- Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
I thought I'd say a few things
about the piece we're going to play.
We are, of course, all string players
and we lead a very charmed life,
and I'll tell you why, the main reason
is this particular
grouping of instruments.
We have two violins, we have
a viola, and we have a cello,
and this is called a string quartet.
Technically speaking, any core instrument
with strings on it that
you put together in a group
would be a spring quartet,
but generally when you think
of a string quartet, this
is what you think of.
Because all the great
composers wrote pieces for us,
and sometimes lots of pieces.
For example, Beethoven
wrote 16 string quartets,
Haydn wrote 65 string quartets.
Imagine that, 65 string
quartets, and so on.
And they're still writing them,
so we have no end of
wonderful pieces to play.
The first piece we're going to play
is by a composer named Dvorak.
He is from a place called Bohemia,
it is now called the Czech Republic.
And it's in the Eastern part of Europe,
east of Germany, east of Austria.
And Dvorak was a 19th century composer.
So he became very interested
in the folk music of his country.
Because in the 19th century,
nationalism was on the rise
and he and other composers
would study the folk music
of their country, or just
absorb it by doing it,
and so you will find a lot of folk music
melodies in this piece.
For example, sometimes we
imitate folk instruments.
For example, I have chords
that I play like this
and that would be something,
some guitar type of instrument.
There are other sounds that Dvorak gets
where he is imitating something,
an instrument that is
something like a accordion
and other types of folk
music that you'll hear.
You will notice that
there are four movements
in this quartet, which is
the standard kind of thing.
If you look at your program,
the third one or the second
one is called a dumka,
D-U-M-K-A, which is kind of an odd word.
Dvorak was one of the very few composers
who put dumkas in his pieces.
And a dumka simply is a movement
that has different tempo changes,
tempo means speed, throughout the thing.
At first it will be slow,
then it will be fast,
then it'll be very fast, and back to slow.
And also, different moods.
Generally speaking, when a composer
writes a string quartet,
he has one movement,
have all the same mood,
and the second movement,
next movement will have all the same mood.
But in this case, the mood
changes within one movement.
I just want to mention one thing,
it's customary in our
time, that is nowadays,
not to applaud in between the movements,
but we'd be very happy to have you applaud
after the four movements are over.
I always make a bet with my classes,
I think in 100 years from now,
people will be applauding
between every movement.
I want them to contact me in heaven,
or wherever else I'm gonna go,
and let me know if that's the case.
I hope it works,
I have a feeling not, though,
that that's gonna happen.
So here is Dvorak.
("Quartet Op. 51" by Antonin Dvorak)
(audience applauding)
So our next piece is by
the famous Beethoven.
I'm sure you've all heard his name.
Even now, 150 years or 175
years after he was alive,
his name is well-known among people
who never, ever go to a
classical music concert.
Beethoven was a very fascinating person,
we know lots about him
because of a terrible thing
that happened to him, anybody
know what happened to him?
You guys better know.
Yup?
- Became blind.
- Not, well, it was
another part of his life.
Deaf, he became deaf.
He contemplated suicide.
We know that because he sent a letter
to the world in general, he
wrote it the world in general,
saying that he decided to live instead,
which is a great thing for us
because we continue to give
us wonderful music, right?
Wonderful music although he was deaf.
He was very innovative,
he wrote things in a way
that none of his contemporaries did.
He continually tried to find
new ways of writing music.
So the result was that the
people who played the music
at the time that he was alive
complained all the time
at how difficult it was.
Just as an idea, in the
first movement of this piece,
we start out with a slow movement
that sounds like it
comes from outer space.
There's no rhythm in there
that you can discern,
that you can put your finger on.
It sounds like it's somewhere,
that's the best way I can
describe it, outer space.
In the second movement,
the cello, that's me,
plays lots and lots of
pizzicatos, those are the notes
that you pluck.
(cello plucking)
But instead of just
having an occasional one
here or there, the way
you heard it in Dvorak,
you're gonna hear whole
melodies played by pizzicato.
So no other composer that I can think of
every did anything like that.
Still haven't, on any given day.
The third movement and the
fourth movement are connected,
you go from the third movement
directly into the fourth movement.
So it'll be a little bit hard to tell
where that fourth movement begins,
but we're gonna play a little
bit of the fourth movement
by ourselves beforehand
so you have an idea.
Because something else here happens
in the fourth movement
that is rather exciting,
and rather terrifying for us, I must say,
and that is a fugue, F-U-G-U-E.
A fugue is a way of
organizing your piece of music
and it consists of one melody,
which the lovely viola player here
gets to play all by herself.
(viola harmonizing)
So I'm so glad I'm not her
because she keeps going.
And then the next person,
who's gonna play it?
Gets to play it, and
while she is playing it,
the viola player continues
with something else that she's doing.
(violin harmonizing)
And then I get to do it.
(cello harmonizing)
And so on.
And all the while, all these other players
who have already started, they
keep going with other stuff.
And then finally, the first violin plays.
(violin harmonizing)
So we're going to play
just this opening part
and it's a little bit like juggling.
Imagine that the juggling
ball is a melody,
first we'll have one in the air,
and then you have two in the air,
and then you have three
in the air, and then four.
("Quartet Op. 59" by Ludwig van Beethoven)
So that's how you know when
the last movement comes.
And after that, we're gonna book, alright?
So we will start from the very beginning.
I meant to mention that the fugue
is a very old kind of
way of writing music.
Bach did it practically 175 years
before Beethoven ever did it,
but Beethoven puts a whole new spin on it
so it doesn't sound
anything remotely like Bach.
("Quartet Op. 59" by Ludwig van Beethoven)
(audience applauding)
(audience applauding)
(audience applauding)
("Quartet Op. 51" by Antonin Dvorak)
