Willy Sucre and Friends

play

 String Quartets

Violist Willy Sucre will be joined by

violinists Krzysztof Zimovwski and

 Anthony Templeton. 

Cellist to be announced soon.

I. Allegro moderato

II. Allegretto

III. Menuetto: Allegretto

IV. Allegro

Mozart was born January 27,1756, in Salzburg, Austria. The F major is Mozart’s last quartet, written in June 1790, a year and a half before his death on December 5, 1791, in Vienna. The tenth of his mature quartets, it is actually the twenty-third that he wrote.  Alfred Einstein, the noted Mozart scholar, says of the Allegretto: “One of the most sensitive movements in the whole literature of chamber music, it seems to mingle the bliss and sorrow of a farewell to life. How beautiful life has been! How sad! How brief!”

Notes  adapted from Melvin Berger's Guide to Chamber Music.

by George Gershwin

Gershwin was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1898 and died in 1937 of a brain tumor.  His first important classical composition was written for string quartet in 1919-20. "Lullaby'' is a quiet, lyrical but syncopated 10-minute work. Joseph Way, the Artistic Director of the Sierra Chamber Society, says of  Gershwin and this piece the following: "He used the opening theme of the Lullaby as part of an aria (Has Anyone Seen My Joe?) in his unsuccessful one-act opera of 1922, Blue Monday. Though the stage work was a failure, (it was part of "George White’s Scandals" and was withdrawn after a single performance), hearing the work caused Paul Whitman to commission a work for his upcoming Aeolean Hall concert. This work turned out to be Rhapsody in Blue."

Notes adapted from the Sierra Chamber Society Program Notes.

I N T E R M IS S I O N 

I.     Vicace

II.    Andante

III.    Agitato (Allegretto non troppo)

IV.  Poco Allegretto con Variazioni.  Doppio Movimento

Brahms was born May 7, 1833 in Hamburg and died April 3, 1897 in Vienna. He did most of the work on his third and last string quartet at Ziegelhausen near Heidelberg, during the summer of 1875, a particularly pleasant, relaxed time for the composer. “My rooms and my daily life are most agreeable,” he wrote. “In short, life is only too gay.” To some extent, though, his work on the quartet was a respite from the strain of working on his monumental first symphony, which he was composing at the same time. In a letter he once described Op. 67 and some smaller pieces from that time as “useless trifles, to avoid facing the serious countenance of a symphony.” About fifteen years later, however, he viewed Op. 67 in a different light, confiding that it was the favorite of his three quartets. The Joachim Quartet premiered the quartet in Berlin on June 4, 1876.

Notes  adapted from Melvin Berger's Guide to Chamber Music.

Time, date, and program subject to change.