Q QUARTETS
EAST/WEST
19:30, 9th May 2024
Church of St Margaret of Antioch
Princes Road L8 1TG
Violins: Anna Bennett, Ben Cartlidge, Frederick Jones
Viola: Tristan Apperley
Cello: Alistair Ligertwood
Guzheng: Xiaoxiao Hou
Q QUARTETS: EAST/WEST
Kai Nieminen (1953-), Canti d’Inverno for solo violin (2024); WORLD PREMIÈRE
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), Quartet 53 in D major (The Lark), Opus 64 no. 5 (1790)
Martin Gaughan (1968-), Silence is a Source of Great Strength, for Guzheng and string quartet (2023); WORLD PREMIÈRE
Kai Nieminen (1953), Quartet VI: Infinite Worlds (2023); WORLD PREMIÈRE
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), Quartet no.1 in C minor , Op. 51 no.1 (1873)
Kai Nieminen, Canti d’Inverno for solo violin
Kai Nieminen’s Canti d’Inverno is by way of being an in memoriam. It was written this winter in the far north of Finland. As well as with memories, it is filled with the intense cold, suggested by high tremolos and harmonics, and with winter bird-songs. Throughout the piece, rhythmical plucked notes (usually on the resonant open strings) punctuate more freely melismatic motifs. These two elements recall respectively the ritual drumming and the free flowing vocalise of Sámi music.
Franz Joseph Haydn, Quartet in D major (The Lark), Opus 64 no. 5
Haydn, along with Mozart a founding figure in the development of the string quartet, wrote a set of six quartets in 1790, of which the fifth is known as The Lark because of the soaring melody on the first violin which enters as a surprise after a sequence of bare chords in the other three instruments. For a long time, Haydn had worked as court composer for the Esterházy family at their remote estate. In this isolation, he found ways of writing music unconstrained by mainstream fashions and this delayed entry is just one of the tricks in this quartet.
Allegro moderato
Adadgio Cantabile
Menuetto. Allegretto
Finale. Vivace
Martin Gaughan, Silence is a Source of Great Strength, for Guzheng and string quartet
Martin Gaughan’s piece for Guzheng and quartet is the second work he has written for Q. It too covers a range of moods from the hypnotically calm to the violently turbulent, a range of extremes which the silence ultimately dominates. It is like a miniature concerto for guzheng, the Chinese multi-stringed, plucked instrument, and there is a constant interweaving of lines between the string players and the guzheng part. There are nine movements of which the fourth runs straight into the fifth without a break.
Q is joined tonight by Xiaoxiao Hou on guzheng for the performance of this work.
Kai Nieminen, Quartet VI: Infinite Worlds
This is the third quartet that Kai has written for Q. We premièred the first on a bitter-cold night in the Nordic Church in December 2022, and the second in Liverpool University’s spectacular Tung Auditorium in 2023. In this new quartet, we leave behind the Northern winter and the masked dramas of Venetian summers and enter a passage that leads between the infinite alternative worlds of the title. We should imagine a hotel corridor lined with doors, behind each of which is a different form of human life. Or, we could see them as hiding the dressing rooms in which life’s players prepare for their entries into kaleidoscopic webs of stories.
Johannes Brahms, String quartet no.1 in C minor
Brahms finished two quartets in 1873 and a third in 1876; he had spent several years working on them, and it is said that he destroyed some twenty quartets before being satisfied with numbers 1 and 2. At any rate, he certainly regarded the quartet as an especially important form, and saw these two as staking a claim in Mozartian territory. We play the first tonight. The four movements cover a big emotional and sonic range.
Allegro
Romanze: poco adagio
Allegretto molto moderato e comodo
Allegro