(audience applauding)
- We have several pieces
on the program today,
the first one is by Haydn, and
it's a full string quartet,
four moments, and the second
one is by Mendelssohn,
and there's a sort of odd
connection between these composers
because Haydn died in the same year
that Mendelssohn was born.
Other than that, there's no connection,
they write in very different styles.
The Haydn quartet that we're going to play
is one of his later works,
it's an Opus 77, Number one.
Opus means work number,
so this is presumably
the 77th piece that he wrote,
and actually he was have thought
to have written something
like 83 string quartets.
Now it's been reduced
to about 60 three or four string quartets
because some of the earlier pieces
have been proven to be
by different composers other than Haydn,
but that's still a heck of
a lot of string quartets.
I've heard of two groups of players
who decided to play them all
back to back at one point,
not taking any rests for anything,
that's why they needed two groups,
and it took them something
like three and a half days,
solid 24 hours a day
playing to get to them all.
Haydn is known as the father
of the string quartet,
somewhere along the line
in the last 200 years
he got that name, we're not sure why,
but probably because he was the person
who really developed the
idea of a string quartet
to it's highest level.
And after Haydn died, of course,
people kept writing string quartets,
and they are still writing
them to this very day.
This piece has four movements
which is the usual thing
for string quartets.
The first movement is fast,
there's a little pause
after the first movement
and we'll have the second
movement which is slow.
The third movement is a minuet,
and the fourth movement is fast.
And it is customary not to
applaud between movements,
so if you can, please restrain yourself
until the four movements are over.
If you're not sure when that is,
just watch the person next to you.
("Opus 77, No. 1" by Joseph Haydn)
(audience applauds)
I hope you enjoyed this concert,
and we certainly enjoyed playing.
(audience applauding)
(audience applauding)
(audience applauding)
Sticking with what has belonged
to the general category of chamber music,
chamber music meaning music
that was meant for a room
rather than a large concert hall.
The unique thing about chamber music
is that every person
plays his or her own part,
as opposed to in an orchestra,
if you're a violin player,
you're playing the same part
as perhaps even 30 other people,
and there's safety in numbers of course,
so this is much more,
everybody has to be really on their toes
because nobody is playing
your part along with you.
String quartets is one
type of chamber music,
but there are many other combinations,
and one of the very favorite
ones is a piano quintet,
so we have a string quartet plus a piano,
and we're going to play one movement
of a piano quintet by Johannes Brahms.
Brahms was a late 19th century composer,
at times when you listen to the piece,
you feel that he really would
love to have an orchestra
here instead of five players
because it's so expansive, so huge
that he almost can't keep it
within the bounds of five people.
(audience applauding)
One thing everybody loves about Haydn
is he's invariably very cheerful.
And he had a job as a court composer,
he worked for a prince,
and now that it's 250 years later,
the only reason that we
know that prince's name,
is because Haydn was at his court.
Haydn was considered a servant,
and his job was to write music
and produce music for the prince.
Now we come to Mendelssohn,
and Mendelssohn is altogether a different,
kind of writer of music.
He lived in the early Romantic Period,
that is the early part
of the 19th century,
and one thing that he's
really very well known for
is a kind of fairy-like music, very light,
very delicate,
you'll hear that in at
least two of the moments
of this quartet that we're playing.
This is a very early work of his,
he was one of these incredible geniuses,
whom genius showed very early in life,
Mozart was the other
person who was like that.
Mozart showed genius
from the time he was
three or four years old,
and Mendelssohn was pretty close to that.
One of Mendelssohn's greatest pieces
he wrote when he was 17 years old.
This particular quartet
he wrote when he was 20,
makes you wonder what I have done lately?
But he was just one of
those incredible people.
Unfortunately he had a very short life,
he died in his 30s, his sister,
who was also a very talented
composer and musician,
died within the same six month period
of her brother's death.
And so they had a very
tragically short life.
So this piece also has four movements,
the third and the fourth
movement are played
within a very short period of each other,
it's marked attacca which means
go right on to the next movement.
("Opus 13 No. 2" by Felix Mendelssohn)
But five people is what it's written for,
so this is the first movement
of Brahms' piano quintet,
Opus 34.
("Opus 34, first movement"
by Johannes Brahms).
