Wrapping up the 2009-10 broadcast season, we have the excellent Chamber Orchestra Kremlin, offering a Rossini composition with a special connection to the Library. This charming lighthearted string sonata appeared in published form only in 1951, when the original manuscript was rediscovered here. Today this piece—written by Rossini at age twelve, and originally conceived for a quartet of two violins, cello and double bass—is most often performed by string orchestras. Plus a final salute to the Mendelssohn Bicentenary with his early String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13, and a string quartet by Astor Piazzolla: Tango for Four. We invite you to stay in touch for the 2010-11 concert and broadcast season updates, at www.loc.gov/concerts.
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Download the Podcast for Program 13 (90 MB)
Performer Bios
Chamber Orchestra Kremlin: Founded in 1991 by Misha Rachlevsky, Chamber Orchestra Kremlin comprises Russia’s finest young string players. In addition to an active schedule of concerts and festivals in Moscow, the group tours regularly in North and South America, Europe, and the Far East. Its discography includes over twenty CDs of works by Shostakovich and Tchikovsky, among others.
Misha Rachlevsky: Moscow-born Misha Rachlevsky began his violin studies at age five and continued through the well-traveled pat hof the Russian school of string playing. After leaving the Soviet Union in 1973, he lived and worked in different countries on three continents, and in 1976 settled in the United States, becoming active in the field of chamber music.
Pacifica String Quartet: Formed in 1994, the Pacifica Quartet quickly won chamber music’s top competitions. Recent career honors include appointment as quartet-in-residence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the position held for 43 years by the Guarneri Quartet. In 2009 the Pacifica was named Ensemble of the Year by Musical America and received the 2009 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance.
Simin Ganatra: Simin Ganatra is the recipient of several awards and prizes, including the Naumburg Chamber Music Award, top prizes at the Concert Artists Guild Competition and the Coleman Chamber Music Competition, and several first prizes in various other competitions. Originally from Los Angeles, Ganatra is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory.
Sibbi Bernhardsson: Sibbi Bernhardsson, a native of Iceland, has received several awards and prizes, including the Icelandic Lindar award. A graduate of the Reykjavik College of Music, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Northern Illinois University, he performed across Europe, the United States, Asia, South America, and Canada as a member of the Icelandic String Octet.
Masumi Rostad: Masumi Rostad was winner of the Bronx Arts Ensemble’s Young Artist Competition Grand Prize and the Lillian Fuchs Award at the Julliard School. With the Julliard Symphony he performed the world premiere of Michael White’s Viola Concerto led by James DePreist, and the New York premiere of Paul Schoenfield’s Viola Concerto.
Brandon Vamos: Brandon Vamos has performed solo and chamber music recitals both in the United States and abroad. He has appeared as soloist with several orchestras including the Taipei City Symphony, Suwon Symphony in Seoul, Samara Symphony in Russia, and New Philharmonia Orchestra and Elgin Symphony Orchestra in Chicago.
Playlist/Repertoire
Gioacchino Rossini: String Sonata No. 3 in C Major
Chamber Orchestra Kremlin
Felix Mendelssohn: String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13
Pacifica String Quartet
Astor Piazzolla: Tango for Four
Pacifica String Quartet
Program Notes
Gioacchino Rossini: String Sonata No. 3 in C Major
Rossini’s career as a composer started in 1804 with his six string sonatas. Although he was only twelve years old, he had already encountered the music of Haydn and Mozart, thanks to the tutelage of Padre Giuseppe Malerbi. In 1804 Rossini was invited by Agostino Triossi, a wealthy merchant in his early twenties, to spend the summer at Triossi’s villa in Conventello, a village near Ravenna. Much music making took place in the villa’s garden by Triossi, an amateur bass player, Rossini, and other guests. Here, Rossini composed his six string sonatas, and, as was his wont later in his career of writing charming attestations on his old autograph manuscripts, he inscribed, in Italian, on the first page of first violin part:
First violin, second violin, violoncello, and contrabass parts for six horrendous sonatas composed by me at the country house (near Ravenna) of my friend and patron, Agostino Triossi, at the most youthful age, having not even had a lesson in thorough-bass. They were all composed and copied in three days and performed in a doggish way by Triossi, contrabass; Morini (his cousin), first violin; the latter’s brother, violoncello; and the second violin by myself, who was, to tell the truth, the least doggish.1
The cover title reads, Opere di sei Sonate, composte dal sigr. Gioacchino Rossina in età d’annie XII in Ravenna l’anno 1804. In what appears to be written by an anonymous hand in a different ink, "Sonate," "XII," and "1804" are superimposed on the partially erased "Quartetti," "XVI," and "1809." Rossini’s widow, in 1872, added an inscription in French pasted on the verso of the cover: "Given to my excellent friend as a token of friendship/O[lympe], widow of Rossini, this March 22, 1872, to Monsieur Mazzoni."—possibly Giuseppe Mazzoni, who sang in Rossini’s Bianca e Falliero at Siena summer of 1868.2
After Mazzoni, the next known owner of the manuscript was William H. Cummings, one of the most prestigious private collectors of music manuscripts. Over six days in May 1917, the Cummings estate offered the entire collection up for auction through Sotheby’s. On the final day, May 24, the Rossini autograph was among several rare items that were acquired by the Library of Congress, through the efforts of Oscar Sonneck, then chief of the Music Division.
In 1825, Ricordi issued a published edition of the sonatas in Milan, which for reasons unknown, excluded the third sonata played this evening, and thus was titled Cinque quartetti. In 1951, the Italian composer Alfredo Casella, who had a long association with Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, founder of the concert series at the Library of Congress, published the third sonata through Carisch of Milan, based on the autograph manuscript in the Library of Congress. The complete set was published at Pesaro in 1954 as the first of the Quaderni Rossiniani (QR), edited by Alfredo Bonaccorsi.
Rossini’s six sonatas are not string quartets in the Classical sense; for one thing, no viola is included, the double bass being the fourth instrument. The ease and generosity with which the melodic material unfolds in his sonatas suggest that the 12-year-old Rossini did not have to overly exert himself to produce these marvels. A smile is never more than a few seconds away, and there is an unmistakable presence of operatic elements, giving hint of what would one day blossom into magnificent stage works. Today these sonatas are extremely popular both on stage and in the recording studio, performed mainly in a string orchestra version.
—Tomás C. Hernández
Music Division, Library of Congress
1.Translated by Richard Osborne, "Rossini’s Life," The Cambridge Companion to Rossini, ed. Emanuele Senici, 2004 (Return to text)
2. Cited by Herbert Weinstock, Rossini: A Biography, 1968 (Return to text)
Felix Mendelssohn: String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13
The song which I sent with the quartet is its theme. You will hear it-with its own notes-in the first and last movements, and in all four movements you will hear its emotions expressed. If at first it doesn’t please you-which might happen, then play it again, and if you still find something "Minuetish," then think of your stiff and formal Felix with his cravat and valet. I think I express the song well, and it all sounds like music to me.1
Mendelssohn wrote this in a letter to his Swedish friend, Adolf Lindblad, who came to study in Berlin with his teacher Zelter. The song mentioned is Frage (Question) and the quartet is the A minor. Both were written in the summer of 1827, while Mendelssohn and a couple of friends were on an extended holiday in-between semesters at the University of Berlin. Their first stop was Sacrow, near Potsdam, where the eighteen-year-old composer apparently fell in love and was inspired to compose a song, published in 1830 as op. 9, no. 1, along with two quartets, designated in reverse order of composition-the A minor as op. 13, and the later E-flat Major as op. 12.
The printed edition attributed the song text to a J.N. Voss, but according to his nephew Sebastian Hensel ( son of sister Fanny), Mendelssohn himself was the author of the verses which begin with the question, Ist es wahr? (Is it true?)
Is it true? Is it true
that over there in the leafy walkway, you always
wait for me by the vine-draped wall?
And that with the moonlight and the little stars
you consult about me also?
Is it true? Speak!
What I feel, only she grasps -
she who feels with me
and stays ever faithful to me,
eternally faithful. 2
If indeed Mendelssohn himself wrote this text, the most likely object of his affection was Betty Pistor,3 a singer in the select Singakademie ensemble he accompanied on the piano, and to whom he inscribed a secret dedication in the manuscript of his String Quartet in E-flat Major composed two years later. However, the feeling was not mutual and she got engaged to someone else, unaware of the dedication until several years after the composer died.
Completed in Sacrow on July 28, the first movement of the String Quartet in A minor begins with the three-note phrase that corresponds to the first three words of the text, Ist es wahr?, and serves as the theme and the unifying element of the Quartet. From Sacrow Mendelssohn and his friends traveled through the Harz mountains, Wernigerode (where he visited Betty Pistor as he had promised), Bavaria, Stuttgart, and Baden-Baden, where on September 14, he wrote Fanny asking if he should incorporate Frage in the quartet’s finale as well. They continued on to Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Cologne, and towns in-between, arriving back in Berlin by mid-October. On the 27th the quartet was completed. In ways both explicit and subtle, the String Quartet in A minor, op. 13, is a paean to Beethoven, whose late quartets preoccupied Mendelssohn in 1827.
Tomás C. Hernández,
Music Division, Library of Congress
1. Greg Vitercik, The Early Works of Felix Mendelssohn, 1992 (Return to text)
2. Translation copyright © by Emily Ezust, from The Lied and Art Song Texts Page, www.lieder.net (Return to text)
3. See R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn. A Life in Music, 2003 (Return to text)
Astor Piazzolla: Four for Tango
Arguably the most renowned tango musician in the world, Argentine-born Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla has left a vast oeuvre of works ranging from instrumental tangos, tango songs, film music, pieces for guitar or flute, chamber and orchestral music, and opera as well, had he lived to fulfill a commission to write an opera. In 1955 he introduced “Nuevo tango,” a new approach to the genre incorporating jazz improvisation, counterpoint, and dissonance. Met with resistance in Argentina, his music gained popularity in Europe and North America. A virtuoso bandeonista, Piazzolla in the 1980s collaborated with classical musicians including violinist Gidon Kremer, cellists Rostropovich and Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Emanuel Ax, and the Kronos Quartet, which commissioned Five Tango Sensations for bandoneón and string quartet (1989). In 1990 he suffered a heart attack in Paris, and died two years later in Buenos Aires.
Last Updated: 04/05/2010