Greg Hettmansberger’s Madison Magazine review:
Catching Up with the Ancora String Quartet
http://www.madisonmagazine.com/Blogs/Classically-Speaking/May-2013/Catching-Up-with-the-Ancora-String-Quartet/

http://welltempered.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/classical-music-the-madison-based-ancora-string-quartet-ends-its-12th-season-with-a-recital-this-saturday-night-of-chamber-music-by-dvorak-haydn-and-shostakovich/

http://www.livescience.com/25117-musicians-brains-sync-up-during-duet.html

The study at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin found that the brain waves of two musicians synchronize when the two play a duet. I imagine the same principle applies to four musicians playing a quartet.

We in the quartet often refer to the concept of the ‘mind meld,’ and here is the science to back up that idea.

The Ancora String Quartet’s Saturday-night concert at the First Unitarian Society, the first of the 2012-13 season, was a splendid survey of 19th-century classical landmarks. The group explored the first half of the century via works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann.

First on the program was Beethoven’s Quartet in A major, No. 5, from the opus 18 set published in 1801. In this early-career work, he draws heavily on the styles of his predecessors Haydn and Mozart. But the originality of a new, young titan shines through. Ancora’s players make a point of playing at least one Beethoven quartet each season. They conveyed their commitment to his striking music with sharply etched textures and bold energy.

Next was a rare public performance of selections from Mendelssohn’s 12 Fugues for String Quartet. Mendelssohn composed this set in 1821, when he was just 13 years old. Ancora played fugues 2, 3, 8 and 9 from a new but not-yet-published critical edition. These pieces are short and highly concentrated contrapuntal studies, set down as the precocious youngster worked to master his trade. They were probably never meant for performance, but they are fascinating windows into Mendelssohn’s development as a student, at a time he was already composing substantial, even monumental, works for strings. The playing of these busy abstractions was sometimes a little rough, though I appreciated first violinist Leanne Kelso League’s experiments with vibratoless playing, which added a touch of Baroque sound.

To conclude the evening, Ancora performed the first of Schumann’s three opus 41 string quartets. Composed in 1842, this work is an example of full-blown early Romanticism. Schumann’s quartets are grounded in confident counterpoint and framed in classic 18th-century form and structure. But Schumann was not really interested in testing musical ideas or pursuing lofty lyricism so much as conveying emotion, in nervous and even high-strung Romantic spirit. This is a passionate work indeed, and Ancora’s players were splendidly caught up in its intensity.

This program was well designed and beautifully executed. Ancora is on a truly exciting ride that shouldn’t be missed.

http://www.isthmus.com/daily/article.php?article=37781&sid=56e42e235feb6f4c78961ec926e03e03

http://welltempered.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/classical-music-this-saturday-night-chamber-music-fans-in-madison-will-have-to-choose-between-two-great-string-quartets-and-two-outstanding-programs/

The Ancora String Quartet is very excited about our upcoming season. We mulled over many wonderful pieces, and assembled a collection of works that we can’t wait to share with our audiences. When we looked over the final collection for some kind of common denominator, to give a theme to our season, an eerie pattern emerged:

This is our 12th season; we’re playing selections from Mendelssohn’s 12 Fugues for String Quartet (1821) as well as from Dvořák’s 12 Cypresses. Our Spring program includes Shostakovich’s String Quartet #12, which features some of that composer’s only 12-tone writing.

We decided to embrace our serendipitous dodeca-ism, and throw a little Shakespeare into the mix (it never hurts!), and we came up with our theme! The fact that Shakepeare’s Twelfth Night is being staged this summer at the American Players Theater in Spring Green, and this fall at the Young Shakespeare Players in Madison, clinched the deal.

Marika has gone so far as to assign a Twelfth Night character to each of the six pieces on our programs this season. Some of the pairings are too good to be believed! They will be revealed in the days to come.

In the meantime, please mark your calendars for Saturday, September 15th, at 7:30 P.M. in the beautiful Landmark Auditorium at the First Unitarian Society-Madison, 900 University Bay Drive. We promise that our music will come o’er your ears “like the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets.”

Russian genius Sergei Prokofiev, 1891-9153, wrote two works for string quartet, the first of which was written in 1930. There are many unusual features to this three-movement work, one of which is that the movements are arranged fast-fast-slow in tempo, rather than the far more common fast-slow-fast. As with many of Prokofiev’s mature works, each of the movements has a unique form as well. The first movement, in three sections, is perhaps best seen as a modified sonata form that contains two “secondary themes”, and in which new material is introduced at the end of the development section. The second movement starts as a slow movement but quickly changes its mind and becomes a scherzo instead. This main body of the movement is a modified five-part rondo. The third movement, which is cyclical in that it quotes material from the two earlier movements, can be understood as a six-part rondo form. Prokofiev was so fond of this final movement that he arranged it for string orchestra and for solo piano.

Regardless of which movement is your favorite, you are bound to hear the distinctive melodies, surprising modulations, unusual counterpoint, and clever interplay of voices and textures for which Prokofiev is famous and which help to make him so well loved. As with many of the works we have performed over the years, we feel that this quartet deserves to be performed and heard more often. We hope you will think so, too.

As wonderful of a child prodigy as Mozart was, Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), is the one composer who can claim to be more deserving of the title of ‘the world’s most amazing young composer.’ For example, in order for Mozart’s compositions as a teenager to be impressive one still must take his tender age into account, but not so with Mendelssohn! In his case, the fact that he wrote his octet at age 16 simply boggles the mind of each new generation that encounters this fact. It is not only considered by many to be the best work for this genre, but to be one of the greatest string chamber music masterpieces of any kind. Mendelssohn’s mastery of string writing is apparent throughout. Noteworthy as well is the freedom with which Mendelssohn combines the various members of the octet in imaginative and ever varied ways.

There are actually some similarities between this work and the Prokofiev quartet, including the fact that Mendelssohn himself arranged this piece for another instrumentation, namely piano duet. This work is also cyclical, with the last movement quoting earlier movements, and it contains considerable counterpoint, but the similarities end there.

The exuberant first movement is an expansive sonata form. Note how well Mendelssohn is able to construct beautiful contrasting melodies that are all integrated by the same motivic material. The calm, languorous melody that begins the second movement gradually becomes more anguished and troubled. The famous third movement scherzo was apparently inspired by an excerpt from Goethe’s Faust. The consummate fairy dance, it showcases many of the light and sparkling articulations that are unique to string instruments. The presto finale is a fugue in sonata form. Over the constantly running eighth notes Mendelssohn spins out slower-moving counter melodies, the foremost of which resembles a familiar passage from Handel’s Messiah.

This masterpiece is one of the few works that every string player dreams of playing at some point, and we are delighted to be performing the work with the wonderful musicians of the Rhapsodie Quartet.

Notes by Dr. Benjamin Whitcomb

The ASQ just gave an adult education class Monday evening April 30 at the wonderful venue where we are in residence, the First Unitarian Society of Madison. Twenty-some inquiring souls came to hear about the Mendelssohn Octet, which is on our upcoming recital programs there, scheduled for May 19 and 20.

Marika took the floor for the first part of the class, giving some background info about our group and this season, ‘The Musician and his Muse,’ before focusing on the composer, his early life and training, and then the piece itself.

Audience members were amused at the description of the 12-year-old composer by a visitor to the Mendelssohn household, Wilhelm Karlowitsch Küchelbecker, in 1820: “Never have I seen such a perfectly beautiful youth. His dark locks fell in natural freedom halfway down his back, his snow-white neck and chest were open, his dark southern eyes glowed and betrayed future conquests over souls! His small, roseate mouth seemed to have been shaped for kisses; in his voice resonated a spirit that knew and felt more than one thought usual for one of his age to know and feel.” (from Larry Todd’s Mendelssohn: A Life In Music).

This description may seem over the top until one sees a painting of Felix from that time:

Oil sketch of Felix by Karl Begas, 1821

Marika went on to explain the back-story of the famous third movement of the Octet, the incredible, sparkling Scherzo. Apparently inspired by the Walpurgis-Night Dream scene in Goethe’s Faust, Mendelssohn created an unforgettable aural depiction of the fairy insect orchestra described in this play-within-a-play, with its buzzing flies, trilling mosquitoes, chirping crickets, frogs, toads, and a bagpipe blowing soap bubbles, all led by a diminutive Kapellmeister, accompanying the assembled enchanted dream-characters in one of the fairy dances for which Mendelssohn is so well-known.

Benjamin picked up on the idea of the fairy dance in the second hour of the class; with a gravity that withstood his colleagues’ smothered mirth, he embarked on an intellectual inquiry into what we *really* know about fairies and their dances. They are small, light, and scamper about quickly, Benjamin solemnly intoned, and he went on to predict how a composer might translate these fairy-like qualities into music.

We were then treated to audio excerpts of many examples of these fairy dances, in scherzos from Mendelssohn’s quartets, piano trios, and of course, the orchestral Overture and Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Benjamin concluded by saying that while Mendelssohn gave us many beautiful examples of music that is lyrical, march-like, exultant, triumphant, stormy, and many other moods, it is really in this charming music of the fairy dance where the composer distinguished himself from all other composers, establishing and excelling in this special musical genre, and using his music to thin the veil that usually separates mere mortals from the world of the spirits.