Carpe Diem String Quartet - Program and Notes

Saturday, February 25, 2012
8:00 PM
Bethel United Methodist Church Hall, Lewes DE

Carpe Diem String Quartet appears by arrangement with
Lisa Sapinkopf Artists, www.chambermuse.com.

Roaming somewhere on the musical spectrum between Ellington's playfulness and Beethoven's romanticism, pianist Bradley Sowash's music has been categorized as contemporary jazz with classical stylings. A composer, arranger, pianist, multi-instrumentalist, recording artist, collaborator, author and educator, Sowash writes and arranges for ensembles of all sizes from string quartets to big bands and full orchestra. He has performed with such luminaries as The Cab Calloway Orchestra and The Mills Brothers.

As a soloist and bandleader, he has delighted listeners of all ages in concert halls and churches throughout the United States and Europe for over two decades, garnering enthusiastic reviews in national publications including The Village Voice and Billboard Magazine. He has been a frequent guest on the PBS television series The Piano Guy for seven seasons. His publications include several volumes of jazz hymn arrangements and educational jazz piano books.

Septendecim means "seventeen" in Latin. The composer writes: "I was thrilled when the Carpe Diem String Quartet asked me to 'write something that has energy and funk.'  Here was an opportunity to combine my formal composition training with my background as a jazz pianist/arranger. My goal was to integrate classical techniques with the hot licks, vamps and blues patterns of the jazz tradition. Few are capable of performing music of this wide a stylistic range, but in the hands of these extraordinarily skilled and open-minded musicians we get to hear highly rhythmic, surprising, and yet familiar music—the best of both worlds!  Completed on my youngest daughter Molly’s seventeenth birthday, Septendecim is dedicated to her."

The circumstance surrounding this quartet, Mendelssohn’s last completed piece of chamber music, was tragic:  the sudden death, at age 41, of his older sister, Fanny, to whom he was extremely devoted. Mendelssohn was inconsolable. To help him recover, his wife convinced him to spend the summer in Switzerland. Mendelssohn went on solitary walks at Interlaken and made drawings and watercolors of the beautiful landscape, but found it difficult to compose. He wrote his younger sister, Rebecca, “I force myself to be industrious in the hope that later on I may feel like working and enjoy it.”

By September he had managed to complete the F-Minor quartet, which expresses some of the grief and bitterness Mendelssohn must have been feeling. The motoric passage that opens the first movement builds to an aggressive motto that hurtles down through the quartet. Once again the agitated opening phrase clamors up to the motto theme, but this time it arrives as a warm, tender presentation of the same motto.     

A thematic extension carries the music to the first part of the subsidiary theme, a calm, sedate descending line. All forward motion seems to cease as the instruments sustain long-held notes in highly chromatic, advanced harmonies. The motifs of the main theme are the subject of the development, in which they steadily rise in pitch and grow in volume before giving way to the recapitulation. Although the coda starts quietly, like the opening, it quickly reaches a level of concentrated intensity, which it maintains to the end.

Unlike Mendelssohn’s typically light and effervescent scherzos, this one is savage and sardonic. The first part is a bizarre dance, with hammered syncopations and harsh dissonances. The brief middle section has the viola and cello playing an implacable ostinato line, to which the violins add a macabre waltz-like tune. The opening section is then heard again.

The most personal movement of the quartet is the elegiac Adagio. Growing from the opening phrase, which is shared by the cello and first violin, the music expresses, with great power and conviction, Mendelssohn’s despair and anguish. The forceful climax is followed by a precipitous drop to the quiet level of the opening and a short final statement of the initial part.

The sonata-form last movement projects a restless anxiety that offers little in the way of solace or acceptance. Despite some loud outbursts in the exposition, the two themes--the first a continuing syncopated line, the second with a drooping cadence at the end of every short phrase--are held under tight control. Mendelssohn’s wrath, however, emerges in the development but is mostly muted in the much-shortened recapitulation, only to rise again in the coda. This profound work preceded Mendelssohn’s own death by less than two months.           
-Adapted from Guide to Chamber Music by Melvin Berger

Czardas (csárdás) is a traditional Hungarian folk dance. The name is derived from the Hungarian term for “tavern,” and the dance can be traced to an eighteenth-century recruiting dance used by the army. It was popularized by Roma (Gypsy) bands in Hungary and neighboring Eastern European lands.

The czardas is characterized by a variation in tempo: it starts out slowly (lassú) and ends in a very fast tempo (friss, literally "fresh"). The music is in 2/4 or 4/4 time. The dancers are both male and female, with the women dressed in traditional wide skirts, usually colored red, which form a distinctive shape when they whirl.

Many classical composers, including Brahms, Liszt, Johann Strauss, Sarasate, and Tchaikovsky, have used czardas themes in their works. Probably the best-known czardas is this virtuosic composition by the Italian composer Vittorio Monti, originally written for violin and piano.

Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla was born to Italian parents in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 1921. (His grandfather, a sailor and fisherman, had immigrated to Mar del Plata from southeastern Italy at the end of the nineteenth century.) Young Ástor spent most of his childhood with his family in New York City, where he was exposed to both jazz and J. S. Bach, and became fluent in Spanish, English, French, and Italian.

Piazzolla began to play the bandoneón when his father, nostalgic for Argentina, found one in a pawn shop. At age thirteen, Piazzolla met Carlos Gardel, a great figure of the tango, who invited the young man to join his band’s current tour. But Piazzolla's father said that he was not old enough to go.  This disappointment proved fortuitous, as Gardel and his entire band perished in a plane crash.

In 1937 Piazzolla returned to Argentina, where strictly traditional tango still reigned. He played in night clubs with a series of groups including the orchestra of Aníbal Troilo, then considered the top bandoneón player and bandleader in Buenos Aires.

The pianist Arthur Rubinstein, living at the time in Buenos Aires, advised Piazzolla to study with the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera. It was at Ginastera's urging that, in 1953, Piazzolla entered his Buenos Aires Symphony in a composition contest and won a grant from the French government to study in Paris with the legendary composition teacher Nadia Boulanger.  Piazzolla and his wife then moved to Paris.

Piazzolla’s oeuvre revolutionized the traditional tango into a style termed “nuevo tango,” which was distinct in its incorporation of elements of jazz, its use of extended harmonies and dissonance, its use of counterpoint, and its ventures into extended compositional forms.

This new approach to the tango made Piazzolla a controversial figure among Argentines, both musically and politically. The Argentine saying "in Argentina everything may change—except the tango" suggests some of the resistance he encountered in his native land. However, his music gained popularity in Europe and North America, and his reworking of the tango was embraced by liberal segments of Argentine society who were pushing for political changes in parallel with this musical revolution.

In 1990 Piazzola suffered a stroke in Paris, and died two years later in Buenos Aires. Biographers estimate that he wrote about three thousand pieces and recorded about five hundred of them. A virtuoso musician, he regularly performed his own works with different bands.

The Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires) are four tangos which were originally conceived as different composi-tions, rather than one suite, although Piazzolla did perform them together from time to time.  The pieces were scored for his quintet of violin (viola), piano, electric guitar, double bass, and bandoneón. By giving them the adjective porteño, referring to people born in the Argentine port city and capital, Piazzolla presents an impression of the four seasons in Buenos Aires. Otoño Porteño (Buenos Aires Autumn) was written in 1969.

The composer writes as follows:  “Fiddle Suite: Montana is a piece about family, about traditions, and about the state in which I was born and raised. Montana is the fourth largest state in the USA, after Alaska, Texas, and California.  However, in the entire state, there are fewer than one million people, an average of around six persons per square mile.

The first movement, ‘Montana,’ is scored very transparently, starting with solo violin to represent the great vastness of this state, adding solo viola with a ‘cowboy lullaby’ in the middle, and then finishing with the two solo instruments to close the movement.

The second movement, ‘Stillwater Gorge,’ interrupts the quiet peace of the first movement with a jig in the second violin which, later in the movement, morphs into a reel in the first violin.  The Stillwater Gorge is one of my favorite places in Montana, in the Woodbine Campground area of the Beartooth Mountains.  The Stillwater River, known for its fly-fishing, is anything but ‘still’ in this part of the country.  Centuries of rushing water have carved a great canyon into the side of the mountain, so when walking around the gorge, to one side of the path the rocks appear ready to crash down upon the viewer, and the other side is met with a steep drop-off, ending in churning whitewater rapids with a boiling energy.  I tried to reflect this energy in the movement.

The third movement, ‘Walkin’ in the Water,’ is of more of a personal nature.  My parents loved to share tales of an early ‘composition’ by me as a toddler.  They tell the story of taking me on a walk after a rainy day, and there were puddles of water everywhere.  I apparently was marching around, singing a little song while stomping in the water.

The fourth movement, ‘Cherry Blossom,’ honors the traditions from my father’s side of the family.  My father was half-Japanese.  One tradition his family kept and he also shared with us was: in the spring, we would sing the Japanese folk song ‘Sakura’ (which means ‘cherry blossom’) when the cherry trees would start to bloom in our yard, in our own family’s celebration of the Cherry Blossom Festival.  He taught us the words in both Japanese and in English.  I have taken the melody of Sakura, and slightly manipulated it into a major key, and have used it as the basis of the movement and have woven it throughout the piece. 

To me, this movement represents the beauty of the ‘now’ and the precious thing that we know of as life, and how important it is to hold on to the moment, because like the delicate cherry blossom, life is fragile, and the winds of change come unexpectedly and blow petals to the wind, scattering our plans and ideas.  We must celebrate and respect today, for we can know nothing of tomorrow.

The fifth movement, ‘Peasebottom,’ honors the traditions from my mother’s side of the family.  Music has always been an important part of family gatherings.  I grew up surrounded by music, but this was not the music of  Mozart  or  of Beethoven.  It was fiddle music.  At every reunion, birth, wedding, funeral, holiday, or similar occasion when people were likely to gather, my relatives would show up with guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, and/or a bass in hand, and there was always a piano wherever we gathered.  If someone didn’t play, they always sang.  We would seat ourselves in a circle and make music, learn music, share music, create music, and commune with music. 

One place where this frequently happened was at my grandmother’s very modest cattle ranch, located in an area known by the locals as Pease Bottom. In the Yellowstone River Valley, surrounded by rolling hills and sandstone cliffs, it will forever be a special place for me.  This music is a hoedown, in which I tried to capture the joy and exuberance of these family gatherings.”