Musicians from Marlboro

Vermont Festival's Southern Exposure
Washington Post, February 21, 2009

Musicians from Marlboro II
Augustin Hadelich and Karina Canellakis, violins; Sebastian Krunnies, viola; Peter Stumpf, cello; Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet
Freer Gallery of Art

Haydn, String Quartet in E-flat, op. 64, no. 6 (.PDF file)
The first movement's sonata-allegro form is more or less monothematic, with the first (m. 1) and second themes (m. 25) beginning alike. In the development (m. 46), Haydn turns to quasi-Baroque devices to develop the thematic idea, layering the instruments on top of one another, blending it with suspensions. Dicing up the little dotted-note tag from the end of the first theme, passed around among the instruments, he sets up a false recapitulation, bringing back the theme in the flat VI (m. 84). Swirling back through other keys, Haydn then prepares a big cadence on G major, as if he were going to recapitulate in C major, only to abruptly shift back to the home key (m. 98).

For some reason, the musicians in this performance treated the eighth notes in the rewrite, starting in m. 103, as dotted notes inégales. They also did something unusual in the third movement, lengthening it by making an additional repeat from m. 52 back to the beginning of the Trio, then repeating the Menuetto, and then performing the entire Trio and Menuetto again. These differences may be due to a different edition: I have not checked to see how the work appears in the Haydn-Institut Werke.

Kodály, Duo for Violin and Cello, op. 7
Brahms, Clarinet Quintet, op. 115