Newly reinvigorated, the Takács Quartet brings its latest musical thinking to two of the brightest gems in the chamber music literature while making space to introduce a brand-new string quartet by the acclaimed pianist Stephen Hough. First up is an account of a quartet from Joseph Haydn’s final completed set, the fruit of his enormously successful penultimate decade and one of the benchmarks that defined the genre. The delectability of musical invention itself is the narrative of works like the Sunrise Quartet. Haydn’s ingenious twists and surprises can seem elevated or mischievous, philosophical or full of humor, spinning even the simplest, folkiest raw material into gold.

This is the tradition Antonín Dvořák revered in his chamber music. When writing his American Quartet in 1893, for example, he remarked: “I had Papa Haydn in mind the whole time.” His Second Piano Quintet, a cornerstone of that genre, additionally draws on the legacy of Schubert and Schumann, balancing Romantic pathos, sophisticated techniques, and the vibrant gestures of Bohemian folk idioms.

Stephen Hough’s new quartet, his first, emerges from a different heritage, having been commissioned as a companion for the string quartets of two French luminaries, Ravel and Dutilleux. Hough imagines “phantom” encounters with the interwar Parisian composers known as “Les Six”—survivors of the early 20th century’s cataclysm—and constructs a labyrinthine memory palace of echoes, ironies, and pleasures.

Sunrise and Surprise: Haydn’s Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 76, No. 4

Commissioned in the mid-1790s and dedicated to Count Joseph Georg von Erdödy, the six Op. 76 quartets are the last complete set in Joseph Haydn’s catalogue. In 1799, the year they were officially published, he undertook another commission for a set of quartets but managed to complete only two (published as Op. 77); these were written for Prince Lobkowitz—the patron who also commissioned Beethoven’s first set (Op. 18), which would appear only one year after Op. 76 was published. After that came the fragmentary D minor Quartet, Op. 103, likely intended as part of the Op. 77 project that remained incomplete.

On the manuscript score of Op. 103 appear the words “gone is all my strength, old and weak am I.” But the Haydn who emerges from the Op. 76 set represents the zenith of creative power and self-confidence. He had already become an internationally acclaimed celebrity, riding a new wave of success after his two residencies in London, which resulted in the magnificent final dozen symphonies of the composer’s catalogue.

Haydn had since returned to Vienna and was spending the summers as Kapellmeister on the Esterházy Estate in Eisenstadt when he took up this quartet commission in 1796–97. It represented an exception to the new creative orientation of this period, as Haydn’s focus otherwise shifted from instrumental composition toward producing sacred choral music: he would soon embark on the oratorio The Creation, the work that crowned his final decade with glory.

In Op. 76, Haydn synthesizes decades of trailblazing experience in shaping the modern string quartet. These works are replete with his trademark inventiveness and genius for upending expectations—expectations that Haydn had himself helped establish in earlier achievements. The chronological closeness to the London experience is not irrelevant. As the Haydn scholar James Webster observes, “the quartets of the 1790s adopt a demonstratively ‘public’ style (often miscalled ‘orchestral’), usually attributed to his experience in London,” and Haydn “expands the dimensions [of quartet form] still further,” to the point of “becoming extroverted and at times almost eccentric” in the Op. 76 works.

The very idea of the string quartet, in Haydn’s hands, like Shakespeare’s treatment of the theater, provides a framework to juxtapose comic and tragic modes within a single work. Along with formal conceptualization, Haydn expands the “conversational” dimension of the genre (to allude to Goethe’s famous metaphor of the quartet as “four intelligent people conversing among themselves”).

The Quartet in B-flat major is one of the three in the Op. 76 set to bear a nickname (the others are No. 2—Fifths—and No. 3—Emperor). No. 4 has become known as Sunrise (Sonnenaufgang) because of the preludial opening gambit, in which the first violin serenely rises above a chordal grounding in the other strings, its melody encompassing an octave-and-a-half ascent. This metaphorical “sunrise” happens twice, before the seeming “first movement proper” takes off—yet Haydn stages all of this in the same Allegro con spirito tempo. The idea is also reversed, with the cello moving in the opposite direction against the ensemble harmony of the others. The movement sustains this extraordinary sense of organic interconnection that nevertheless encompasses surprising contrasts and detours.

The Adagio, in E-flat major, anticipates the profound, hard-won simplicity and emotional complexity of late Beethoven. Even the ornamentation of this sacred secular song is revelatory, no mere decoration. By its end, Haydn has approached a pathos-tinged twilight, setting up the most pleasant contrast with the cheerful, indeed “sunny” and very physical, minuet. Its irresistible waltz impulse frames a peculiar outing to the countryside by way of dreamy drones—another extension of the chordal anchor that opened this quartet—and unexpected pauses.

Haydn’s transformational art again impels the finale, building from a folk-like main theme that is subjected to delectable variations and reconsiderations. The tempo accelerations in the final pages—virtuosic gear shifts—leave the listener with ever giddier pleasure.

—© 2022 Thomas May

Stephen Hough’s String Quartet No. 1, Les Six Rencontres (Bay Area Premiere)

This piece was conceived after an invitation from the Takács Quartet: to write a companion work for a recording of the quartets of Ravel and Dutilleux. It was a thrilling if daunting challenge and it gave me an immediate idea as I considered these two colossi who strode across the length of the 20th century—not so much what united their musical languages but what was absent from them, not to mention the missing decades between the Ravel Quartet of 1903 and Dutilleux’s Ainsi la Nuit from the mid-1970s.

The term “Les Six,” referring to the group of six French composers most prominently active around the interwar years, evokes a flavor more than a style—and it’s a flavor rarely found in the music of Ravel and Dutilleux. Here, it’s not so much a lack of seriousness, although seeing life through a burlesque lens is one recurring ingredient; rather it’s an aesthetic re-view of the world after the catastrophe of the Great War. Composers like Poulenc and Milhaud were able to discover poignance in the rough and tumble of daily human life in a way that escaped the fastidiousness of those other two composers. Stravinsky referred to Ravel as “the most perfect, Swiss watchmaker.” Poulenc and his party could never be accused of being clock-watchers; their social hours were dimly lit by sputtering candles as the parties continued through the night, with Jean Cocteau or Picasso (other godfathers) opening yet another bottle of Bordeaux.

• • •

The subtitle for my Quartet No. 1 has within it a pun and a puzzle: the six movements as an echo of “Les Six,” although there are no quotes or direct references from those composers; and “encounters” that are unspecified, their phantom occurrence leaving only a trace in the memory of the places where the meetings might have taken place.

I) Au boulevard

Stravinskian spikes elbow across the four instruments, with jagged accents, darting arpeggios, and bracing white-note harmonies. Indeed, no sharps or flats appear until bar 35, when the main theme is suddenly transformed into technicolor for the central section, blushed with sentiment, and exactly half-tempo.

II) Au Parc

Under a pizzicato accompaniment a gentle, melancholy melody floats and is passed around the players in a haze of decorative variations, the central section warming the trope like vermouth around a bitter olive.

III) À l’hôtel

A bustling fugato, its short subject incorporating repeated notes, an arpeggio, and a scale, patters in metronomic conversation until it suddenly finds itself swept off its feet on a decadent dance floor. It is soon exhausted and the opening material returns, now inverted and condensed, until a hectic coda hurries the theme through many keys with offbeat, snapping chords in pursuit.

IV) Au théâtre

A spiccatissimo skeleton of a motive dances in a recurring harmonic sequence, decorated with each repetition in more and more lurid colors, smeared with lipstick glissandos. Then comes a sudden change of mood with the viola’s plangent amoroso melody pushing the music forward to a splashing climax. The swirls of arpeggios segue to ferocious tremolos underneath the first violin’s piangendo statement of the opening theme. As the music totters on the edge of despair, there is a meltdown into a coda of consolation where the viola reimagines the opening skeleton theme in smooth, consoling D-flat major.

V) A l’église

We remain in D-flat major for this serene hymn, which is sewn together into one four-part seam across the con sordino instruments—with a glance perhaps back to Ravel’s teacher, Gabriel Fauré.

VI) Au marché

This whole movement energetically tosses material from one player to the other in a moto perpetuo of exuberance. Material from the rest of the piece reappears (most prominently the harmonic progression from the central section of the second movement) until the work ends as it began with the first movement’s Stra­vinskian spikes, interrupted in the penultimate bar with a feroce quote of the opening of the third movement.

—© 2022 Stephen Hough

Second Time’s a Charm: Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No. 2 in A major, Op. 81

A good deal of obscurity and myth-making surrounds the origins of Antonín Dvořák’s career as a composer. Several of his youthful works, including his earliest essays in chamber music, fell into oblivion—nearly or indeed successfully destroyed during his lifetime. This fate almost befell his first attempt at the challenging format of the piano quintet. The work in question, the Quintet No. 1 in A major, Op. 5, was written and premiered in 1872. Dvořák was so dissatisfied that he rejected the idea of publishing the score and lost track of the autograph manuscript. Later, he was able to reconsider the piece by tracking down a copy from the pianist of the first performance.

In 1887, by now internationally sought after, Dvořák took another look at the piece and decided it was worth a second go. He reworked the quintet yet was again dissatisfied and withheld publication. That frustrating experience fueled an urge to start over and write an entirely new quintet for piano and strings, in the same key as the first. The result, the Piano Quintet No. 2 in A major, Op. 81, is of epic proportions and has become widely treasured as among the finest contributions to the genre.

Dvořák composed Op. 81 between late summer and early autumn of 1887. The premiere took place in Prague in January 1888. The A major Quintet is typically classified as one of his “Slavonic” works because of its more overt references to Bohemian national elements. Yet, as David Hurwitz observes in his survey of Dvořák, “the vast majority of his work in general reflects the influence of Czech folk music and dance rhythms, whether he explicitly says so or not.”

The A major Quintet persuasively fuses folk idioms with structural principles from the Classical tradition of Haydn & Co. that he also deeply loved—all the while organizing the interplay between the sound worlds of the piano and string ensemble to wonderful effect. Dvořák also holds in his inner ear such preceding models as Schumann’s Piano Quintet and Schubert’s Trout Quintet (likewise in A major, although Schubert trades one of the violins for a double bass).

The piano launches the expansive first movement with quietly rippling motion; against this, the cello spells out the unforgettable main theme. A dramatic transition intrudes, setting the stage for the striking contrasts—between major and minor, loud and soft, lyrical and propulsive, piano and string textures—that play out in this movement.

The two middle movements are associated with specifically Czech elements suggested by their subtitles. First is the Andante con moto in the form of a dumka—the longest example of Dvořák’s treatment of this folk idiom whose name derives from Ukrainian ballads associated with introspective melancholy. Yet its elegiac poetry brings to mind the “heavenly lengths” of Schubert as well. The refrain-like opening section in F-sharp minor alternates with a consoling D major response, while a brisk interlude whirls in and out of the picture with manic intensity—but it is the melancholy that remains.

The Scherzo in turn draws on the Czech dance known as furiant, although the music is not as syncopated as it tends to be in its original Bohemian folk source (where duple and triple rhythms alternate). Dvořák calls for the piano to reach to the highest note available on contemporary keyboards. The Trio slows down the furiant idea, with the piano and violin vying for the spotlight. The rondo finale teems with Dvořák’s characteristically irrepressible rhythms, fusing folk impulses with the “learned” devices of Classical tradition. Anticipating a strategy he would use in his Op. 96 (American) String Quartet six years later, Dvořák closes with an episode evoking a church-like solemnity, played very softly. But the cheerful mood cannot be suppressed and inevitably, thrillingly, takes over to close the work.

 —© 2022 Thomas May