by Andrew Gillett | 5 Apr 2022 | blog
John Braga writes: The string sextet is quite a rare animal. Neither Mozart nor Haydn nor Beethoven nor Schubert nor Mendelssohn ever composed one. You wait for ages for a string sextet, then two come along at once! Divertimento String Quartet plus friends will be playing Spohr’s only sextet, written in 1848 and Brahms’s sextet no. 1 written in 1860. So, two mid-nineteenth-century works. Brahms is of course a major composer, and very popular today. Spohr is not a well-known name to most people, so I want to start by giving some brief details of the man, his life and his legacy. Louis Spohr was born in Brunswick, North Germany in 1784. To put this date in context, In Vienna Mozart was aged 28 and sadly had only 7 more years to live. Haydn was in full flow in Esterhazy, aged 52, and would live another 25 years. Beethoven was a lad of 14 living in Bonn. Spohr showed early musical ability and was taken on by the Duke of Brunswick as a violin player in his orchestra at the age of 15. From that time on to the end of his long life he was able to earn a living as a player, conductor and composer. Unlike Mozart and Schubert he never had to starve in a garret. He married an 18-year-old harpist, Dorette Scheidler, in 1806 and they remained happily married until her death 28 years later. He composed 10 symphonies, several operas, 18 violin concertos, 4 clarinet concertos, many songs, 36 string quartets and a very successful octet and nonet. At the height of his fame...
by Andrew Gillett | 9 Feb 2022 | blog
It is safe to assume that when John Dowland – whose poignant ‘Flow My Tears’, in an arrangement for string quartet, we are playing in our forthcoming concerts – took up his post as lutenist and composer at the court of Christian IV of Denmark in 1598, he travelled by ship from London to Copenhagen. In a way, ports such as Copenhagen were the equivalent of modern day airports, making the world seem a smaller place. In finding connections to distant shores in our current concert programme it is clearer than ever that ‘no man is an island’, to quote John Donne (a direct contemporary of Dowland.) Carl Nielsen, born on the Danish island of Funen in 1865 would have been very aware from a very young age of Copenhagen’s pivotal position in maritime connections to the wider world. Nielsen said that ‘I do not enjoy composing music if I continue to do it in the same way.’ His music is certainly very stimulating to play. To say that it is an unpredictable ride might suggest that it is difficult to listen to or hold together coherently in performance but somehow he knows how to make it all work. As a violinist himself (in the Royal Danish Orchestra for a while) he had an inside knowledge of string playing and gained considerably from playing many pieces that stimulated his imagination. He wrote his second string quartet in F minor mostly while he was spending time in Germany on a scholarship after he had officially finished his musical studies at the Copenhagen Conservatory. He relished the input gained at Leipzig,...
by Andrew Gillett | 6 Feb 2022 | blog
The contemporary composer Caroline Shaw lives on the east coast of the USA, in New York – a faraway shore from Topsham in Devon but as was mentioned in the previous blog post the trading connections between Devon and America are historically longstanding. This map shows the trading links – in particular the route to Newfoundland with its fishing riches. As we will see, the connections across the sea are greater than a map can show. Shaw was born in North Carolina, studied Suzuki violin with her mother and subsequently developed as much of an interest in singing as violin playing, although she has said that she has a particularly close affinity with the string quartet as she fell in love with the genre when she formed a quartet with friends at school. She has very diverse musical interests and has collaborated with musicians in a number of different genres. She is not easily pigeonholed. One of the characteristics of Shaw’s writing is how she embraces older musical forms and weaves the old into the new, but without it being obvious or derivative. She uses it as a spark for her musical imagination. In this sense she is writing in a great tradition of course, along with many other illustrious composers. Entr’acte, which we are playing, is a response to the minuet and trio of Haydn’s Op 77 No 2 quartet. In programming Entr’acte with chamber music by Dowland and Locke written long before Haydn established the string quartet as a genre to be reckoned with, it feels right that Haydn’s significance is implicitly acknowledged, especially as we then...
by Andrew Gillett | 23 Jan 2022 | blog
In our next programme we will be starting with music written long before the advent of the string quartet as we know it. The viol consort music of the early English baroque period in particular has a very strong affinity with the concept of the string quartet – four equal parts interacting and ‘talking’ together. It seems that as long as there have been chambers (as opposed to big halls), there has been chamber music. Let me take you up the Exe estuary. Topsham, Devon, in 1788, bustling with life and trade. Topsham was a key port with strong trading connections to places as far away as The Netherlands to the East and Newfoundland to the West. A century and a half before this picture was painted a boy chorister at nearby Exeter Cathedral brazenly inscribed his name in the stone structure of the organ loft. It is not known why he used this spelling. Maybe he was worried that the correct spelling, Matthew Locke, would have taken him too long to scratch in the stone; he might have got caught vandalising the building and have been severely punished. One wonders what he was doing in the organ loft anyway. I suppose he must have had to pump the bellows occasionally. Locke’s tutor at Exeter would have been Edward Gibbons, brother of Orlando Gibbons. This curious little piece ‘What Strikes the Clocke?’ by Edward Gibbons, originally for three viols but here played on recorders, shows that instrumental chamber music had a place even at that time. After his time as a chorister Locke broadened his vision considerably, travelling to...
by Andrew Gillett | 23 Dec 2021 | blog, Uncategorized
Greetings from Divertimento String Quartet. Lindsay and I (Andrew) had injuries to our fingers quite recently that temporarily jeopardised our playing commitments. I had a bizarre altercation with a handle of a chest of drawers that left one of my fingers lacerated and Lindsay performed impromptu involuntary surgery on a finger tip while chopping vegetables. Fortunately our digits recovered just in time for us to be able to fulfill our playing engagements. So, on the same theme of extra-musical behind the scenes trivia and in the spirit of seasonal story telling and merriment, we thought that we would share a few other pre-concert incidents that have happened over the years, just in case we have ever given the impression that our rarified artistic world is devoid of the experience of the mundane. Mary: I was playing in a concert with the English Chamber Orchestra. The soloist in the first half of the concert had been the violinist Frank Peter Zimmerman. We were chatting with him in the green room and then it was time to go back on stage for the second half of the concert. I couldn’t get my violin out of the case; somehow the lock had jammed. Frank Peter pushed his Strad into my hands and I hastened after the others to get on stage. Every violin takes getting used to, but I enjoyed trying to control this amazing instrument. After the concert Frank Peter triumphantly held up my fiddle… as he had spent the time prising open the lock on my case with a knife that he had got from the restaurant. Lindsay: I...
by Andrew Gillett | 10 Oct 2021 | blog
I may have given the impression in the previous post that Haydn’s Op 76 No 4 is full of angst. Don’t let this put you off. There is lightness too. Everything is in balance. Towards the end of the last movement suddenly a melody shoots off on its own, like a cheeky schoolboy running off laughing in the playground. http://www.divertimento.uk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Game-2.mp3 How Haydn asks for it to be played is even more cheeky. Instead of being played by one instrument, Haydn effectively challenges all four players to have a game with it, taking it in turns to play fragments of the melody. It’s a speed jigsaw, the notes up for grabs and needing to be put in the right place at (and in) the right time. http://www.divertimento.uk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/3_YouCut_20211001_074008384-1.mp4 It is a tricky game to play, but great fun. Haydn offers so...
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