Music@Menlo Live
Elgar Piano quintet
Disc 2 spotlights the rebirth of England’s musical culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Following the death of Henry Purcell in 1695, England entered a long era of silence, becoming known for two centuries as “a land without music.” Sir Edward Elgar reawakened England’s composers to the richness of their musical heritage with his iconic Enigma Variationsfor orchestra in 1896. With Elgar leading the way, subsequent generations of English composers—including William Walton and Benjamin Britten—revitalized their country’s musical landscape.
Beethoven Quartet, op. 95, "Serioso"
Disc 3 honors the great musical tradition of Vienna, the seat of Western music from the early eighteenth century to the dawn of the twentieth. Vienna was the crucible of the Classical and Romantic periods, fostering the innovations of Joseph Haydn—the father of the Classical style—and forward-looking statements like the Serioso Quartet of Ludwig van Beethoven, Haydn’s prize pupil. Beethoven’s vision for a new direction in music would be realized by the Romantic generation in such masterpieces as Johannes Brahms’s Opus 36 Sextet.
SCHOSTAKOVICH QUARTET NO. 8 IN C MINOR
Disc 4 brings together three of the twentieth century’s most commanding compositional voices. Dmitry Shostakovich’s name has become virtually synonymous with the intensity of his musical reaction to Stalinism, his work serving as a musical chronicle of the harsh conditions under Stalin’s regime. His countryman and contemporary Sergey Prokofiev fled Russia after the October Revolution of 1917 and ultimately settled in Paris, where he composed the Opus 39 Quintet, a work of razor-sharp wit and duplicitous charm. Arnold Schoenberg became the most notorious of the three as Western music’s first composer to abandon the tonal system. His audacious compositional language that so revolutionized music in the twentieth century remains as fresh and provocative at the dawn of the twenty-first.
WEBER QUINTET WITH ANTHONY MCGILL
Such works as Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio, op. 70, no. 1, represent what the composer himself identified as a “new path” in his compositional language. This “new path” paved the way for the Romantic generation to emerge. Carl Maria von Weber, Beethoven’s contemporary, is often considered the first true Romantic. His Clarinet Quintet, though more reflective of the genteel Viennese salon than Beethoven’s impassioned “Ghost” Trio, nevertheless extends the Classical language of Haydn and Mozart into a more extroverted, operatic style. Robert Schumann’s famous Dichterliebe song cycle, which sets the poetry of Heinrich Heine, demonstrates the sturm und drang aesthetic of the Romantic generation with its tragic hero’s fits of manic ecstasy and depression.