SPRING AWAKENING
Friday, September 11th, 7pm
REDFERN TOWN HALL
Sydney Art Quartet
violin Thibaud Pavlovic-Hobba
violin Anna Albert
viola Andrew Jezek
cello Andrew Hines
SOGETSU IKEBANA ARTISTS
PROGRAM
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - String Quartet No. 14 in G major, K.387 “Spring” (1782)
Allegro vivace assai
Menuetto. Allegretto
Andante cantabile
Molto allegro
György Kurtág - Aus der Ferne III“From Afar III” (1991)
Toshio Hosokawa — Blossoming(2007)
Anton Webern - Langsamer Satz(1905)
Joseph Haydn — String Quartet in D major, Op.76 No.5 (1797)
Allegretto
Largo. Cantabile e mesto
Menuetto. Allegro
Finale. Presto
PROGRAM NOTES
For this Redfern performance of Spring Awakening, Sydney Art Quartet is joined by Sogetsu Ikebana artists Paulina Rosa and Junko Daniels, creating a meeting between music and the Japanese art of flower arrangement. Both artists are experienced Sogetsu teachers who studied in Sydney with Riji Master Masae Ako, bringing to the collaboration a practice grounded in close observation of nature, form, space and transformation.
Their installations respond to the musical and seasonal ideas running through Spring Awakening rather than simply decorating the performance space. Across this program spanning Mozart, Kurtág, Hosokawa, Webern and Haydn, the ideas of growth, stillness, renewal and changing form recur in very different ways.
The connection is especially vivid in Toshio Hosokawa’s Blossoming, in which the gradual opening of a lotus becomes a metaphor for transformation and self-discovery.
Bringing Sogetsu Ikebana into Redfern Town Hall creates a parallel visual language. Music and botanical form unfolding alongside one another, each inviting us to experience space, gesture and the emergence of something new.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - String Quartet No. 14 in G major, K.387 “Spring” (1782)
Mozart completed the G major Quartet on 31 December 1782. It became the first of the celebrated group of six quartets he later dedicated to Joseph Haydn, whose recently published Op.33 quartets had transformed Mozart’s understanding of what four string instruments could do together. Mozart worked unusually hard on these six works, describing them to Haydn as the fruits of “long and laborious effort”.
The nickname “Spring” was added later and did not originate with Mozart, but it is easy to understand its appeal. The opening Allegro vivace assai has a freshness and vitality that seems to constantly renew itself. Yet beneath its effortless surface is remarkably intricate writing. Sudden contrasts of loud and soft, chromatic turns and constantly shifting instrumental roles establish the quartet as a genuine conversation between four equal voices.
That equality becomes increasingly important as the work progresses. The Minuet plays games with rhythm and accent, while the Andante cantabile opens into a more spacious and expressive world. Mozart saves his greatest contrapuntal ingenuity for the finale. Beginning like a fugue, its subject passes from instrument to instrument before Mozart combines the intellectual discipline of counterpoint with the energy and theatrical instinct of his mature Viennese style. The result looks backwards to Bach while anticipating the magnificent contrapuntal finale of Mozart’s own “Jupiter” Symphony six years later.
György Kurtág - Aus der Ferne III“From Afar III”
Few composers have been able to say as much with as little as György Kurtág. Born in Romania in 1926 and closely associated with Hungarian musical life, Kurtág developed a language in which a single note, gesture or silence can carry extraordinary expressive weight. His musical miniatures are often compared with those of Anton Webern, whose influence can be felt throughout Kurtág’s work.
Aus der Ferne III (From Afar III) was written in 1991 for the 90th birthday of Alfred Schlee, the legendary director of the Viennese publishing house Universal Edition. It forms part of a sequence of pieces Kurtág composed across many years in connection with Schlee, the last eventually becoming a memorial.
Barely three minutes long, Aus der Ferne III seems to emerge from an immense distance. Fragile violin and viola sounds hover at the edge of audibility, punctuated by the darker resonance of the cello. There is no conventional melody or narrative. Instead Kurtág asks us to listen intensely to resonance, decay and silence itself. Coming directly after Mozart’s abundant musical conversation, its extreme economy creates an entirely different sense of space: music remembered, overheard or approaching from somewhere beyond our immediate reach.
Toshio Hosokawa - Blossoming
Nature lies at the centre of the musical imagination of Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa. Rather than treating the natural world simply as something to be depicted, Hosokawa frequently explores the relationship between humanity and nature, sound emerging from silence, growing, transforming and eventually disappearing back into it.
Written in 2007, Blossoming was commissioned for the Tokyo String Quartet and forms part of Hosokawa’s extended exploration of flowers as a musical and spiritual image. The flower imagined here is the lotus: its roots buried in mud beneath the water, its stem reaching upwards and its flower eventually opening towards the light. For Hosokawa, that process also becomes a metaphor for human transformation and self-discovery.
The quartet does not attempt to paint a literal picture of a flower. Instead, the music itself seems to behave like a living organism. Sounds emerge almost imperceptibly, grow and interact; glissandi bend and stretch pitches while tremolos, harmonics and changes of bow colour create an extraordinary spectrum of sound. Individual gestures accumulate into increasingly intense waves of energy before subsiding again.
Time seems to move differently here. Rather than being propelled by conventional melody and rhythm, we become aware of growth, breath and changing musical space. The effect is simultaneously delicate and elemental: a gradual awakening in which the act of blossoming becomes something we experience through sound.
Anton Webern - Langsamer Satz(1905)
The Anton Webern encountered here may surprise listeners who know his later music. Webern would become one of the great musical radicals of the twentieth century, compressing entire musical arguments into works sometimes lasting only a few minutes. But Langsamer Satz, literally “Slow Movement”, belongs to another world.
Webern wrote the piece in June 1905, while studying composition with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna. That spring he had spent several days hiking through the countryside of Lower Austria with his cousin Wilhelmine Mörtl. The two fell deeply in love and would later marry. The experience found its way into this intensely passionate music.
Rather than the spare textures of mature Webern, Langsamer Satz inhabits the luxuriant late-Romantic world of Wagner, Brahms and early Schoenberg. Long melodies rise and fall through densely woven harmonies, moving between tenderness, yearning and ecstatic climaxes. Yet there are already signs of Webern’s extraordinary sensitivity to instrumental colour and the expressive possibilities of individual musical gestures.
The manuscript disappeared from view and was rediscovered only decades later, with the work receiving its premiere in 1962. Heard today, Langsamer Satz provides a fascinating glimpse of Webern before the musical revolutions that would define his career: a 21-year-old composer in love, writing music of extraordinary warmth and emotional directness.
Joseph Haydn - String Quartet in D major, Op.76 No.5 (1797)
By the time Haydn composed his six Op.76 quartets in 1797, he had been writing string quartets for nearly four decades. The genre had changed profoundly during that time, in no small part because of Haydn himself. These late works do not simply perfect an established formula; they continue to experiment with what a string quartet might be.
The D major Quartet begins unusually. Instead of the substantial sonata-form movement we might expect, Haydn gives us a graceful, pastoral theme in 6/8 time and subjects it to a series of transformations. Its apparent simplicity is deceptive: darker contrapuntal writing interrupts the pastoral atmosphere before the music ultimately regains its brightness.
The emotional centre of the quartet is its magnificent second movement, marked Largo. Cantabile e mesto — broadly, “singing and sad”. Haydn places it in the remote key of F-sharp major, creating an immediate change of light and colour. The first violin sings an expansive melody above the other instruments before viola and cello are drawn increasingly into the musical argument. Serene on the surface, the movement continually wanders into unexpected harmonic territory, creating a sense of suspended time.
A vigorous Minuet abruptly restores us to D major, its forceful character offset by a contrasting central Trio. The Presto finale then releases the quartet’s accumulated energy in music of quicksilver wit and momentum. Themes pass rapidly between the four instruments as Haydn combines contrapuntal ingenuity with an almost irrepressible rhythmic drive.
There is a pleasing symmetry in ending Spring Awakening with Haydn after beginning with Mozart. Mozart’s K.387 was profoundly shaped by Haydn’s example; fifteen years later, in Op.76, the older composer was still reinventing the quartet. Across those two works and through the very different sound worlds of Kurtág, Hosokawa and Webern between them, the string quartet becomes a place of continual renewal: four instruments finding ever-new ways to speak, listen and transform.