The Greenwood String Quartet

This second concert of our 59^th season spans 215 years of maturing composers developing their own skills while pushing the boundaries of their style periods.

String Quartet Op. 76 No. 4 “Sunrise” (1797) Franz Joseph Haydn (1732 – 1809)

Haydn’s "Sunrise" is the fourth of six String Quartets, Op. 76, composed in 1797 or 1798. The opus is dedicated to the Hungarian count Joseph Georg von Erdődy (1754–1824) and form the last complete set of string quartets that Haydn composed. At the time of the commission, Haydn was employed at the court of Prince Nicolaus Esterházy II and was composing the oratorio The Creation as well as Princess Maria Hermenegild Esterházy's annual mass. Last season the Valencia Baryton Project played several of Haydn’s baryton trios. Those were composed while the prince was studying the instrument. According to barytonist, Matthew Baker, those earlier compositions greatly influenced Haydn’s string quartet works.

As is true of other composers, Haydn’s styled evolved throughout his career. In the Op. 76 quartets he deviated from the standard sonata form, instead emphasizing thematic continuity through the seamless and near-continual exchange of motifs between instruments. Charles Burney wrote:

...they are full of invention, fire, good taste, and new effects, and seem the production, not of a sublime genius who has written so much and so well already, but of one of highly-cultivated talents, who had expended none of his fire before.

The Quartet No. 63 in B♭ major, Op. 76, No. 4, is nicknamed Sunrise due to the rising theme over sustained chords at the beginning of the quartet. It consists of four movements and these are their motifs:

Allegro con spirito: 

Adagio: 

Menuetto. Allegro: 

Finale. Allegro, ma non-troppo:

Valencia (2012) Caroline Shaw (b.1982)

Caroline Shaw is a composer, violinist, and singer from Greenville, NC. She is best known for the a cappella piece Partita for 8 Voices, for which she won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Shaw also received the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her Narrow Sea.

Shaw received her Bachelor of Music (violin performance) from Rice University in 2004, and her master's degree (violin) from Yale in 2007. She entered the PhD program in composition in Princeton in 2010.

At 30, Shaw became the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her composition Partita for 8 Voices. The jury citation praised the composition as: 

"a highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects."

Valencia, for string quartet, premiered by Lorna Tsai, Shaw, Sage Cole, and Shay Rudolph in August 2012. Its name comes from the common orange variety. Shaw describes it as:

"an untethered embrace of the architecture of the common Valencia orange, through billowing harmonies and somewhat vicious chords and melodies."

Shaw layers the instrumental lines and incorporates a wide variety of uncommon techniques, including left-hand pizzicato, a frequently occurring harmonic-based accompaniment, slow and pronounced glissandi, and something like a reverse sforzando with the accent and weight at the frog instead of the tip of the bow. The players focus on short melodic fragments, in tandem with extended, brooding figures and then rotate their roles in the complex texture. 

String Quartet No. 2 (1994) Eleanor Alberga (b. 1949)

Eleanor Alberga is a Jamaican contemporary music composer who lives and works in the United Kingdom. As a composer Alberga uses tonal harmony and emphasizes repeated rhythmic patterns. Her later pieces show an increasing use of dissonance as in her three string quartets (1993, 1994, and 2001). You will hear that rhythmic drive and dissonance in tonight’s program. We most recently heard the Aizuri String Quartet perform the String Quartet no. 1, which was inspired by a physics lecture. Tonight we’ll hear the next piece in the 3-quartet set.

String Quartet no 2 is, in the words of the composer, more concise and compact than the first. Its single movement span presents traditional forms embedded in a forward-thinking piece. In this work, Alberga develops the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic material introduced in the opening bars of the piece. The first half develops the opening material’s energetic, syncopated character, while the second takes a contemplative turn towards placid variations on the opening motif. Later a mournful violin melody, adorned with harmonic trills, gives way to lush supporting harmonies. The piece ends with a dance-like pizzicato texture.

The final piece by Schubert will be announced from the stage.