Program notes
Nimrod Borenstein, Cieli d’Italia opus 88
Cieli d’Italia was ordered by the Cremona Quartet from Nimrod Borenstein and is featured on their latest album (Italian Postcards), dedicated to foreign composers who have written music inspired by Italy. Borenstein (born 1969) is an Israeli-British composer who is highly respected and performed all over the world.
The Italian premiere of Cieli d’Italia was in October 2020 in Turin.
“In my personal world map, Italy is one of the favourite places in my heart: I love listening to the unmistakable sound of conversations in Italian between my wife and our daughter, risotto is one of my favourite dishes and many of my most cherished memories are connected to the Bel Paese. It was my great pleasure to get a request from the Cremona Quartet, an ensemble with whom I had been in touch since our first collaboration, to write a piece dedicated to Italy for their 20th anniversary album.
Although it only lasts seven minutes, Cieli d’Italia is an intense piece that gives the feeling of having much bigger proportions: it contains many contrasts that with their continuous and often unpredictable changes contribute to making the piece interesting and defining its structure. We move from moments of eternal peace and beauty to episodes of struggle and desperation, with playful intervals and more introspective and melancholic moments. My music is full of melodies that overlap each other in a rich rhythmic counterpoint. In this way I am able to create a layering of contrasting feelings that occur simultaneously instead of following the traditional chronological construction of contrasts.
In writing music one of the most important things for me is to create moments of suspension, that magical feeling of hovering in the air, like when a bicycle keeps going without needing to pedal…”
Nimrod Borenstein
Camille Saint-Saëns, String Quartet No.1 in E minor op.112
An admired musician, an excellent concert pianist and an esteemed teacher, as a composer Camille Saint-Saëns devoted himself to almost all musical genres, with a preference for instrumental music. In 1871 Saint-Saëns founded the Société Nationale de Musique with some of his friends and fellow musicians (including César Franck, Edouard Lalo and Gabriel Fauré) in order to spread French instrumental and chamber music by following the example of the Austrian-Germanic tradition and contrasting with the ‘overwhelming power’ of melodrama. He contributed to a significant renewal of the French artistic and musical environment. His long and intense artistic activity, which began in his early childhood as a true child prodigy, ended only late in his life with his death in 1921. The funeral was held at La Madeleine Church in Paris, where he had been the organist for more than twenty years.
Since Haydn, the string quartet has been considered the chamber music style of excellence, a testing ground for every composer: each composer has approached this musical form according to his own personal inclination, according to “his own time”. Saint-Saëns was not different in this respect: although he was a strong supporter of chamber music and the composer of admirable chamber compositions, he did not write his first string quartet until he was 64 years old, as if he had felt a sort of ‘reverential fear’ towards the form. As a keen and intelligent musician, he nevertheless knew that he could not avoid this further proof of his talent, as he himself told his publisher August Durand: “If I had not made this quartet, writers on esthetics would have drawn a lot of deductions from this gap, they would have discovered in my nature why I had not written about it and how I was incapable of writing about it! This is how the Quartet in E minor no. 1 op.12 was born, dedicated to the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, who undoubtedly had a certain influence on the writing of the part for the first violin, which is often given a virtuosic and concertante role. Although it has a unitary form with extensive references to the classical form of the string quartet, Saint-Saëns’ Quartet No. 1 also has many innovative features, such as the “inversion” between the second and third movements, or between slow tempo and scherzo, which is however entirely instrumental to the overall organic development of the piece.
The Quartet starts with two soft notes that create an atmosphere of suspension that is functional to the main theme (played by the first violin) of the full-bodied and panting initial Allegro, from which are derived a series of secondary motivic ideas, until the appearance of a second theme, presented in the first instance by the enveloping voice of the cello. The two themes and the secondary motivic elements are then continually revised in a succession of harmonic and rhythmic variations until the expressive and powerful coda that concludes the movement. The following Scherzo intensifies the previously heard breathless atmosphere with a syncopated motif that progressively involves all four instruments. After the central trio, conceived in the form of an elaborate fugato, the movement closes with a repetition of the syncopated opening theme. If the Scherzo anticipato can be considered a sort of continuation of the initial Allegro, the postponed position of the slow movement assumes the role of temporary relaxation within the piece and of preparation for the finale. In the delicate and intense Molto adagio the voices of the four instruments emerge in an expressively supple singing, but it is above all the first violin that assumes a real concertante role, with elaborate and virtuosic writing in an increasing rise to the highest notes (here Saint-Saëns certainly had in mind the instrumental skills of Ysaÿe). This sort of cantabile “ break “, concluded in pianissimo, seems to want to increase the momentum of the tumultuous final movement, structured in the form of a rondo with a repetition theme and three couplets (musical episodes alternating with the ritornello) in a rhythmic-melodic course rich in contrasts and increasingly animated. For the conclusion of the piece, Saint-Saëns makes one last use of the expedient of the “calm before the storm”: after a break with a crown, a fast-paced coda begins, closing the piece with a thunderous crescendo.
Giuseppe Verdi, Quartet in E minor
The name of the quartet associated with Giuseppe Verdi might, at first sight, bring to mind one of the many famous four-voice moments included in the operas of the composer from Busseto. Nevertheless, it is true that the greatest Italian opera composer also tried to compose the chamber music form of excellence, confirming his skills as an extraordinary musician even in a more intimate and purely instrumental style. And perhaps one of the reasons that caused the chamber music of Verdi to be forgotten is that the composer himself did not give any particular importance to this composition. He was forced to stay in Naples for a long time in the winter of 1872-1873, while waiting for the debut of two of his operas at the Teatro San Carlo, and “in the many hours of laziness”, as the composer himself tells us, Verdi wrote the String Quartet in E, “without importance”, and “equally without importance it was performed one evening” at the Albergo delle Crocelle where the maestro was staying. In this Verdian unicum, nonetheless, one can note an undeniable assimilation of the quartet model of the German school, also testified by the technical difficulty of the piece, combined with melodic ideas of lyrical origin, with many references to already written works and some anticipations of the future. For example, in the opening Allegro, there are many similarities with some pages of Aida (one of the operas for which Verdi was awaiting the Neapolitan performance), with an insistently dramatic first theme and a sweeter, more tranquil second, which alternate and develop in a masterfully composed counterpoint context until the finale in fortissimo. The slow movement is an Andantino with a cadence and almost dancing rhythm, elegantly scored, and with a melancholic atmosphere, contrasted by a few brief, more expansive and energetic phrases played alternately by the four instruments, before the final return to the poignant initial melody. Verdi does not deny his operatic soul in the third movement (tripartite): rhythmic and harmonic echoes that can be traced back to Trovatore and Traviata are the material of the two extreme sections of the Prestissimo, characterised by the energy of the fast staccato notes and the energy of the ribattute notes; the central section, on the other hand, is unmistakeably lyrical, with the solo cello that seems to be singing a melody, accompanied by the pizzicato of the other instruments. The last movement, on the other hand, is the one that reveals, once again, Verdi’s compositional wisdom and his skill in using counterpoint technique: a light pianissimo fugue, an undeniable anticipation of Falstaff’s finale, which crescendos with an exuberance and irony characteristic of the Cigno di Busseto’s last opera. After a series of developments of the main theme and some more dramatic passages, Verdi leads us to the “Poco più presto” of the final coda which concludes the piece in an exultant atmosphere.
Vittoria Fontana
Since its formation in 2000, the Quartetto di Cremona has established a reputation as one of the most exciting chamber ensembles on the international stage. Regularly invited to perform in major music festivals in Europe, North and South America, and Far East, they garner universal acclaim for their high level of interpretive artistry.
“BBT Fellowship” prize winner in 2005, the Quartetto di Cremona received by the Borletti Buitoni Trust also the “Franco Buitoni Award” (2019 edition) for its constant contribution to the promotion of chamber music in Italy and around the world.
In 2020 the Quartetto di Cremona celebrates its first twenty years of career, an important milestone for an Italian ensemble. For the occasion, distinguished concerts and recording projects will be developed over consecutive seasons: several performances of the complete Beethoven quartets’ cycle, CD releases, a tour with Bach’s “The Art of the Fugue”, new music expressly composed for the Quartet. Further 2020/21 season’s highlights include concerts in Geneva, Istanbul, Milan, Rome, London (Wigmore Hall) and the debuts at the Carnegie Hall in New York and at the Rudolfinum in Prague. Numerous are the collaborations with artists of the level of Angela Hewitt, Eckart Runge, David Orlowsky, Emerson Quartet.
Noteworthy recent recording projects include a double CD dedicated to Schubert, featuring cellist Eckart Runge. The album was recorded with the Stradivarius set of instruments named “Paganini Quartet”, on kind loan from the Nippon Music Foundation (Tokyo) and attracted high levels of acclaim in the international press. Same goes for the Beethoven’s string quartets cycle, completed in 2018: the eight volumes won prestigious awards (including Echo Klassik 2017 and ICMA 2018) and received numerous recognitions from specialised critics. Expected in Fall 2020 the release of “Italian Postcards”, a new album including works by Wolf, Mozart, Čajkovskij and a brand-new piece by Nimrod Borenstein.
Frequently invited to present masterclasses in Europe, Asia, North and South America, since 2011 they are Professors at the “Walter Stauffer Academy” in Cremona. They are ambassadors for the international project “Friends of Stradivari” and honorary citizens of Cremona, UNESCO Cultural Heritage for violin making. They are also testimonials for “Le Dimore del Quartetto” project and Thomastik Infield Strings.
