Carl Friedrich Abel and Johann Christian Bach held an annual series of concerts in London that began on January 23, 1765 and ended May 9, 1781. Under the patronage of Lord Abingdon (who brought Haydn to London) they opened their own concert hall in 1775 in Hanover Square, producing ten to fifteen concerts and eleven oratorio evenings. The concerts declined after the death in 1782 of J.C. Bach, though Abel was able to keep them going a little bit longer under his own name. Abel was a genteel man as can be seen in his portrait by Thomas Gainsborough here at The Huntington Main Art Gallery. Abel enjoyed the company of artists, engravers, and designers, and was a friend to a host of London figures, including Gainsborough and Cipriani. Abel's cause of death is attributed to an over indulgence in rich food and, in particular, wine and spirits. His music, especially his adagios, possesses a great depth of emotion. Burney remarked that "his exquisite taste and deep science prevented the admission of whatever was not highly polished." His String Quartet in B flat major, Op. 8 No. 2 is in the three expected movements typical of the galant period.

The Phantasy for Oboe & Strings by Benjamin Britten was written for Leon Goosens. In one movement, it is a bright and energetic composition, with a muted string march leading the work on and off stage. Britten's lifelong characteristic of focusing on a protagonist is present in this early chamber work. The oboe soloist functions in an almost operatic role. Britten, who was himself a violist, exhibits a staggeringly high professional knowledge of orchestration - the work resonates from start to finish.

- Jeff von der Schmidt

The work is a short, lyrical piece where an outsider (the oboe) joins the group (a string trio) and adds to their dialogue. At first the newcomer is treated with a mixture of suspicion and agitation, but eventually is made welcome. The oboe is invited to share the musical theme that has been established which he then proceeds to embellish and adorn. He leads the harmonic changes that result in the theme being heard in many different keys. He then introduces a new theme. The excitement grows and leads to a climax. A peaceful coda re-establishes the original theme and all ends harmoniously among the integrated quartet. The work was commissioned by the London Chamber Music Society to celebrate their move to Kings Place in October of 2008 and first performed by Nicholas Daniel and the Chilingirian Quartet.

-Thea Musgrave

Long known as the "Dean of African American Composers," as well as one of America’s foremost composers, William Grant Still has had the distinction of becoming a legend in his own lifetime. On May 11, 1895, he was born in Woodville, Mississippi to parents who were teachers and musicians. They were of African, Native American, Spanish, Irish and Scotch descent. When William was only a few months old, his father died and his mother took him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she taught English in the high school. There his musical education began - with violin lessons from a private teacher, and with later inspiration from the Red Seal operatic recordings bought for him by his stepfather.

Dr. Still's service to the cause of brotherhood is evidenced by his many firsts in the musical realm:  Still was the first African-American in the United States to have a symphony performed by a major symphony orchestra. He was the first to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the United States, when in 1936 he directed the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in his compositions at the Hollywood Bowl. He was the first African-American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the Deep South in 1955, when he directed the New Orleans Philharmonic at Southern University. He was the first of his race to conduct an all white radio orchestra in New York City. He was the first to have an opera produced by a major company in the United States, when in 1949 his Troubled Island was done at the City Center of Music and Drama in New York City. He was the first to have an opera televised over a national network. With all of these accomplishments, Still was a pioneer, but, in a larger sense, he pioneered because he was able to create music capable of interesting the greatest conductors of the day: truly serious music, but with a definite American flavor.

Music for the native dancers of Panama has been notated so infrequently that it is still unknown to people outside of the country itself. It was Narciso Garay who first called the attention of Elizabeth Waldo to it and she, in turn, interested the American William Grant Still in developing it for concert use. Mr. Still has written, on Panamanian dance themes collected by Miss Waldo, a work which is adaptable to string quartet or string orchestra. Nothing like it was done before in the literature for strings. Mr. Still departed from traditional practices by making an attempt to approximate the sounds of native instruments, giving the music an unusually interesting quality. There is a distinct unity and a touch of Caribbean color in the four dances. The first and last are African in origin, probably brought by the first slaves imported into Panama, while the second and third are of Spanish-Indian derivation.

The American String Quartet of Antonín Dvorák was written in Spillville, Iowa, in June of 1893. Dvorák had been encouraged to journey into this small rural Czech émigré town by his secretary, J. Kovarik, who was born in Spillville. He arrived in Iowa with his entire family after his first year of teaching in New York City at the National Conservatory of Music. "Imagine, I was walking there in the wood along by the stream (the Turkey River) and after eight months I heard again the singing of birds! And here the birds are different from ours, they have much brighter colors and they sing differently, too. And now I am going to have breakfast and after breakfast I shall come again." Dvorák was also exposed to two weeks of Native American music, dance, ceremonies and medicine (including trying an herbal compound for a headache) by tribal remnants of the Kickapoo and Sioux Indians. Though in all probability apocryphal, there is an unsubstantiated report that Dvorák's daughter, Otilka, was romantically involved with Chief Big Moon, which may have prompted Dvorak's abrupt departure from Spillville.

The quartet is infused with a joyous energy, and can be appreciated as Dvorák's Pastoral - echoing Beethoven's sentiment in the first movement of lithe awakening of happy feelings upon arriving in the country. The work was sketched in a mere five days. Highlights along the way include a haunting slow movement amalgamating the Native American and Negro spiritual sympathies of Dvorák, which he had learned from the great African American baritone Harry Burleigh. A bird call in the third movement is reported to be that of the scarlet tanager. Commonalties exist between the resonance of this great composition (and its companion pieces from Spillville, the "'American" Quintet and Sonatina for Violin and Piano) and the photography of Edward S. Curtis. Both expressed, with the highest artistry and deepest sympathy, essential aspects of the Native American experience that was soon to vanish forever.

-Jeff von der Schmidt

"I play the violin and I have given recitals all over the country, but I found of no interest posing as a virtuoso, so I have devoted my life to composition and conducting, perhaps a better pose. I like all types of music; I can even stand some of the classics and some of my own works, but prefer the music of the people of the ranchos and villages of my country." In the String Quartet No.4 Música de Feria, Silvestre Revueltas paints a vivid, energetic and highly colorful musical homage to his beloved ranchos and villages in this description of a Mexican fiesta. Revueltas was born on a momentous day, New Year's Eve, 1899, in the city of Santiago Papasquiro in Durango, Mexico. An inquisitive musical talent eventually brought a violin into young Revueltas’ life. His studies took him to Chicago in the United States, where he studied with the renowned Czech violinist Sevcik. Revueltas was for a time a member of the San Diego Symphony in California. His colorful life included fighting on the side of the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. Carlos Chávez recalled Revueltas to Mexico to teach violin and composition in Mexico City. Revueltas rejected the idea of a national school of "Mexican" composition. One is equally quite curious about what Revueltas would have thought of today's multiculturalism: he referred to his own use of indigenous instruments in a few of his compositions as "for the tourist trade." He died of alcoholism in 1940, leaving behind a body of music renowned for its challenge and intensity.

-Jeff von der Schmidt

Aroma Foliado was a Mainly Mozart commission underwritten by James R. and Frederica Rosenfield for the Cuarteto Latinoamericano and the La Jolla Summerfest. In the summer of 2005, I had the opportunity to see the work of North American visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra. I was especially intrigued by her work: All the Petals from Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Sense of Smell, 1618, 2002. As its title indicates, this work uses Jan Brueghel’s The Elder’s Sense of Smell as its source. In his painting, Brueghel presents us with a garden where a female figure is inhaling the fragrance of a large bouquet of flowers. Bocanegra captures the essence of the flowers through a series of painted petals; the number matching the number of visible petals on the Brueghel painting. Each one of the petals is tied with a black ribbon on white wall forming a floral map, with the final effect a series of textures of great expressive and visual force.

The interesting part of this work is the way in which an artist creates her work from the appropriation, interpretation or fragmentation of images of another artist to build new units, creating new languages in quite different environments. Undertaking the writing of a piece to celebrate Mozart’s 250th anniversary called for some decisions to be made, one of them whether or not to incorporate fragments of the Mozart pieces. But what was important was to have thoughts about the intersection points of his music with mine. That was the reason I decided to write my piece in a format very similar to a rondo, in which the musical language could flow with lightness and absolute freedom. So I used some fragments of the Mozart String Quartet No. 21 in D Major K. 575. These fragments link the sections, which are my memory, time and personal musical history. 

The process used by Bocanegra inspired me and I used it like a platform for the reinterpretation and redevelopment of another artist’s material, but it gains its own life in my music without losing its essence. The main aspect is not the musical origin in itself, but how the new composition incorporates, develops and acquires new meanings and aesthetic values.

-Gabriela Ortiz

“Perhaps no work of Beethoven’s met a more discouraging reception from musicians than these now famous quartets.”

-Alexander Wheelock Thayer

It is ironic that Beethoven’s music is popular. He was painfully aware that it was not going to be appreciated in his lifetime. When confronted with the moaning complaints of violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh about the difficulty of the first Rasumofsky quartet, Beethoven famously barked “Do you think I worry about your damn fiddle when the spirit speaks to me?” The cycle of the three Op. 59 quartets begins the breakdown between Beethoven and his public. 

“How can a key be ambiguous and simultaneously retain its structural coherence?” would have been a valid question from a contemporary of Beethoven’s confronted by this unfamiliar and forbidding vocabulary. This new dissonance, one of structure, becomes critical to the large scale unfolding of the music – a roundabout way to explain why Beethoven’s music was to become longer and longer as he got older. Op. 59, No. 3, as critic Bernard Jacobson observed, “never sits down.” Though there are the usual suspects of Mozartian ghosts (in particular Mozart’s quartets K. 387 and K. 465), the third Rasumofsky opens with the polar opposite of the 5th symphony, tremendous, long term harmonic ambiguity. The ambiguity continues with the Allegro vivace until finally C major triumphs. The second movement is a melancholy lament in A minor, keeping the quartet unified in a single, pure key signature of no sharps or flats. The third movement harkens back to the world of Mozart with a vision of the minuet that never quite existed within the legato phrasing Beethoven requests. There is also an extended coda, leading seamlessly to the energetic fugal finale. Beethoven always dreamed of making the fugue powerfully expressive, changing the purity of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. He kept at the concept of heaven-storming fugues into his late and final works. Consequently, the finale of Op. 59, No. 3 is a portent of even more radical music on his horizon.

-Jeff von der Schmidt

The Danse sacrée et danse profane were composed in 1904 at the specific request of the famous Paris piano manufacturing firm of Pleyel. The works were to help popularize the new chromatic harp – an instrument that abandoned the harp’s pedal mechanism in favor of a separate string for each semitone. The chromatic harp proved to be a failure, but Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane remains among the most popular pieces in the harp repertoire.

These two dances, composed in the period after the completion of his opera Pelléas et Mélisande and during the composition of La Mer, present sacred and secular aspects of Debussy’s creative personality. The Danse sacrée returns to antiquity for its atmosphere, much as in his Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastian. The Danse profane is an Impressionistic vision of a pagan world of mythical rite and revelry.

The flute and harp resonate throughout the music of France and Asia and perhaps no two instruments blend East and West as effectively. This brief transcription by Japan’s Toru Takemitsu of Erik Satie emphasizes the close ties Takemitsu felt with French music, though the Japanese master’s primary influences were Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen. Le Fils des étoiles was a mystical Rosicrucian play of 1891 for which Satie composed piano preludes. Takemitsu was attracted to Satie’s harmonic sequences, floating naturally without cadences, unencumbered by bar lines of regular meter, a characteristic of his own musical voice.

-Jeff von der Schmidt

Solar Music, inspired by a painting of the same name by the female Mexican Surrealist Remedios Varo, depicts a woman standing in a dying forest, bowing rays of the sun. Written for four flutes (bass, alto, flute, piccolo) played by one person, and harp, the score incorporates non-traditional playing techniques, including pitch bends, tuning key glides and bowing procedures for the harp. The premiere took place at the Berlin Philharmonie Kammermusiksaal in April 1997, performed by Camilla Hoitenga and Alice Giles. A recording of Solar Music is available on CRI 865, “Sacred Theory of the Earth.” This piece was made possible by a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation.

-Anne Le Baron

“In my own composition I judge a long period of gestation necessary. During this interval I come progressively, and with a growing precision, to see the form and the evolution that the final work will take in its totality. Thus I can be occupied for several years without writing a single note of the work, after which the composition goes relatively quickly. But one must spend time in eliminating all that could be regarded as superfluous in order to realize as completely as possible the definitive clarity so much desired."

Maurice Ravel is a paradigm of celebrated French clarity (in this regard he far outshines the impressionism of his compatriot, Claude Debussy). His entire output is gemlike, from two glowing fairytale operas to Spanish exoticism, Asian mysticism, American jazz, and African mystery. Ravel, indeed, traveled an internal globe throughout his life. The Introduction & Allegro was composed in 1905, after the scandalous reception of his now famous String Quartet in 1903. A concert aria for the harp soloist, the work is luxuriously in D flat major, and features numerous harp cadenzas.

Claude Debussy was born on August 22, 1862 in St. Germain-en-Laye. His parents came from a middle class background and he studied piano with Mme. Maute, the mother-in-law of Paul Verlaine. Debussy's ability was easy to spot -at an early age he traveled throughout Europe in a piano trio with two Russian musicians and Mme. Natalie von Meek, the patron of Tchaikovsky. It is not surprising that one of his strongest influences would come from his study of Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov.

The String Quartet is a musical sibling to Debussy's symbolist masterpiece, the opera Pelléas et Mélisande. The quartet was most surely finished during the early stages of the opera's composition. The first movement represents a self-confident break from tradition, for the pure shape of the main theme will assert a greater importance than its initial harmonic structure. This gives Debussy the means to create a perpetual variation of idea, rather than invoking the intervalic development of music influenced by the likes of Bach and Beethoven. The second movement, with its moments in 15/8 meter, is another bold stroke of timbre for timbre's sake. The ostinato and pizzicato variants present a maze of associations with the theme of the first movement. The third movement is a retreat into Debussy's beloved Russian sound world. The melodies, especially for the solo viola, remind one of the famous Garden Scene in Pelléas et Mélisande, when Mélisande de loosens her long hair to erotically envelope Pelléas, and these melodies are in the same key as similar moments found in the opera. The introduction to the final movement provides a Proustian remembrance of things past before moving forward to a brilliant conclusion in the major key.

The Notturno in E flat major, D. 897 was published after Schubert’s death in 1828. It is more a German lied than an instrumental piece of chamber music. The two strings and the piano answer each other in a “song without words” exchange. Orchestration colors include magical pizzicato from the violin and cello. Harmonic modulations rely heavily on Neapolitan harmonies to take us from beginning to end. This key change device is created by constructing a major triad one half step above E flat major. Technically this is the remote key of F flat major, but can be spelled conventionally as E major. The Neapolitan chord elevates the music throughout, a musical metaphor to the numerous moonrise scenes found in the paintings of Schubert’s contemporary, Casper David Friedrich.

-Jeff von der Schmidt

L'apothéose d'un rêve (2005) was commissioned by pianist Menahem Pressler for the Beaux Arts Trio and was premiered by the Beaux Arts Trio at The Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, on 16 January 2006 with consecutive performances throughout the Netherlands during the Trio's 50th anniversary season. Composed during Autumn 2005 and inspired, initially, by the breadth, length and depth of the Beaux Arts Trio's presence, the composition of the work began to internalize certain influences: Cathedral bells at Notre Dame de Paris on several storm-filled afternoons; Indiana's countryside--where I was based while pursing my Bachelor's degree while writing this piece, and other flat, Midwestern, land-locked landscapes. At the heart of the piano trio is an emotionally suspended D-Minor theme that occurs, in its purest form, during the two Adagio cantabile, semplice movements near the beginning and at the very end of the work. The theme is first passed from cello to violin. The emotional differences in these two instruments' tessitura and the order in which the theme is heard represent specific meaning. The second time it is reversed: violin passes to cello - which is then interrupted by "bells" and the final notes. Throughout the middle movements, variations of this theme meander through different memories, atmospheres and times in my life in the five main sections made up of eight movements--all of which were composed and felt as if it were a dream.

-Alexandra du Bois

Composed in 1778 while Mozart was in Paris, the Sonata in E minor for Violin & Piano, K. 304 is in two movements. E minor was considered an extremely dark and serious key, and this is the only composition in Mozart’s entire career that uses it as the home key. The association with deep sadness perhaps has origins in the Phrygian mode that originally was built upon E natural. Regardless of key symbolism, the sonata is Mozart’s response to the death of his mother, Anna Maria. 

In March of 1891 Brahms heard the deeply impressive artistry of clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld for the first time. The elderly composer had already announced his compositional retirement, but Mühlfeld inspired four works that provided the final summit of Brahms’ extraordinary output of chamber music. Brahms was putting his things in order and clearly aware that his earthly life was drawing to a close. The Trio in A minor was composed in the summer of 1891 in Bad Ischl in the beautiful Salzkammergut area of Austria. It was written at the same time Brahms drew up his last will and testament.

Mühlfeld was in the renowned Court Orchestra at Meiningen, and served as the principal clarinetist of the Bayreuth Festival. Upon completion of these summer works for Mühlfeld, Brahms wrote to Countess Heldburg, the wife of Count Meiningen that “I wish to invite myself to Meiningen! For once this is not out of pure egotism! I must tell you in secret how much I have thought of you and worked for your welfare.  Entre nous it has not escaped my notice that you have a “penchant” for the Right Honorable Richard Mühlfeld.” This letter goes on to ask for Brahms to have the chance to play through his new clarinet works away from the glare of Vienna, and to invite his handpicked cellist, Hausmann, to join him. By September violinist Joseph Joachim would arrive in Meiningen for rehearsals with Brahms (he would play the viola in place of the clarinet) before programming these clarinet works in Berlin. Adding a clarinet and piano onto the concert of a string quartet was quite avant garde in the 1890s as Brahms attested to his publisher Simrock: “I must inform that the Joachim String Quartet has lost its virginity through me! I break into the holy circle December 12 with clarinet and piano.”

What becomes evident from the very first bars of the Trio is that Brahms is ingeniously putting new wine into an old bottle, and old wine into a new one. On the one hand the music is long lined and easily understood harmonically, and on the other, the manipulation of intervals into small cells of melody creates a clear path to the new music of the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.

-Jeff von der Schmidt