One of the 20th century’s more versatile and prolific composers, Bohuslav Martinů was widely regarded as the most significant figure in Czech music since Dvořák and Janáček. Unlike his predecessors, Martinů refused to wear his nationalism on his sleeve; his style and outlook remained obstinately, almost defiantly, cosmopolitan to the last. As a result, his music is hard to pigeonhole, conforming neither to the tenets of modernism nor to those of any recognizable stylistic school. In common with Dvořák, however, Martinů had a special affinity for the quartet medium. “I cannot express what pleasure it gives me when I start work and begin to handle four instrumental parts,” he said. “In a quartet one feels at home.”
In addition to seven numbered string quartets, Martinů wrote several works for other instrumental foursomes. In the fall of 1923, the 32-year-old composer moved from Prague to Paris to study with Albert Roussel, a highly respected former teacher of Satie and Varèse from whom he hoped to glean “order, transparency, balance, taste, and a clear, exact, expressive language—the characteristics of French art I had always admired.” In the event, Martinů may have learned more from the music he encountered outside the classroom in Paris, that of Les Six, le jazz hot, and especially Stravinsky. Indeed, the Russian’s influence on the impressionable young composer of the Quartet for Clarinet, Horn, Cello, and Snare Drum was so apparent that critics took to calling him—not always approvingly—the “Czech Stravinsky.”
Although Martinů admired the “primitive touch” that had made Stravinsky’s early ballets the talk of Europe, his assessment of the Russian’s music as “complicated but not subtle” bespoke an underlying ambivalence. Nevertheless, the sound world of the quartet closely resembles that of Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat; even the instrumentation is a stripped-down version of that work’s scoring for clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, percussion, violin, and bass. Apart from its clear, Neoclassical texture, the quartet’s most conspicuously Stravinskian feature is the shifting, jazz-inflected rhythmic patterns of the two outer movements, which stand out in sharp relief against the crisply strutting snare drum. At times the clarinet, horn, and cello are closely synchronized, while at other times they seem to march to different drummers. The central slow movement unfolds like a solemn march, opening and closing with warmly expressive recitatives for the solo cello.
A great pianist as well as a distinguished composer, Clara Schumann led the stressful double life that was the common lot of gifted women in her day. Equally devoted to her family and her music, she managed to rear eight children even as her brilliant but increasingly unstable husband succumbed to mental illness. Robert encouraged her work as a composer on the tacit understanding that his career took precedence over hers. After his death in a sanatorium in 1856, Clara all but stopped composing and loyally tended his memory, performing his music throughout Europe and editing it for publication. She remained active as a highly sought-after teacher until her death in 1896.
Written in 1846, Clara’s Piano Trio undoubtedly inspired Robert to compose his first essay in the genre the following year. Although the two works are cut from the same stylistic cloth, the Schumanns’ artistic and marital union was so close that it’s generally impossible to judge which way the influence ran in any given piece. (Much the same can be said of Felix Mendelssohn’s relationship with his sister Fanny, who, as it happens, visited her good friend Clara while they were both at work on their respective piano trios.) Inevitably, Clara’s lone piano trio was destined to be overshadowed by Robert’s three; even she deemed her Op. 17 “effeminate and sentimental” compared to his D-Minor Trio. Not until the late 20th century was Clara’s distinctive musical voice widely recognized.
Robert once complained that contemporary piano trios were “dominated by the frivolous strains of Italian and French opera in the theater, and the facile but vapid stunts of virtuoso pianists.” Given Clara’s prowess as a concert pianist, one would hardly expect the G-Minor Trio to be less than virtuosic, but her piano writing is always judiciously scaled and integrated with that for the violin and cello. The two outer fast movements feature fugal passages that reflect the composing couple’s joint immersion in the “learned” contrapuntal idiom of J. S. Bach. Tonally, the Allegro and Allegretto are firmly anchored in G minor. The minuet-like Scherzo skips along in B-flat major (modulating to E-flat in the more sedate and expansive central section), while the voluptuously lyrical Andante moves from G major to E minor and back again. In addition to the trio’s carefully balanced tonal structure, there are numerous thematic links between the four movements—for instance, the jaunty rhythmic motto (a dotted figure followed by repeated notes) embedded in the opening themes of the Allegro and Allegretto.
Trained as a pianist, Eleanor Alberga sidelined her concert career in her early 50s to devote herself to composition. Although the musical colors and rhythms of her native Jamaica figure prominently in many of her pieces, she works in a basically tonal idiom and pointedly describes herself as a “mainstream British composer.” Her catalog ranges from chamber music to opera and the short choral work Arise, Athena!, a prestigious commission for the closing night of 2015 BBC Proms. As rehearsal pianist and later music director of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Alberga honed her skill at improvisation, one of several jazz elements that she has incorporated into her music.
Alberga’s first two string quartets date from the early 1990s (she added a third in 2001), shortly after her marriage to violinist Thomas Bowes, with whom she frequently performs. Unlike her First Quartet, whose three movements sport playfully allusive titles that signal the composer’s dual allegiance to classical and popular idioms, and the Third, with its nominally conventional four-part structure, the single-movement Quartet No. 2 is a concise, essentially monothematic work. It was commissioned in 1994 by England’s venturesome Smith Quartet.
The rhythmic vitality and repetitive patterns of Alberga’s music are reminiscent of Bartók (whom she acknowledges as one of her major influences). The terse, slashing motive heard at the outset of the Second Quartet functions like one of the Hungarian composer’s trademark rhythmic cells. In Alberga’s words, “this short motive is treated to all manner of variation—inversions, expansions, and so on—and is present in some form” throughout the piece. Restless and propulsive, the opening bars have a distinctly edgy, mid–20th-century modernist feel. Thereafter the musical horizons gradually expand to embrace a panoply of timbral, gestural, and expressive idioms. Alberga’s treatment of dissonance is free but never abrasive, as is her use of pizzicato, harmonics, and other special instrumental techniques. The quartet’s highly compressed energy culminates in a final burst of manic intensity.
Best known as a keyboard virtuoso, Bach was also a highly proficient string player. He learned to play the violin as a child—probably under the tutelage of his father, a town piper in Eisenach—and, according to his composer-son Carl Philipp Emanuel, developed a “clear and penetrating” technique. This dual ability was surely a factor in Bach’s first major appointment as Kapellmeister, or director of music, to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen in 1717. The young composer felt lucky to be in the employ of “a gracious prince who both loved and knew music.” Thanks to Leopold’s interest and generosity, he had at his disposal a group of some 16 expert instrumentalists who inspired not only the Brandenburg Concertos but also Bach’s great unaccompanied works for violin and cello.
The six concerti grossi that Bach dedicated to the Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg in 1721 range widely in both style and instrumentation. On the title page of the presentation copy, the composer identified them as “six concertos for several instruments.” Scholars have long debated whether he was referring to the varied instrumentation of the collection as a whole (each work calls for a differently constituted ensemble) or indicating that the concertos should be performed with one player to a part. Even today, when period-style reduced forces are now the norm, it is not uncommon to hear the Brandenburg Concertos played by a full orchestra. The basic requirement is that the opposition between soloists and full ensemble be clearly maintained.
The Fifth Brandenburg is a harpsichord concerto masquerading as a triple concerto for flute, violin, and harpsichord. Bach almost certainly wrote the elaborate harpsichord part for himself; according to his first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, he had “acquired such a high degree of facility and, we may almost say, unlimited power over his instrument in all the keys that difficulties almost ceased to exist for him.” The opening Allegro culminates in an impressive 65-bar cadenza for unaccompanied harpsichord, while in the slow movement—marked affettuoso, “affectionate” or “tender”—Bach creates an oasis of intimacy by paring the scoring down to the three soloists. The finale is a propulsive fugue notable for its transparency and delicacy.
—Harry Haskell