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ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)
Flute Quartet in D Major, K. 285
Mozart was 21. In August of 1777, desperate to get out of Salzburg, he requested a leave of absence from the Archbishop Colloredo, who was so annoyed by Mozart’s constantly looking for other work that he fired both Mozart and his father. So the trip to Augsburg, Mannheim, Paris, and Munich wasn’t entirely voluntary, and became a frantic search for a new position, as Mozart was depleting his savings rapidly.
He and his mother, Anna Maria, stayed five months in Mannheim, where the Dutch East India Company surgeon and amateur flutist Ferdinand de Jean asked him to write three easy, short flute concertos and two quartets. Mozart wrote this quartet in a week, finishing on Christmas Day of 1777. He made it easy for himself by changing the lead violin part of an existing quartet to the flute part.
While he was in Mannheim, Mozart met members of its well-known orchestra, and also fell in love with Aloysia, the sister of the woman he would later marry. The sisters’ brother Franz’s second wife gave birth to Carl Maria von Weber, so the Weber sisters had music in their blood.
Mozart was unenthusiastic about the quartets, which he wrote to get enough money to leave Mannheim, but Aloysia obviously gave him a reason to linger over the music. So this is the music of love.
The Adagio is both a cantilena and a nocturne for the flute floating over pizzicato strings in the time-honored fashion of Vivaldi and Giuliani. Alfred Einstein wrote that this move- ment is “perhaps the most beautiful accompanied solo ever written for the flute.” The Adagio’s 35 bars contain the roots of the future slow movement of the Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488.
IAN CLARKE (b.1964) Zoom Tube for Solo Flute
Ian Clarke has studied both music and mathematics in London, and is professor of flute at the Guildhall School
of Music and Drama there. This étude is an amusing and virtuosic paraphrase of the Zoom, Zoom, Zooma-Zoom theme from the popular children’s show, Zoom, from the 1970s. Clarke has mentioned using a variety of techniques to make this charming piece a cleverly fiendish étude: note bending to imitate the whirr of snare drums; rhythm and blues; Bobby McFerrin’s vocalizations; ideas from Stockhausen, Robert Dick, and Ian Anderson; and South American flute playing. The voice whispers, shouts, and scoops, apart from playing the flute, using these multiphonic displays to end the piece. Don’t be fooled by the pauses halfway through: the piece is four minutes long.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) String Quartet No. 9 in C Major, Op. 59, No. 3
This work is the last of three quartets commissioned by Prince Andrey Razumovsky, then the Russian ambassa- dor to Vienna, and one of Beethoven’s great patrons until a fire destroyed much of his wealth. Razumovsky kept a permanent string quartet from 1808 to 1816, led by Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who premiered many works by Beethoven, including the quartets.
Critics have suggested that all three of these quartets merge together to form a unique symphony. But we’ll only look briefly into the workings of the last one.
As Mia Chung of the Curtis Institute of Music says, the first movement starts “in complete abstraction, pulseless- ness, dissonance, and tremendous uncertainty.” This rootless anxiety will become triumphant in the fourth movement,
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The Music at Tippet Rise