo, Syracuse, San Antonio, and at Caramoor. Some of their performances will be quartet concerts and others will feature guest artists including violist Robert Mann, pianist Jonathan Biss, and clarinetist Alex Fiterstein.    Return engagements at Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, and the Ravinia Festival with Leon Fleisher highlighted the Mendelssohn Quartet’s 2003-04 schedule. Other concerts included appearances at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, at Rockefeller University with Robert Mann, and in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Honolulu, and at the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Competition in Kalamazoo, MI, with pianist Jonathan Biss. The quartet also continues as Artist Faculty at North Carolina School of the Arts.    The Mendelssohn String Quartet has a strong commitment to contemporary music and has given world premieres of works commissioned by and for them. During the past several seasons, the Quartet performed the world premieres of string quartets by Bernard Rands, Augusta Read Thomas, David Horne, and Scott Wheeler. Additional composers who have written for the Quartet include Shulamit Ran, Ned Rorem, Bruce Adolphe, Mario Davidovsky, and Tina Davidson. The group has also performed the complete quartets of Arnold Schoenberg in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.    The Mendelssohn String Quartet's most recent projects include a 2-CD release on the BIS label of the Mendelssohn Viola Quintets (with Robert Mann, viola), and of composers associated with Harvard University featuring works by Mario Davidovsky, Bernard Rands, Walter Piston, Leon Kirchner, and Earl Kim (with Lucy Shelton, soprano). Other recordings by the Quartet include the Quartets Op. 26 and Op. 70 with the Divertimenti Op. 37 by Ernst Toch for Laurel Records, Tobias Picker's New Memories for String Quartet for Nonesuch, and the music of George Antheil and George Gershwin for Music Masters Classics. Additional recordings on the Music Masters label include the Mozart and Weber Clarinet Quintets (with Charles Neidich, clarinet), and the first quartet of Arnold Schoenberg.    Distinguished guests who have appeared with the Mendelssohn String Quartet in recent years include pianists Claude Frank, Ursula Oppens, Peter Serkin, and Menahem Pressler; sopranos Phyllis Bryn-Julson and Lucy Shelton; violinists Jaime Laredo and Robert Mann (on both violin and viola), violist Scott Nickrenz; cellist David Soyer; and clarinetists Richard Stoltzman and Charles Neidich.       ROBERT MANN    Violinist/Violist    American violinist, conductor, teacher and composer, Robert Mann was born in Portland, Oregon on July 19, 1920. He moved to New York in 1938 where he studied violin with Edouard Dethier at The Juilliard School. Mr. Mann won the prestigious Naumburg Competition in 1941 and made his debut in Town Hall. In 1946 Mr. Mann formed the Juilliard String Quartet and was the ensemble's first violinist for 51 years. As composer, Mr. Mann's compositions have been performed by Dimitri Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, Itzhak Perlman, Joel Krosnick, Gilbert Kalish, and the LaSalle and Concord String Quartets. He has composed more than 30 works for narrator and music, often performed by his wife, actress Lucy Rowan.    Robert Mann has conducted throughout his professional career, most recently leading the New York Chamber Symphony in a series of summer concerts in Central Park, and at Tanglewood. As teacher, Mr. Mann is a mentor to younger generations of string players. He is currently on the faculty at Juilliard and teaches regularly at Tanglewood and at the Saito Kinnen Festival in Matsumoto, Japan. Mr. Mann is President of the Naumburg Foundation.       WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART    String Quartet in D minor, K. 421    In 1785 Mozart wrote a set of six string quartets which he dedicated to his friend and mentor Joseph Haydn. In the dedication, Mozart wrote "Behold here, famous man and dearest friend, my six children...your praise...encourages me...and makes me hope that they shall not be entirely unworthy of your good will."    Haydn, for his part, was so impressed with Mozart's quartets that he thereafter insisted that Mozart had taught him how to compose for string quartet, even though by that time Haydn already had forty-two such works to his credit! The D minor Quartet is by far the most tragic of the six, with a piercing sadness that sometimes borders on gloominess. The falling octave in the opening theme is the first of numerous musical devices traditionally associated with sadness that continually reappear throughout the quartet. The only ray of hope is provided by the trio of the third movement (Minuetto: Allegro), which introduces playful spurts in the reverse dotted rhythm of the Schottisch. The final variation of the theme and variations that make up the fourth movement (Allegro ma non troppo) is in major mode, but even here, the frequent harmonic changes present a troubled picture.       BÉLA BARTÓK    Quartet No. 2, Sz. 67    Béla Bartók was a long time finding his way to a musical style that suited him. For a long time he was inspired by the dynamic presence of Brahms, the champion of Hungarian music outside of Hungary, and in his youth, Bartók actually heard Brahms conduct his own works during his frequent visits to Budapest. After Brahms it was Liszt, and after Liszt, Wagner - and after Wagner it was Richard Strauss, whose Thus Spake Zarathustra completely overwhelmed Bartók when he heard the Budapest premiere in 1902. Bartók modeled himself after Strauss for a while, but in 1905 he met Zoltán Kodály and discovered the real Hungarian folk music (not the fake verbunkos of the urban tea-rooms). He and Kodály unearthed it the hard way, by walking through the most desolate rural areas, and they published their first collection jointly in 1906.    Bartók’s music was very different after that. He adapted the folk modalities and percussive rhythms to his classical writing, and thereby earned for himself the enmity of almost the entire musical “Establishment” in Hungary. Long after the rest of Europe had accepted Bartók as a creative genius, Hungary granted him status only as a piano virtuoso.    To those who revere the architectural monuments of Beethoven, as far as string quartets go, Bartók inherited his mantle. It is obviously a subjective judgment not open to useful argument, but the brilliance and importance of these six works, written between 1908 and 1939, cannot be denied.    A stretch of thirty years between the first and last suggests considerable differences. Of the six, No. 2 is one of the most accessible - a broadly arched work imbued with poignant romanticism (the 19th century was only 17 years past). The footings of the arch are the slow, outer movements which are thematically related to each other. At the peak of the arch is the hard driving Allegro molto capriccioso, rife with fierce peasant rhythms, strong, angular melodies and abrupt cadences. The Lento finale is quite unusual, and brings to mind Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3, where the central slow movement dissolves into forest sounds. The forest sounds are here too, rising out of a fog of Ivesian mystery, and subsiding back into it at the conclusion. The movement does not so much end, as fade away, and the emotional effect is very powerful.       FELIX MENDELSSOHN    String Quintet No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 87    Nearly twenty years separate the two string quintets of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy; the first was written when the composer was 17 (1826), and the second when he was 36 (1845). They thus span nearly a lifetime of composition for Mendelssohn, who lived only until his thirty-eighth birthday.    Despite the many years between the composition of these quintets, these works are actually quite similar in style and form. This is not really a surprise, as Mendelssohn's compositional technique did not change significantly over his lifetime. Unlike many composers of the romantic period, Mendelssohn was immediately at ease with the chamber music idiom. While most of his colleagues were intimidated by the unparalleled output of chamber music masterpieces by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert and Ludwig van Beethoven, Mendelssohn, a classicist at heart, carried on the tradition. After Ludwig van Beethoven's late quartets, Mendelssohn was not left struggling with the question of 'what next'? He immediately consumed Ludwig van Beethoven's music, studying it with abandonment. His first quartet (Op. 13) was an homage to Ludwig van Beethoven, filled with quotes from the master. Mendelssohn created his own unique musical voice using Ludwig van Beethoven's emotional language as his inspiration. One can also hear the strong influences of Bach and Mozart in his early development.    Mendelssohn was one of the most precocious prodigies in all of classical music. As a child he began performing his compositions in his family's legendary Sunday morning salon concerts. This is the young man who wrote the most compelling and effervescent string octet in the repertoire at the age of sixteen. When it came to chamber music, Mendelssohn was a natural.    The String Quintet No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 87, was completed during the summer of 1845 at Bad Soden, Germany. Mendelssohn was at the height of his career; he was prosperous and famous as a composer (he was the official composer of the King of Prussia), he was highly acclaimed as a conductor (holding the directorship of the Leipzig Gewandhaus), and he had become very involved as a teacher (having, among other duties, founded the Leipzig Conservatory). While the quintet was written in a single effort, it was not published until 1851, four years after the composer's death. There is some evidence that Mendelssohn was not totally satisfied with the last movement, and that he had put the work aside. Later generations, however, can attest to the compelling brilliance of this final Allegro.    ©Nicholas Mann 2002    All concerts are free and open to the public — no tickets or reservations are required. Doors to the auditorium open 30 minutes prior to the performance.    Directions to the National Academy of Sciences Auditorium