Favorite Encores for String Quartet

Excerpts from the sleeve notes

UNLIKE THE ORCHESTRA OR THE PIANO, the string quartet is rather tied to the use of its generic name as the title for most of the works in its repertoire: string quartets play string quartets, whereas orchestras play symphonies and pianists play sonatas - and a lot more besides. This would seem to give much less flexibility in concert programming to quartets in comparison with their 'rivals'; yet, as the items on this recording show, there is a body of music - both independent pieces and successful plunderings of movements from full quartets - that goes some way in broadening the scope of the repertoire, as well as providing ideal encores to fulfil the demanding clamour at the end of concerts.

To begin with we have two movements from quartets by Haydn - or at least one by Haydn and another long attributed to him but now believed to be by another composer. This applies to the six quartets of his 'Opus 3' which have now been more-or-less proved to be by a Benedictine monk, Roman Hoffstetter (1742-1815), a composer who admitted that 'everything that flows from Haydn's pen seems so beautiful to me and remains so deeply imprinted on my memory that I cannot prevent myself from occasionally imitating it'. But the Andante of the Fifth Quartet of 'Op 3', often referred to as the 'Haydn Serenade', is no less delightful for not being by Haydn.

The Opus 33 set of quartets is, however, irrefutably by Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). Late in 1781 he wrote to prospective subscribers announcing the completion of six 'brand-new ŕ quadro … written in a new and special way, for I have not composed any for ten years'. They were really his first truly mature quartets and, as he himself suggested, were more advanced in their use of both the medium and musical material than any he had written before. The last movement of the third Quartet in C major is a hectic, humorous rondo in Haydn's most approachable style.

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) wrote his one and only work for string quartet, Crisantemi ('Chrysanthemums'), in a single evening in 1890 as an elegy on the recent death of the Duke of Savoy. Three years later he borrowed some of its material for what proved to be his first successful opera, Manon Lescaut, but Crisantemi has maintained a life of its own, both as a quartet and in its version for string orchestra.

Frank Bridge (1879-1941) is often better known as the teacher of Benjamin Britten than as a distinctive composer in his own right. Yet his compositions were in their own way as influential as his teaching, bringing a greater pan-European outlook to his music than was the wont of his English contemporaries. There is, however, a side to his work that is English to the heart - his vocal works and his few treks into the area of folk-song in particular. Sally in our alley and Cherry Ripe are two such songs that he arranged for orchestra in 1916 and subsequently rearranged for string quartet.

Not a composer one often associates with chamber music, Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) was drawn to the string quartet medium by his friend Nikolai Rubinstein who in 1871 persuaded him to promote a concert of his own works in Moscow to advance his reputation and his finances. An orchestral event was obviously too expensive to mount so the two decided upon a chamber concert, for which Tchaikovsky wrote his First String Quartet, Op 11, to be performed alongside his only other small-scale works at this time - six songs and a few short piano pieces. The Quartet was a great success, particularly its slow movement, an Andante Cantabile, which is as often performed on its own as it is in its original context. It is largely based upon a folk-song Tchaikovsky had noted down when on holiday in the Ukraine in 1869 and it is renowned for having made the great Russian writer Tolstoy weep when he first heard it in the composer's presence.

Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962) is best known as one of the greatest virtuoso violinists of the century, but he was also a composer - and not only of lightweight pieces for his own recitals. Early in 1919 he composed a string quartet, first performed in April of the same year in New York at an evening in honour of another famous violinist, Efrem Zimbalist. When Kreisler brought his new work to London for the first time in 1921 the Daily Telegraph critic perceived an extra-musical influence behind the Quartet (which Kreisler later confirmed): 'Is it Vienna - Vienna in the lively, lovely days and in all its tragedy, or is it Viennese, then and now?' The same writer recorded that the Quartet's Scherzo, the movement included here, was 'a burst of purest happiness …'

Alexander Borodin (1833-1887) was primarily an academic chemist and this career left him little time to devote to composition, something that affected his other colleagues in the so-called 'Mighty Handful' of Russian nationalist composers who were all, essentially, composers only in their spare time. Thus Borodin's output is comparatively small, though highly distinctive. One of his best-known works is his Second String Quartet of 1881, and in particular its slow movement - a richly romantic Notturno, or Nocturne, supposedly an evocation of the first meeting in Heidelberg of Borodin and his future wife Ekatarina, twenty-seven years earlier.

The music of Josef Suk (1874-1935; not to be confused with his violinist grandson of the same name) bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, in a sense, provides the missing link in Czechoslovak music between the generations of Dvoňák and Janáăek (although he outlived the latter). In 1891/2 he spent a year of postgraduate study with Dvoňák at the Prague Conservatoire and became acknowledged as the older composer's favourite pupil, in 1898 actually marrying his daughter, Otilie. In the autumn of 1914, in the wake of the first eruptions of the Great War, Suk, as if intent on helping to keep his country's morale up, wrote his Meditace na staroăeský chorál 'Svatý Václave' ('Meditation on an old Czech hymn 'St Wenceslas'), making versions both for string quartet and for orchestra.

Amidst the flow of well over two hundred and fifty songs that poured from his pen during his short life, Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) wrote only a handful of purely instrumental works; the Italian Serenade is undoubtedly the best known. It was written in early May 1887 and in fact seems to be all that was completed of a more conventional Quartet; the Serenade was apparently to be the first of three movements. Through all the stages of the manuscript it maintained simply the title 'Serenade', and was only first referred to as an 'Italian Serenade' in a letter of April 1890, but its vivacious, sunny manner is unmistakably an evocation of the Italian spirit, projected through a masterly use of the quartet medium and a rich melodic imagination.

Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) was born in Switzerland of Jewish parents and in 1924 became an American citizen, making a name for himself as a teacher of composition in a number of American musical institutions. In the last months before he finally left for America, Bloch composed four programmatic pieces for string quartet - Night and Three Landscapes ('North', 'Alpestre' and 'Tongataboo'). Night is an evocative nocturne, written in the late-Romantic language with a tinge of neo-Classicism that became the composer's hallmark.

Felix Mendelssohn's Canzonetta comes from his first numbered String Quartet - that is, it was published as No 1 but is actually No 2 in order of composition. It was written late in 1829 while Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was on the first of his many tours of Britain, having earlier in the year made his famous trip to Scotland and the Hebrides, and the Quartet may have already been forming in his mind while staying in Wales in the late summer and autumn. The delightful Canzonetta - effectively a short set of variations on a staccato theme - is so typically Mendelssohnian in style that it could have come straight from his music to A Midsummer Night's Dream, and despite its Allegretto tempo it comes close, with its low dynamic markings, to his characteristic elfin scherzo style.

Although he wrote fourteen full-scale quartets, Antonín Dvoňák (1841-1904) also aided the diversification of the repertoire more than most with two sets of arrangements of other works for the quartet medium - a pair of waltzes and transcriptions of his cycle of songs known as Cypresses. The two Waltzes, Op 54, come from a set of eight he composed for piano in the winter of 1879/80, and he seems to have made the quartet arrangements of numbers one and four almost concurrently.

With Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) we come almost full circle, back to the age of Haydn. Like Haydn, Boccherini reputedly wrote numerous string quartets (as well as a vast number of quintets) which have been reduced to an authoritative ninety-one on the basis of the latest research. (As with Haydn, he seems to have had a number of works wrongly attributed to him.) The Rondo which ends this collection avoids the more profound explorations of some of Boccherini's music and is perhaps the perfect encore - playful, not too intellectually demanding, and a joy to listen to.