2024-2025 PROGAMS 

RESILIENCE AND RELEASE

Reena Esmail (b.1983): Zeher (Poison) (2013)
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): String Quartet No. 2 in C, Op. 36 (1945)
Trevor Weston (b. 1967): Juba (2017) (9 mins)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): String Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135 (1826)

This program is a celebration of human resilience. The four composers in this program were all writing in response to traumatic circumstances, and their music embodies an acknowledgement and in some ways, a resolution of those struggles. Reena Esmail’s Zeher (Poison) was written during the course of an illness which limited her ability to eat, speak, and at times, even breathe. As the piece reaches its end, two contrasting raags emerge, one angular and dissonant (played by the cello), that is gradually neutralized by the calm, undulating waves of the other, as the music gently releases. Benjamin Britten wrote his second string quartet at the conclusion of World War II, after giving a series of recitals with violinist Yehudi Menuhin for concentration camp survivors in Germany. The quartet’s epic third movement pays homage to the English composer Henry Purcell through its use of chaconne form. The music cycles through a series of variations, ebbing and flowing before culminating in a passage of incredible intensity featuring twenty-one C-Major chords, final and cathartic, yet not fully resolved, as if Britten understood the immense shadow the war cast upon the world. 

The second half of the program begins with Trevor Weston’s Juba, which pays homage to previous generations of Africans and African Americans through the incorporation of traditional musical elements. Weston writes: “Juba honors the lives and contributions of African and African American forced laborers who cultivated various crops during slavery. The work makes a musical journey from Africa to the United States through traditional African music and traditional folk music by African Americans…This work highlights the musical contributions by African Americans and celebrates the lives of those who helped create our American economy, industry, and culture.” Featuring folk fiddling styles and rhythmic foot stomping, this music traverses a broad terrain of styles and emotions in just nine minutes. At times exuberant, celebratory, intense and thoughtful, the music leaves the audience in a place of quiet and contemplation. The program concludes with Beethoven’s final quartet, Op. 135, a piece that stands in contrast to the expanse and weight of his other late quartets. It was written as Beethoven’s health was failing, at a time when Beethoven had taken refuge in the country with his nephew Karl, following Karl’s attempted suicide. But despite the circumstances surrounding Beethoven, the quartet is full of lightness and buoyancy, with rhythmic play, jokes, and incredible beauty. It is not an innocent or youthful piece; but rather, it feels like the work of a composer who has arrived at a new sense of truth and peace after a long, arduous journey.

THE ART OF TRANSLATION

David Lang (b. 1957): wed (1992)
Caroline Shaw (b. 1982): Valencia (2012)
Franz Schubert (1797-1828): An Die Musik (Arr. Jannina Norpoth) (1817)
Harrison Birtwistle (1934-2022): XI. Todesfuge - Frieze 4 from 9 Movements for String Quartet (1991-96)
Misato Mochizuki (b. 1969): Boids (2018)
Franz Schubert: Nacht und Träume (Arr. Jannina Norpoth) (1825)
Paul Wiancko (b.1983): Purple Antelope Sound Squeeze (2021)
Franz Schubert: String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, Death and the Maiden

How does one translate the expression of an idea from one medium to another? How do we account for our varied and personal responses to visual art, literature, technology, and the world around us? This program, bringing together the music of Franz Schubert and contemporary composers David Lang, Caroline Shaw, Harrison Birtwistle, Misato Mochizuki, and Paul Wiancko, explores these questions. 

The first half of the program opens with a pairing of two acts of musical translation: wed by David Lang and Valencia by Caroline Shaw. Composed for a production of Shakepeare’s The Tempest, wed is a bittersweet interpretation of the wedding masque Prospero creates to entertain Miranda and Ferdinand. A far cry from a traditional joyous wedding march, wed is a hushed and enigmatic evocation of this scene. This paves the way for Valencia, which takes its inspiration from the construction of a simple orange filled with hundreds of individual vesicles of juice — something Shaw describes as “a thing of nature so simple, yet so complex and extraordinary.” 

The program continues with a set of four pieces, opening and closing with two art songs by Franz Schubert, An Die Musik and Nacht und Träume. These new arrangements created for the Aizuri Quartet by Jannina Norpoth allow the listener a moment to reflect and pause, to consider Schubert’s ode to art and the dream world where ambiguities reside. Following An Die Musik, Todesfuge by Harrison Birtwistle is an act of literary translation which takes its source from one of the seminal works of WWII literature, Paul Celan’s poem Todesfuge (itself a form of translation in its use of the musical form of a fugue in a poem). Birtwistle returned to Celan’s poetry throughout his career, and this quartet is a searing interpretation of Celan’s landmark poem. From here we explore connections between technology and the natural world in Misato Mochizuki’s Boids. Based on an early AI program imitating the flocking patterns of birds, this work is a translation of natural phenomena into music. The piece is at times threatening and disruptive, leaving the listener uncertain as to their place in nature. Closing the first half of the program is a new work written for the Aizuri Quartet by Paul Wiancko, Purple Antelope Sound Squeeze. Created in response to the visual art of Sam Gilliam, this piece is a recent commission by the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.

The second half of the program returns us to the 19th Century with Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, which features two levels of translation: Matthias Claudius’s poem (“Der Tod und das Mädchen”) inspired the composer’s lied of the same name (composed in 1817), which in turn formed the basis for the second movement of his beloved string quartet. Written in the throes of a serious illness, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden transforms a short poem into an epic, deeply felt contemplation on life and death.