Tune in every day at 1pm this week to hear the Stenhammar String Quartet perform the quartets of their namesake, the Swedish composer Wilhelm Stenhammar
On Sunday November 3, and Monday November 4, Winnipeggers will have the opportunity to hear one of the most prominent string quartets on the scene today.
The Swedish based Stenhammar String Quartet will be performing two concerts, one for Virtuosi Concerts, and one for Winnipeg’s Groundswell.
The concert on Sunday, November 3 for Virtuosi takes place at 2:30pm at the Muriel Richardson Auditorium at the WAG-Qaumajuq. Called Stockholm Paris Prague: 1900, the concert will present a snapshot of the state of the string quartet around the turn of the last century. Quartets by Germaine Tailleferre, Bedrich Smetana and Wilhelm Stenhammer will be heard. All the quartets being written within the span of 35 years, as the string quartet form was making its way into the 20th century.
The Concert on Monday, November 4th at 7:30pm for Winnipeg’s GroundSwell will again take place at the Muriel Richardson Auditorium at the WAG-Qaumajuq is called Sketches of Shifting Landscapes. It explores the string quartet form, as it is being written for today. Music by Canadians Cris Derksen, Tanya Tagaq, and Gordon Fitzell will be heard, as well as music by Swedish composer Örjan Sandred, and American composer Caroline Shaw will be on the program.
One of the exciting things on GroundSwell’s concert is that the Stenhammar quartet will be giving the world premiere performances of quartets by Fitzell, and Sandred who are both professors of composition at the Desautels Faculty of Music at the University of Manitoba.
In anticipation of this truly remarkable quartet performing in Winnipeg, we here at Classic 107 will be featuring the Stenhammar Quartet, performing the quartets of their namesake, the Swedish composer Wilhelm Stenhammar.
Monday, October 28: String Quartet No. 1 in C major, Op. 2 (1894)
Stenhammar’s First String Quartet was composed in the summer of 1894, just a few months after his sensational breakthrough with his Piano Concerto in B flat minor, Op. 1.
With his First String Quartet, Stenhammar presents his calling card as a composer of chamber music; and he does so in the most challenging genre, that of the string quartet. His decision to do so is closely linked with the collaboration that had begun two years earlier, when he appeared as a pianist together with the Aulin Quartet, and with his close friendship with the violinist Tor Aulin. (1866–1914) In the years that followed, Stenhammar and the Aulin Quartet undertook wide-ranging concert tours throughout Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, setting new standards for public chamber music concerts wherever they went.
Stenhammar dedicated the first quartet to the Aulin Quartet.
Musically, Stenhammar attempted in his First-String Quartet to continue directly in the central European tradition of the genre. In terms of motivic economy, unity of overall form and metrical subtlety he oriented himself around the quartets of Johannes Brahms. As a young man, Stenhammar had studied Brahms’s quartets eagerly in arrangements for piano four-hands.
Tuesday, October 29: String Quartet No. 2 in C minor, Op. 14 (1896)
The String Quartet No. 2 in C minor, Op. 14, written just two years after the first, represents something of a liberation from the genre’s conventions. This is immediately evident from the way Stenhammar begins the work. Unlike the First Quartet, he does not formulate a specific theme but presents a collection of motivic fragments which seem to go in chromatic quest of their continuation. Only later, above a sixteenth note motion, does the first violin present a sort of theme. A virtuoso, irascible gesture that Stenhammar might have composed specifically with his friend Tor Aulin in mind.
Stenhammar starts again from scratch, working with the motivic fragments from the outset. He gives these fragments an expansive, harsh sonority, quite far removed from the established string quartet ideal. Here we hear an echo of elements that had become established, especially in Edvard Grieg’s String Quartet in G minor, Op. 27. (1878) – and which were responsible both for the caustic reaction to that work from German language critics and for the widespread positive impact it made in Scandinavia. During the 1890s Grieg’s G minor Quartet was one of the most frequently played works in the Aulin Quartet’s repertoire.
Wednesday, October 30: String Quartet No. 3 in F major, Op. 18 (1897–1900)
Stenhammar composed the first movement of his Third String Quartet in an intensive creative period in 1897, but did not add the remaining movements until 1900. In the meantime, following the première of his opera Tirfing, Op. 15, he had gone through a phase of deep depression. Although audience reactions to Tirfing had been positive, with hindsight the opera did not measure up to Stenhammar’s own standards. Around 1900 Stenhammar was grappling in depth with his compositional ideas, and developed a self-critical attitude that would leave its mark on his future works.
The F major Quartet, Op. 18, would clearly document his high aspirations as a composer, and explicitly names the benchmark: Ludwig van Beethoven. Stenhammar’s contemporaries already observed that the first movement’s principal motif alludes to the beginning of Beethoven’s first ‘Razumovsky’ Quartet, Op. 59 No. 1. The context in which Stenhammar places this motif is, however, remark able: soloistically from the viola, with short, fragmentary comments from the other three instruments. This technique was also based on tradition, and can be traced back to late Beethoven, as used for instance in the German composer’s final string quartet, Op. 135, which is also in F major.
Thursday, October 31: String Quartet No. 4 in A minor, Op. 25 (1904–09)
The Fourth String Quartet, too, comes from a period of change in Stenhammar’s life. He sketched the scheme of the first movement as early as 1904 but did not flesh it out until the winter of 1906–07, which he and his entire family spent in Florence.
Stenhammar received a prestigious offer from Gothenburg, to be the conductor of the city’s newly formed symphony orchestra. He accepted, and from 1907 until 1922, the orchestra became one of the finest in Scandinavia.
His free time for composing, however, was thereby permanently restricted to the summer months. Completion of the remaining movements of the String Quartet in A minor was thus delayed until the summer of 1909. The extended genesis of the work is not, however, discernible from listening to the piece; in fact, the Fourth String Quartet sounds as if it had been written in a single burst. This is the most important of Stenhammar’s string quartets and, more than almost any other work, proves his abilities as a composer: a supreme command of a wide range of traditions and models, harmonic sophistication pushing the very limits of functional tonality, artistry in the transformation of motifs and an inter connectedness that spans the entire work.
Stenhammar’s own conviction that he had done justice to his highest aspirations in his Fourth String Quartet is clearly shown by the fact that he dedicated this work to his friend and colleague Jean Sibelius.
Friday, November 1: String Quartet No. 5 in C major, Op. 29 (‘Serenade’) (c. 1910)
The time when the Fifth String Quartet was written – around 1910 – falls within another period of upheaval in Stenhammar’s life. His hectic schedule of work as conductor of the Gothenburg Orchestral Society, a position he had taken up in 1907, meant that opportunities for him to devote him to composition became increasingly rare. Moreover, his collaboration with the Aulin Quartet ceased entirely owing to the illness of his friend Tor Aulin (who died in 1914).
The first performance of the Op. 29 Quartet thus took place in 1916, six years after its composition, and was given by the Gothenburg Quartet. 5 After the harmonic and technical audacities of the Fourth String Quartet, Stenhammar felt the need to explore other paths. Thus, in the Fifth Quartet, he makes a new beginning, as indicated by the title ‘Serenade’ that he uses in the autograph score. By means of this, he places the work in a world of apparent lightheartedness, sometimes going as far as ironic detachment.
In addition, this is the only one of his string quartets in which the primary focus is on the slow second movement, the Ballata. This alludes to another meaning of the term ‘serenade’: the evening performance of a simple song with lute or guitar accompaniment. In the preface to the score Stenhammar explains that the Ballata is based on a song that he had learned as a child, from his grandfather: the tragicomical ballad of the knight Finn Komfusenfej.
Thus in his Serenade, Op. 29, Stenhammar distances himself from late-Romantic conventions by his use of the serenade genre and his treatment of his Viennese Classical models – without, however, abandoning the technical demands of the genre.